'To Reach The Spring' Is A Wake Up Call For Ecosystem And Planet

Think Thomas Paine Common Sense, Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books during the social ferment between World Wars, samizdat dissent in the post-war Eastern bloc, or historian Timothy Snyder’s excellent little bestseller, On Tyranny.

Nathaniel Popkin’s To Reach the Spring: From Complicity to Consciousness in the Age of Eco-Crisis (New Door Books, Paper, $15.95) fits in the pamphleteering tradition with its brevity, accessible writing and deep thinking about perilous times.

Finished during the early stages of the pandemic and protest following George Floyd’s death, To Reach the Spring tackles the big question of how humans can possibly face together an  existential threat in which we are both victims and perpetrators. It is less a book about ecology than a human critique of the systems that have given us unimaginable freedom to consume the planet that sustains life. 

The book’s 146 pages could easily be read in a day. I took much longer to finish, not because it was slow going but because each of its four chapters demanded reflection. I found myself underlining and starring the text on a substantial number of pages, then waited until I felt alert and committed enough to attend closely to the summing up.

Popkin leads us through a reflective argument that has no certain conclusion. In a preface, he frames the underlying truth about human life on planet Earth, illuminated by the pandemic, that the global capitalistic economic system operates by virtue of a tradeoff of lives for profit. As members of society, he observes, we are trapped into causing harm. The system is so intricate and familiar that, “as workers, investors, consumers, victims—we can’t seem to envision another way.”

This is just one of many provocative insights as Popkin walks us through his rigorous attempts to find hope in the face of extinction. The first chapter is written as a letter to a future grandchild living in conditions for which the author accepts responsibility and asks, “How did we let this happen?”

He ruefully answers in a style that is characteristic of the book, at once profound and engaging:  “We had been warned, you see, but we didn’t know how to heed the warning. It’s a rule of humanity that our actions are often the very opposite of their intent.” And… “Consenting to be exploited as consumers (indeed, embracing it), we become exploiters of the earth. In this way, passivity becomes aggression. So inured as we are to living in consumer cultures, we don't even realize we are doing it.”

In his grief, Popkin fears that by exercising his freedom he has foreshortened the future for others not yet born, who “will have to redefine the actions of freedom, if you can.” 

The second chapter explores more deeply our paralysis and complicity in perpetuating life-devouring capitalism. This is also how structural racism is able to operate. We know there’s a monster under the bed but deny our responsibility to banish it. 

He quotes from Primo Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz, “The Germans are deaf and blind, encased in an armor of obstinacy and willful refusal to know,” and later asks, “Isn't this how we commit our crimes: in the most terrifyingly normal way?”

If Popkin’s unflinching recognition of humanity’s failures have depressed you, take a walk outside, because that’s where Popkin goes next. The Earth is actually resilient. It’s life that runs into problems. He invites a new awareness of modernity, which represents our separation from nature. “Modernity simultaneously [is] the cause of our problems and our only basis for a solution.”

He challenges us with observations by British ecologist Chris D. Thomas: “the process of success for some and failure for others is inevitable” and “mass extinction events seem horrifying but ultimately make way for a new bout of life.” He then asks how we as a species will respond to ecological system collapse given that we are “hardwired to choose to protect human life over all else” and “a desire will emerge to save one kind of human and not the other, and the choices that result will be made along the predictable lines of race, class, religion, and tribe. It won't be pretty.”

He speculates on other scenarios and lands on the idea of applying principles of restorative justice to the ecological crisis: “a work of healing to give back to the exploited—humans and other creatures alike—that which makes them alive. Restorative justice works for the many and not the few on the basis that both victim and perpetrator can be healed jointly.”

The concluding chapter doesn’t prescribe how to undo the powerful dynamics we have unleashed but how to approach the doing, which includes collective awareness of life’s commodification and transformational ways to reconceive human life and human society on earth. 

“The spring” of the title is both lifesaving oasis and season of rebirth. It is too late for our fossil-fueled generation to reach it. But with a loving consciousness of earth as the source of life, not a resource to be subdued and controlled, humans may yet weather the metaphoric approaching winter.