image by Steve and Sara

I was sitting on a bench outside the Charlotte airport, soaking up the sun. In front of me splashed a fountain. I was waiting for my flight back to New York and it happened to be a really sunny day. I took off my shoes, pulled my pants up to my knees and got comfortable to take in a statue. In the center of the fountain, the city’s namesake Queen Charlotte rose up on a high pedestal. But this was not an ordinary, erect sculpture. Her posture was something Martha Graham might have choreographed. Her entire middle caved in like a bowl while her head jutted forward and five splayed fingers held out in front of her – a crown. Maybe she was fighting the winds of the incoming planes, maybe the waves of the Atlantic dividing England from America. I wasn’t attached, though, to the actual story. This statue arrested me as though it had a message for me, for this exact moment.

I’d first seen the statue when I arrived in Charlotte, but I didn’t have time then to sit around and think about it. I was on my way to Warren Wilson College in Asheville for the first annual Headwaters gathering, a conference about climate change in Southern Appalachia. I had missed the first day’s speakers which included Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx and David Orr of Oberlin College. But my colleagues Steph Pistello and her friend Austin were still talking about them when we met up.

One of the messages Majora Carter had delivered about our work to fight climate change was the need to love our enemies. Apparently, she said this early in a panel discussion and it nipped certain lines of speech in the bud later on. I wondered to myself if, as the consequences of our enemy’s actions become more and more severe, whether we could really continue to love them.

The next day, we attended a writers’ seminar and my question from the previous day was put in a new light by Andrew Revkin, environmental writer for The New York Times. He said that we can’t just attack the bad guys, nor just love them; they exist because they feed an appetite. We have an appetite for what they provide and they wouldn’t exist if we weren’t buying. In the past, less than ethical business practices, say prostitution, have been defended on these same grounds: “Though is may be ethically wrong, we will never put a stop to the oldest profession.” I knew though that Revkin didn’t believe our appetite for fossil fuels was just a fact of life that would never change. So, where do we go after we’ve changed the focus from the bad guys to our own appetite?

Once an appetite exists, can it be gotten rid of? As I contemplated this question, I realized that there are appetites behind appetites. It’s not that we have an appetite for liquor, per se, we have an appetite for what it does to us - provide a sense of freedom from ourselves. Similarly, it’s not that we have an appetite for fossil fuel, we have an appetite for progress that fossil fuel effectively propels. With fossil fuels, we have been able to eat more kinds of food, see more places, build taller buildings, make more products, communicate with more people and generally do everything faster and further. How could we not love it? This process has been so satisfying that it’s become an end in itself. The fossil-fueled first world has become a giant cookie monster tearing gleefully through a world that’s getting smaller and smaller.

Though we may have developed an addiction to them, there is no innate biological need for fossil fuels. Our need for them is a consequence of a human need to make progress. Fossil fuels will not satisfy this need in the long run. But it’s true, just knocking out the “bad guys” who control the stuff is not the answer. For realistic change, we must think about how to change the way we satisfy the appetite behind the appetite for fossil fuels. Just as we’ll never extinguish our need for sex (at least, I hope not), we’ll never get rid of our need to strive for more. The change comes in how we define “more”. Will we define it literally, until the point that the entire earth’s been carved up into piles presided over by the most enterprising and ruthless of our race? Or will we define it figuratively as a quality of consciousness that elevates our experience of the physical world?

The statue of Queen Charlotte transfixed me with her posture and her offering. I was moved by the way she struggled against the prevailing forces that would beat her back. I saw her in the water, traveling through time to reach us. Her crown represented the higher consciousness that will save us from ourselves. And many have been coming to meet her, many who have already passed away. The ones who fought to end slavery, the ones who fought for women’s suffrage, the ones who fought to protect wild lands, the ones who fought for Civil Rights. We have been moving to meet her, but whether we will ever reach her and take our crown is uncertain.

As we have discussed so much here on the Sunny Way, the change we long for begins inside each of us. When we change our individual appetites, we take away power from “the bad guys” who are actually, like all of us, just strivers. They are particularly passionate strivers and it is not confusing from this perspective that they feel justified. Yes, they strive for the wrong things but this is only a reflection of our own striving for the wrong things. It is us, collectively, that show them what to strive for (and I do firmly believe marketing is a nefarious conspirator, BUT we retain free will). We, collectively, will not turn them “good”, we will rather direct their powerful energies to pursuing goals that better serve the earth and our future generations. When we have changed our appetites, we will take our crown and Queen Charlotte will lie down at last.

Taking my eyes from the fountain, I pulled down my pant legs and put my shoes back on. My focus came back to myself and I thought uneasily about getting on that airplane back to New York City. Was I starting with me? When would I?