Articles
SelfWATCH:Who's watching the watcher?
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By Phil Smith & Peta White
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Let’s consider…we have Beachwatch Streamwatch Waterwatch Airwatch Dunewatch… Perhaps it’s time for SelfWATCH: time to watch our selves.
Achieving sustainable societies requires a change of thinking, valuing, and acting. It requires people to step up and make a difference. But what differences? And how do we know?
It is time to think about how we think about our selves. We need time to aim the microscopes back at ourselves. The meters and monitors and measurements. The probes and tools and scales and callipers. To count and watch and count and watch. And wonder.
To peer into our own actions and attitudes and feelings and thoughts. To ask, ‘What is my worldview?’ ‘What do I value?’ ‘What’s my role in the future?’ and ‘How do I conceive of my self?’ Good question, that last one: do we see our selves as single entities, as connected to family, to community, to the rest of humanity? Do we conceive of our selves as connected to the rest of the planet? Our decisions and actions are influenced by the scale of this conception.
Socrates considered an unexamined life one not worth living. More recently, Curtis White in The Idols of Environmentalism (Orion March/April 2007), asks if ‘our mistaken assumptions actually cause us to conspire against our own interests.’ It’s a rhetorical question: he believes they do. He urges self-examination: ‘Responding to environmental destruction requires not only the overcoming of corporate evildoers but self-overcoming, a transformation in the way we live’. He suggests we ‘cease to be a society that believes that wealth is the accumulation of money’ and become a society that believes ‘there is no wealth but life’.
We have electricity and water and energy and waste audits. We monitor travel and trips and air and water quality. Acknowledging the constraints of societal systems, these measures rise or fall according to human actions. Humans are the cause of the environmental problems; humans can be the cause of the solutions. We need to conduct self-audits to examine what aspects of actions, thinking and attitudes are causing the problems and can, therefore, cause the solutions.