I am writing this primarily to share two things of recent mental note in my own life.
The above poem by Mary Oliver, I put into audio-visual form.
This interview of the poet Gary Snyder. Not A Throwaway World.
I’ve been pre-occupied, ever since my own sequester on my mountain in Nicaragua during the pandemic, occupied with thought of how we/us homo sapien sapiens, despite our pretence otherwise, are consuming the natural world voraciously. In his blog - you’ll find this thread weaving its way through its cloth.
It’s a machine, a mechanical process. The blossoms of the tree of materialism, that siren song, whose spell we are under …
Inwardly, Ai is doing its work to consume our souls and inner thoughts and workings. A process of turning everything into a product, a commodity that can be not just bought or sold but - controlled as a data point. Pretty soon, we’ll pay for the pleasure of experiencing anything or even to remain turned on, such is the path of this future digital dystopia.
Outwardly, there is no end to the harm we are doing. Our hubris, anthropocentrism. Inch by inch we are consuming everything, like a giant garbagerator, munching ourselves to nowhere.
We’ve got it all wrong but we refuse to listen and we refuse to act outside the materialistic hallucination we sleep in.
“Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and star wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish, and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons.” - Douglas Adams
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
Reading Gary Snyder or Mary Oliver give me great solace. I feel horrible guilt about my own role, blindness and destructive partnership in the current ecocide. Both in their way tell us not to feel guilty, nature will sort things out BUT at the same time, to do what you can to live correctly, justly, in line with our natural world and center.
I grew up on a homestead, a farm. Middle of nowhere. It’s a land of bare-bones survival. But these days, that’s long past but the spirit lingers. Companies have cut all the trees for miles, its a moonscape. My parents complain how hard it is to heat the house now, without the blankets of trees, the north-west wind whipping across the frozen barren land. And for what? Packaging for products we’ll never use?
On Facebook, my childhood friend Randy shared this photo. It nearly broke my heart and why I'‘ve of late, turned deeper into my Buddhist leanings, that of “do no harm”. I know he is just part of one big culture that doesn’t see the forest for each tree, just like the roadkill I count on my long bike rides. Grist for our voracious human mill that powers onward.
But this could be Gaza, could be Gambia, could be Galatarsaray. We are consuming the wild world, domesticating everything into a monoculture of steel, glass, concrete, pavement, cardboard and above all plastic.
Inch by inch the planet is screaming in pain. I read this week a WWF report that just since 1970 - the “wild” has decreased by 73%. It’s worse on so many levels - the carbon sink, the rising ocean levels, mass extinctions, pollutants in everything, autopsies reveal in each of us so much plastic, yes, plastic!
It pains me, how in education, through my years of teaching and re-inforcing a message of sustainability, “green” (whatever that means anymore, so much it has been washed by big corporate messaging), it pains me that we seem to have just thrown this small gain out the window for Ai. The next shiny bobble, trinket.
I think, nay I believe, we are just stupid, greedy, loathsome creatures. Yes, I’m sounding like H.G. Wells, how in his final days, he turned from being the great tech optimist, into Mind At The End Of His Tether. Same process for Vonnegut - A Man With No Country.
The crucified planet Earth,
Should it find a voice
And a sense of irony,
Might now well say
Of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."
I’ll leave you with Mary Oliver’s words. I hope you read Snyder. Smart man. Take some solace in the fact you are here and can put up a good fight for our planet, live with less, be more. The Peace Of Wild Things.
David
Live simply, Simply live.
SIMPLE POETRY
There is more plastic in our
oceans than fish.
More guns are fired each day
than knives spreading butter.
People no longer avoid stepping on ants.
We kill over 250,000 living
organisms each time we inhale.
100% of us will die.
Despite appearances
there is no tomorrow.
The day is sufficient
unto itself.
The Human Consumation