She existed only in the periphery of their vision. No one saw that in her was reflected truth. But maybe they had sensed it and that was why they never turned. She was a mirror, a fractured caricature of the society they tried to withhold.
They treated her presence like the absence of something long forgotten.
She was the earth and the bubble, the ecosystem that sustained them. Yet they dare not look.
The roads they paved both physically and metaphorically were scars upon her arms and wrists. And she bleeds away her sustainability while they continue to carve and crave more and more.
And while the Jays perch upon her oak crown and paint the forests, they cut them down. And sometimes she could forgive them, they were after all animals themselves. And some trees got put to good use but then they started to cut too much
And the land bared it’s bone.
ecosystem
Meditation diaries: Where I bring doom and gloom and hint to a question no one wants to ask or answer.
Through reading the book I was recently reading and mentioned in a previous post, I’ve also started to come across other authors/people who see themselves as ‘recovering environmentalists.’
What that appears to mean is that they’ve seen the cracks in the environmentalist movement and seen that the flaws in it are too big to continue on that road.
A lot of the flaws they point out, I have long felt uneasy about myself.
For example, there is a tendency to talk about technology as something that can become our saviour.
The idea is that we can use technology for positive purposes, we can make more ‘environmentally friendly’ technology etc.
‘recovering environmentalists’ see this as a kind of like another religion.
Instead of believing in heaven or some superior being saving us from ourselves, believing that technology can save us instead.
The idea that technology can save us has always created mixed feelings for me.
On the one hand I really, really, emotionally, want to believe it to be true.
But on the other hand, a less emotionally driven part of me can see the massive flaw in the idea.
How exactly do people expect we can utilise technology in a sustainable way when the very things that create those technologies are part of the problem? Not to mention the energy that is then needed to keep that technology up and running.
The world is a closed-off system. We can only utilise what the world has within it.
We end up ‘utilising’ more than our fair share.
Environmentalists often also suffer from the human, nature separation delusion.
We as humans can save the planet, somehow. According to them.
The language used helps the illusion of separation from nature.
As pointed out on a site I found the other day, the very fact we have the word ‘nature’ shows the delusion that nature is something separate from us. Scroll to II THE SEVERED HAND
The sentence “lets get back to nature” is the epitome of that delusion.
It’s pretty clear why emotionally I would want to side with the environmentalists and believe that technology could save us.
How could it not be wrought with emotion?
As I’ve pointed out previously I’m alive from that technology.
But as someone else in a comment section of a youtube video pointed out so is most of the western world now.
But I can’t help feel I rely on it more. Surgery, powerchairs…
Some ‘recovering environmentalists’ have the ability to live a life that shows their recognition of what modern technology is doing.
And some say that is the only way to go because even though not many people are currently following their trend, there will be a catalyst that is coming and we will see a massive change.
Maybe I’ll be long dead before that moment.
But I can’t help feeling like it’s just another thing that will inevitably leave me behind.
Because while we can’t possibly remain sustainable using technology the way we do, and future depictions in science fiction of further advanced gizmos and gadgets or how we save ourselves by utilising resources on other planets are science fiction and probably always will be…. Where does that leave people like me?
This is one of those unanswered question.
Because the answer is dark and no one wants to acknowledge it.
The human tendency to extremes
It seems humans believe one of two things about human life, either
1. Humans are insignificant
2. Humans are the most significant species.
these can be framed in different arguments.
Humans are insignificant is an undervaluing of themselves as a species. They think it makes them sound ‘modest’ or ironically ‘enlightened’ ironic because to believe you’re enlightened is to believe your superior to everyone else therefore you sort of crown yourself as the significant one, it’s everyone else who is insignificant for noticing how insignificant they are.
Humans are the ‘more evolved’ (people who say ‘more evolved’ don’t understand evolutuion.) There is no ‘more evolved’ since this implies an eventual ‘perfect’ species. Evolution isn’t quite like those pictures of apes forming into humans in a row. Evolution doesn’t happen in step by step process quite like that, though the images are good at showing the similiarities and the gradual changes between one particular species into another. Anyway I digress, to say Humans are the ‘more evolved’ or the most significant species is overvaluing humans as a species.
Both points of view seem to have difficulty seeing us as within the natural cycle itself. The insignificant line of thinking, that we don’t have much or any impact on the world, implied with this is that nature itself happens around us and we’re not a part of it. “That thing out there, thats natural forces, nothing to do with humans”
And to see us as the most significant species, erases the fact we act within nature and while we do have some impact on the world so does everything else in it, we have some significance but we’re not the most significant. We are within nature, not outside of nature. We don’t build outside of nature, we build within nature for better or for worse. but so do other animals.
We have significance in that we have great numbers of us and we’re multiplying, meaning we build more homes, cause more construction and with that destruction aswell.
Both points of view are a bit wrong and a bit right.
Humanity as a whole is significant, not in the sense that humans are important in a superior sense. We’re simply important in the life cycle and ecosystem that exists today. That doesn’t make us some brilliant magnificent species, it makes us the same as other species in that we simply play a role in the ecosystem. We can debate till the cows come home what is superior in the sense of which species can the most, which species has the best talent or whatever else you want to quanitfy. But all that aside we are simply like the other animals, we are fullfilling a role in the ecosystem.
You your individual self? You are insignificant. You as an individual would only become significant if the human race began to decline so much so that not many people were left and you were one of the very few left.
It is not humans that are insignificant, it is yourself.
silverbackgorillapoetry.com 