What
can we do? We are without doubt in an historically unique and
incredibly challenging position. The Anthropogenic extinction is here,
now. It is not something we are anticipating or awaiting. It is upon us.
Today, we are in it, watching the life we have known unravel on a
hundred different fronts. And I find myself asking with crazy-making
regularity: how can I—one ordinary human amongst 7.5 billion—honor this
extraordinary time with whatever gifts and goods I happen to be
carrying?
Many of us are posing similar questions to ourselves, to one another.
These are my own very personal musings of this moment, shared in the
hope that they might spark or support others’ explorations. I expect
that there are as many answers as there are humans willing to ask; we
all must find our own way, our own truth in these times.
Any human under 50 today—and all the other innocent
beings on the planet—are facing a life immeasurably more difficult than
the one I was granted.
I experience a lot of gnawing low-level anxiety of late, I have
frequent bursts of anger and I regularly skirt the precarious edges of
depression. It is not easy for any of us to hold in full consciousness
the massive losses—and concomitant suffering-- that are already
underway, not to mention all those which are almost certainly just
around the next bend. I try, like so many of us do, to balance awareness
and honest acknowledgement of our impending collective demise with
kindness and compassion. I work hard to avoid becoming completely
subsumed by grief, to stay in the moment. It isn’t fun—or particularly
functional—to wallow in sorrow. More importantly, I don’t want to be
lost in my own inoculating darkness when there is relatively little time
left to manifest the best of who it has been given to me to be. I
continue to believe that among the few meaningful actions left to us may
be the choice to seek within ourselves love and courage and connection,
even—and especially—in the midst of devastation.
But grief arises as part of that commitment. We know: loving almost
always entails loss. To live with an open heart means being present for
the slings and arrows. Grief is part of the journey that lies ahead for
all of us, should we choose to make it in consciousness. And sometimes
the grief captures my attention in ways that take me completely by
surprise. As a parent, I am ever aware of the legacy of our choices, all
that we have made impossible for our children and grandchildren.
Easiest to see are the larger and most tangible of consequences —the
horrifying prospects of global warming, climate chaos, habitat
destruction, rising and acidifying seas, breakdown of civil order, war
and…extinction. Any human under 50 today—and all the other innocent
beings on the planet—are facing a life immeasurably more difficult than
the one I was granted.
Unbearable at times, I do try not to let the looming calamity keep me
small or shut down, from delighting in the advent of another spring,
from watching the birds with wonder and gratitude. Nature, though
brutally ravaged by human greed, still manages to offer deep sustenance,
an unbeatable and incredibly generous antidote to the fear and anger
and sadness that are afoot everywhere in these times.
A few weeks back, out walking in the unseasonably warm weather, I
came upon a gnarled old apple tree, in full bloom. As I always do, I
leaned in for a good whiff, a deep receiving of the tree’s offering. My
own personal ‘madeleine,’ the scent instantly conjures for me the glory
of infinite possibility, the breathtaking capacity of human beings to
make beauty, to create meaning, and to love heroically. Twined together
forty-three years ago, that particular fragrance and the aliveness I
felt back then, on the cusp of adulthood, cannot be separated.
At seventeen, I embarked ebulliently on the adventure of my life. My
best friend and I moved into our first apartment in January, and we got
jobs that paid us the minimum wage of $2.10/hour, to cover the rent. We
bought big sacks of bulghur and millet to eat, and I brought home as
many leftovers as I could from the college dining hall where I made
salads all day. As spring arrived, our landlady gifted us with armloads
of beet greens thinned from her large garden, and then rhubarb stalks
as they emerged. We didn’t know what to do with them, but we learned.
Turning down free food was not really an option. Besides, we were saving
for our very own telephone, and in a couple of months we succeeded in
getting the necessary cash together, and proudly found ourselves waiting
for the calls to come in on the brand new yellow wall phone.
Our apartment comprised the second floor of a farmhouse nestled in
the midst of a rambling apple orchard. The windows ran almost floor to
ceiling, filling our living room with incredible light in the mornings,
and being up high, we could see the purple shadows of the Catskills in
the distance as we washed dishes in the early evenings. The shabby
furniture, the makeshift kitchen, the ancient bathroom—none of these
eroded one iota our wonder and delight at the breathtaking freedom and
promise of our lives.
The truth is that these are desperate and
utterly unusual times; no one really knows how to navigate them, there
are no experts at walking gracefully into annihilation.
We filled the place with too many plants, got a cat and a puppy, and
spent a great deal of time dreaming. I was going to be a French chef.
Maybe a Classics scholar, rendering obscure Latin poetry into meaningful
contemporary verse. Possibly a shaman: I’d learn to fly and heal and
see far into the future, into the very meaning of life. And of course,
we were both going to find love that surpassed even our
literature-fueled dreams. Almost everything we imagined seemed within
reach. After a few beers, listening to Mozart’s piano concertos and then
The Velvet Underground and finally, Laura Nyro, we would weep for the
unfathomable breadth of potential and possibility of what lay ahead, for
the bittersweet knowledge that it would not, could not, all come to
pass.
We were so fortunate.
As March drew on, something unexpected but utterly foreseeable
occurred. The orchard burst into bloom. Everywhere, everywhere, the
pale pink blossoms called to the bees and the scent, subtle but
persistent, filled the air, drifted in the windows we opened to feel the
spring on our skin. Although we knew it was not especially ethical,
knew that the farmer counted on each of those flowers to mature into
apples for sale, we stole out in the night anyway and cut massive sprays
of the branches to bring inside, sticking them in jars and arranging
them in every one of our three rooms. Something beyond reason commanded
us to immerse ourselves in this amazing efflorescence, this unlooked for
gift from the earth. To bury our noses in the blossoms and sink
gratefully into olfactory celebration of the new life that spring
promises, the beginnings, the vastness of what might be.
We were so innocent; we had no idea. Like many of my time and place, I ‘grew up’ in fairly short order. I
made choices, and with each choice, I shut the door on other options.
My trajectory, though never straight, became clearer. I learned about
limits, and despite protestations both internal and external, I came to
accept that there were things I would never, could never, do or be. The
lingering sorrow of this is balanced somewhat by the knowledge that I
did manage some of my dreams, modestly understood. Following those
dreams was a privilege that I took mostly for granted. It was a
privilege that many of my contemporaries never had, and which few, if
any children today will claim.
Hard on that moment a few weeks ago, inhaling the scent of apple
blossoms and being overcome with the visceral memory of unlimited
potential, came the grief. What have we done? Oh, what have we done?
As a species, we have been unable to meet the challenges posed by our
own misguided attachment to growth. While the apple blossoms in the
orchard around my first apartment faded and began their transformation
into fruit (duly sprayed, no doubt, with stockpiled DDT), the fifth
annual Earth Day was observed. It is impossible to say whether we might
have changed the course of things enough if we had paid attention to
what was already known then, but the point is moot. We didn’t grasp the
urgency, we didn’t act. And for the main, we still do not, even as the
world burns.
Life, such as it is, goes on, and all of us try in our own ways to
live it without undue pain or suffering. In the developed world, those
with the means drive, eat, charge our phones and computers, heat and
cool our homes at minimum. When we can, most of us look for release and
entertainment, travel a bit, and take in the beauty of our planet while
we still can.
I really do try not to judge anyone’s choices, much less their coping
strategies. After all, I have done my bit to contribute to this
situation, I am far from blameless. We are facing epic disaster,
extinction in all probability, and although I have not always done my
best for this planet and its inhabitants, it feels incumbent upon me to
do so now. The truth is that these are desperate and utterly unusual
times; no one really knows how to navigate them, there are no experts at
walking gracefully into annihilation. We are making it up as we go and
have only our own vast, and often ignored, inner resources to guide us.
For me, part of the answer lies in feeling it all, in refusing to
turn away from what is before me. To look both the beauty and the horror
head on, to keep my heart open, no matter what it finds. Some days this
leaves me enveloped in a sizzling joy, encountering the glories of this
world, human and otherwise. Other days, that same display plunges me
into despair, as I sense the transient, ebbing nature, the impending
loss of all that has been so good and beautiful.
Some of what we will have to relinquish is
painfully clear already, as we see cities and small nations burn and/or
wash away, as we find ourselves increasingly donning masks so as not to
die of the very air we must breathe, as we find cesium 137 in our fish,
RoundUp in our grains, microplastics in our waters.
On those days, there are moments when the hellish scenarios that
populate my imagination take over and scare the shit out of me, but
sometimes I simply long to apologize. To bow down and beg forgiveness,
to offer up my sincerest regrets. To the waters, the dolphins, the oaks,
the salamanders, the children. All beloved and all endangered. I was
never especially profligate with my resources, but along with many
others, I was entrusted with stewardship of this planet--my home. I did
not do enough and I bear responsibility for the consequences of our
shared indifference to the fate of the planet.
Leaving aside any breast-beating, which accomplishes less than
nothing at this point, I am simply incredibly sorry for what has
happened, and what will inevitably happen to the trillions of beings who
will not have the chance to make their own choices. I am indescribably
sorry for the destruction, the suffering, the pain that are already
visited upon the many as a result of human action/inaction, and which
will undoubtedly become universal in the not too distant future.
Our insistence upon having everything has ironically set us upon a
journey toward an era of great loss. Some of what we will have to
relinquish is painfully clear already, as we see cities and small
nations burn and/or wash away, as we find ourselves increasingly donning
masks so as not to die of the very air we must breathe, as we find
cesium 137 in our fish, RoundUp in our grains, microplastics in our
waters. These are the obvious costs. The larger lamentations as we walk
the road to extinction.
But there are other losses not so readily apparent or dramatic, for
which I weep as well. They will make themselves known as we continue our
collective walk down this road, the one we have chosen—consciously or
not—for our species, our planet and most of the other beings with whom
we share the earth.
Today, a lesser lamentation. There were, according to the United
Nations Population Fund, 1.8 billion young people in the world in 2014.
More now, to be sure, but we know that there are at least that many
young human beings in the flowering of their lives, readied by time and
nature to imagine, to dream, to believe in the future and all it might
hold. That which was so heady and life affirming for me is denied them.
The future is no longer a place where vision can forge reality, where
longing coupled with determination can lead to almost anything imagined.
Admittedly, this isn’t nearly so dire as losing life or limb or family
or home, but it matters.
Prompted by the precious scent of this year’s apple blossoms, I am
quietly grieving this little loss: the end of the future as something
the young can dream into reality, take by storm, make their own. Never
an option for all, now looking obsolete and unattainable for everyone.
Even those with a luxury bunker in New Zealand.
And so I apologize to those young people whose lives will almost
certainly be robbed of the richness, the freedoms, the potential—the
very future—which I enjoyed. I cannot substantively change what lies
ahead; I am afraid it is too late for that. But I can own my part in
creating it. And, perhaps more meaningfully, I can try to be an honest
witness, I can find the courage to look without flinching, no matter how
painful it gets. I can decline to turn away, I can refuse to close my
heart, I can continue to love even when it hurts like hell. It isn’t
much, it isn’t nearly enough, but in concert with my unfettered delight
in the return to my neighborhood of a breeding pair of ospreys, it is
what I can wholeheartedly offer today.
