Our financial debts are ultimately imaginary. These days, most are recorded only as ones and zeros in the digital ether. One solar stormwell-timed or badly-timed depending on your perspectivecould wipe it all out, as nearly happened in July, 2012. But our debts to the planetto lifeare wholly tangible. The trees cut, the waters poisoned, the soil depleted, the air tainted, the species made extinct. That list doesn't even include climate change.
Much of the damage is not repairable in the lifetime of any human currently walking the earth, but that's not the point. We must acknowledge what we owe and do our damnedest to start making payments. This will keep us busy. Tasks will include:
- Transitioning agriculture from monolithic monocropping to small-scale polyculture, and relearning wildtending
- Reshaping cities from alienating sprawl to community-based walkability
- Picking up the trash, which will include massive clean-up operations of rivers, soil, the oceans and the atmosphere
- Reforestation and rewilding of rural spaces to restore the homes of their original denizens (keeping in mind that shifting climate zones will prevent everything from being just like how it once was)
And most important is Forrest Palmer's point: Sacrifice. We must cut our consumption drastically. Building new "renewable" energy structure is not the first step. Reducing our energy use is. If solar panels, for example, are actually needed they should be installed at-source, not out in the wild where they will displace more flora and fauna.
I hasten to add that individual conservation right now with no other systemic change doesn't do much, if anything, in the big picture. This effort must be collective, top-to-bottom, bona fide revolutionary, and must target institutional operators like corporations and the Pentagon. That's who's doing the most damage.
Of course, individual lives will also change. It won't just be no new pipelines and no new power plants but no new server farms and no new smart phones.
The next generation of humans born can live without screens; in fact must live without them. Reconnecting with the actual, under-our-feet earth and over-our-heads sky is our most important task. Now we fill our ears with noise and our eyes with flashing images. We must learn to listen and to see again. With such a shift, the new children will look on us with a mixture of sorrow and horror. How could we have been so numb to the condition of the world? How could we have ignored the screams for help and turned away from the desperate pleas of all the suffering creatures? How could we even think of ourselves as alive, let alone human, when we behaved in such despicable ways?
I would not blame the next generation if they turned on us and took us out. Is a better fate deserved by the monstrosity that we've become?
Oak and Fir forest clear cut in Humboldt County for a Cannabis operation, 2017 [photo by author]
(Image by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume) Details DMCA
I look around at the mess we've made and I am sickened not only by the destruction but by our attitude: That we somehow can't help it. That there is no other way. That it's "human nature." That's some BS that at once conveniently exonerates our bad behavior and excuses us from doing anything about it. I don't buy it. We have responsibilities.
In order to pursue those very real responsibilities, we must abandon the immaterial set of fakes ones under which we are currently suffering, such as debt and money. Freedomis what we must grant ourselves, at once. And when we have it, we must take up devotion. Life is calling. Will we answer?
#WeedsArePeopleToo: Springtime reflections on farming & its damages(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).