Intellectualizing and explaining away the obvious as being cyclical and normal serves to give ‘normal’ a very wide range. This view may cloak our eyes and subdue our concern, further delaying our response to these alarming signs. Again, we are practicing not seeing. Some might suggest that we shouldn’t be overly concerned about the oaks. It’s part of the cyclical ebb and flow of life. I disagree. There has been no historic corollary or fossil evidence anywhere of a loss of this magnitude in such a short period of time.
Regarding the recent rapid rise in childhood autism, there are those who credit the increasing numbers to better diagnostic tests and more accurate record keeping. Twenty or thirty years ago this breakdown of communicative and emotional structure occurred only once in every hundred thousand births. Today it appears in one out of two hundred fifty births. To accept these numbers as being within the ‘normal range’ may be foolhardy. Is it possible that the quantity and quality of life is just not able to support the developmental and structural integrity of so many of our children’s growth?
What is our best hope in all of this? Caring will be the verification of our willingness to see the value of protecting life’s needs. Identifying with life’s needs connects us to the special something that underlies all life forms in our world of existence. We can’t be here and alive without it. All life draws from it moment to moment, and without it we are no longer involved in the living experience.
Our hope lies in the often-asleep goodness within us. If we can translate this into personal and collective acts of caring for life, then that which began us will find a way to keep us. It is within us to be caring. We are capable of being good stewards of our Earth and the life upon her. Clearly we are special beings on this world. But perhaps we must foster a new attitude that suggests that we are not more special. Much of human behavior suggests that we are separating our thread from the fabric of life in the pursuit of being special, which may be diminishing our lives while threatening the well-being of the world to which we belong. Thus, we may be better served by giving standing to all of life, regardless of how we interact with it. The health and vigor of life belongs to all of life simultaneously. If certain forms or expressions of life are lost, then all of us have lost something as well. And if caring is what it will take, what could possibly stand in our way? Old habits and outworn beliefs, perhaps; a belief like ‘this world is only a place that we are passing through, and what really matters is that there is an eternal resting place, Heaven,’ for example. Of course if we are just passing through on our way to Heaven we must be more special, and we can take from this world whatever we see as deserving of our special status.
Is there a ‘better’ belief system for this world’s needs? All theologies can find a place in life’s needs; if not a mantra then a cloak of comfort against the powerful and ruinous winds blowing about us. We have seen the human hand of taking in some of our losses, and we have noted the human hand of giving in some acts of recovery. Our American eagle and California condor still fly, and they fly over cleaner water flowing in our rivers.
As for the tipping point of resistance; where is ours in all of this? Is there a colony collapse of our own just up the road? With specie failure so evident in the world around us, can we be long immune? Are the super bugs of decline lining us up in their sights? Will MRSA soon have the company of even more aggressive super bugs? Are the AIDS virus, cancers, autoimmune diseases, and the many debilitating children’s afflictions (genetic abnormalities, autism, etc.) the beginning of an assault on the human family? Are these losses already holding a mirror up to us to which we are drawing frightfully close? Is the future something we can assume we will enter? What are we willing to do to lengthen our horizons?
Nothing could be more assuring than if what we do and are willing to consider centers around life for life’s sake. We must let life be the sun we revolve around. Any thing, thought, or action that takes away part of this sun may only continue to cloud our future.
Admittedly, many of the assumptions and implications herein are speculative and subjective. Drawing from observation in the natural world yields parallels and corollaries regarding the state of our world. These parallels I have attempted to draw between plant, animal, and human domains may not be completely appropriate, but that something is going on with our natural and living world I am quite certain.
There are more troubling observations from where I interact with the world. Many of the grand expressions of life are being depressed and thus being substituted with more marginal (less beneficial and less valued) expressions. In the landscape and woods edge poison ivy is thriving and growing at accelerated rates, while cultured grapes are struggling with one pest after another. Ageless species of trees are dying, but the common weeds are thriving. Beneficial insects like lacewings and honeybees are struggling while consuming, decline-inducing insects such as Japanese beetles, bagworms, and tent caterpillars are ever increasing their populations. In the soils that support the plant kingdom the beneficial and necessary fungi of the micro-rhizae families are less and less evident, while infectious soil-born fungi like those causing verticillium wilt are ever more present.
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