 In response to my Saturday post, reader Chaitanya sent me a quote from the late Stephen J. Gould:
We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without
forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well -- for
we will not fight to save what we do not love.
This is important. More than half of the nearly 7
billion humans on this planet now live in cities, in ecosystems that
are disconnected from the resources and places and plants and animals
that they depend on for food, water and energy. To that extent, cities
are 'artificial' environments -- they are not sustainable without
resources that come entirely from outside them, 'mysteriously' (because
the people in the city have no direct personal experience or knowledge
of how their food, water and power gets to them). Children in cities
can be excused for thinking food 'comes' from the grocery store, that
water comes magically from the tap, and that electricity comes from the
switch.
We cannot expect people to care about factory farmed
animals' misery, because to them it is invisible. It is no more 'real'
than what they read about in story books. We cannot expect people to
care about the end of oil or the end of water or the end of electricity
or the end of telecommunication because they don't see or know where
these things come from, and their scarcity is a mere abstraction. I
have spoken to people who lived through the Great Depression, and
deliberately read first-hand accounts of the incredible suffering and
deprivation that those people lived through, and their astonishment
that things they had 'taken for granted' could disappear so quickly.
But this is lost knowledge, and we cannot expect people to care about
it now.
We cannot expect people to care about the loss of
biodiversity, about species extinction, about the death of the oceans.
This is too cerebral, probably even if you depend on hunting or fishing
for your livelihood. We cannot expect people to care about global
warming, despite Al Gore's powerpoint slides. It's the specific, the
personal that we care about, not the broad, conceptual issues. As
Frederick Barthelme says in his wonderful advice to writers wanting to
engage their audience: "Apropos the big issues, note that parents don't
sit around getting heartbroken about abortion, they get heartbroken
because they killed the baby."
You can of course watch a National Geographic special
that shows a baby animal dying of starvation because of human
encroachment on their territory, or poisoned by some man-made toxin,
but it is still abstract: You didn't cause this, and besides, it's a
million miles away, and how do you know it was human encroachment or
poisoning that caused it. Change that channel, fast! Who wants to see
that stuff we can't do anything about, and which wasn't our fault
anyway?
We cannot expect people to care about deforestation or
strip mining or the atrocity of tar sands extraction. That kind of
stuff happens someplace else. And the trees have to go to make room for
houses eventually anyway, right?
The continuation and rapacity of our industrial economy,
and the continuing exponential growth of human numbers, depend utterly
on this disconnection, in lands that have been stripped of everything
that made them natural places, and expecially our cities (including the
suburbs, the exurbs, and the monoculture farm hinterlands that sprawl
outwards at an ever-accelerating rate, until only the deserts, the
arctic, the mountain tundra and other 'natural wastelands' unfit for
human habitation are left.
Lawns and gardens and parks full of non-native species
soaked in fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides are no substitute
for natural places. We cannot expect people to "forge an emotional bond
with nature" when this is what they think nature is. We can be backyard
birdwatchers or zoo-goers or humane farmers or urban tree-planters or
love our companion animals, and get some inkling of what nature is, but
not long enough or deeply enough to form an emotional bond to it.
We can sense, from doing these things, or from watching
March of the Penguins or from a weekend hike, that there is something
important 'out there'. But then we are brought back to our urban
'reality', and we have things that we must do, and when they're done
we're too tired to do things that perhaps should be done.
We don't care enough. And that's perfectly understandable. How can we love what we do not see, feel, smell, hear, taste, know?
John Gray would tell us that it's too late to change
this. More and more of us, in proportionate and absolute terms, are now
so disconnected from nature that we cannot care enough to bring about
the huge changes that would be necessary, that are necessary. I have
been at conferences full of brilliant, sensitive people who want to
make the world a better place (mostly through technological invention)
who, when I speak to them of the importance of having a deep connection
with nature, look at me as if I'm from Mars. They want to make cities
more livable. They want pets to be treated humanely. They want to find
new resources and technologies to sustain the unsustainable lives they
live now. They want to reduce violence and crime in their
neighbourhoods.
When I was 21, fighting the Mackenzie Valley
Pipeline proposal back in the early 1970s, I managed to get an audience
with the Liberal federal minister of natural resources, and I explained
how the proposed pipeline would destroy caribou migration routes and
melt the fragile Arctic permafrost. He looked at me, amazed, and said
simply "Who cares about the permafrost?"
I did not answer. I was too stunned. At that time, there
were some people who cared about the permafrost, and we won a temporary
victory. But this year, a generation later, the government is poised to approve the
pipeline, because they need the clean energy to power the extraction of
dirty oil from the Alberta Tar Sands. Thanks to global warming, the
permafrost is already melting, and the northern migration of swarms of
insects has made life so miserable for the caribou that the herds are
thinning. Like the polar bears who can no longer find firm ice to hunt
from, they are wasting away and giving up. Soon they will all be gone,
and we won't have to care any more, the few of us who did.
So I continue to grieve for Gaia. But that does not
prevent me from living a life of great joy, or from doing what I can to
make the world a slightly better place. The emotional bond I have with
nature is strong, and cannot be broken -- in fact it grows stronger
every day, as I learn more and strengthen my connection with
all-life-on-Earth. I shall continue to fight for what I love, even
though I know it is a losing cause. It is enough to try.
To those who understand, I offer my love, my sympathy,
my silent nod of recognition and connection and
appreciation. To those who do not, who can
not, I offer my respect and understanding, and hope against hope that
you will somehow come to re-discover what you are missing,
and join us. We cannot care about what we
do not know personally, and how can we know nature personally when we
grow up in a world opposed to and disconnected from her? |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
