Tag: Earth

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America: Society Art of Living Iraq War Journal Nature Society Stewardship

Statement

Winter Cherry
Bare branches of a cherry tree in a kindergarten near my home, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan, 2004
Winter Cherry
Bare branches of a cherry tree in a kindergarten near my home, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan, 2004

I’ve had a lot of time to think. And the conclusions are not quite so cut and dried that I can claim enlightenment, but there have been some tightening of convictions and brushes with clarity. Here are some of the pebbles of insight into myself that I found:

• I love the Earth. Ever since I can remember it has been a more than average, deep anima within me. When close to the natural world, when interacting with other living things, when walking between the ground and the heavens and no human intervention to obscure the view, when the childlike excitement and fascination envelopes me while I crawl through thickets or wade up to my waist in swamp water or climb a tree to get a closer look at a nest or walk for days and days along a mountain ridge, those are the times I always feel most alive. I live in the heart of Tokyo now and am denied these things. It goes against my nature. Like Dersu Uzala (from Kurosawa’s film and the book by V.K. Arseniev) something dies within me when cities are the only connection to life that I have access to. For those who love cities this is impossible to explain.

• I love the human race. People can be capable of so much beauty and grace and generosity. When they open their minds and care for one another and the places they live in, our imaginations are limitless. As a integral participant in the dance of the natural world, our role is as the steward of this world, with the means and awareness to protect all that is around us. Other animals have their place in the scheme, ours is to protect. And therefore I want to see that I position myself within my own life to fulfill my role as steward. And to resist with all my heart and intellect and abilities those who would destroy our world.

• The planet is in danger. How long are we going to sit around squabbling about this? It is not some parlor room debate where the “winner” gets to make a toast. It is the lives of millions and millions of our fellow creatures and our very own survival that is at stake. The danger is NOW! And yet we sit around like crash victims, staring with disbelief out the window. Meanwhile we play like fools with our weapons, our chemicals, our water, our air as if there isn’t a care in the world. The whole scenario seems to be following, step-by-step, Kim Stanley Robinson’s warning, from his Mars series books, where the Earth falls into worldwide catastrophe. We are on the verge of meltdown and still denying it. The planet cannot take this abuse any more.

• My anger is not impotent or inconsequential. When I react with anger to what the United States and Bush are doing it is out of pain and love for the planet and for all people. I cannot sit idly by while there are those who would destroy it all. Meditation and a letting go of self is all important of course, but what self will there be to let go of if there are no people to examine themselves? Before Hitler took control so many people had opportunities to voice their anger and prevent him from coming to power. If the Blacks in America had not voiced their anger at and opposition to their suppression, where would they be today? Certainly much worse off than they are. Or the Indians. If Gandhi had not seized upon the strength of his anger with Britain, where would the Indians be today? No, I will not back down and whimper in a closet. I am angry. I am opposed to what is happening and, though I am but a small voice and cannot do much, I will do what I can to oppose the world order that the United States is forcing on everyone. This in no way means that I am not angry about other countries and what they are doing, or that I think other places are perfect, but the United States poses the biggest threat to the world today. If the United States cannot learn to live in harmony with the rest of the world, if they continually shake the tree without thinking of others or the tree itself, then I will work to oppose it.

• Bush is a criminal. Not just a local criminal within the U.S. itself, but an international war criminal. He has attacked and murdered thousands upon thousands of people. He has started two wars, based on lies, and defied the international community. He has upset the balance of the entire world, possibly putting the stability of the world’s economy in jeopardy. Personally, I believe that he was responsible for the New York tragedy… there are just too many coincidences, lies, and sleights of hand to see it any other way, much as Americans are just too horror-struck to admit the possibility of such a heinous act on the part of their own president. Almost no one in America has even entertained the possibility of this, in spite of the awful lies and acts that Bush has already committed. The fixed election; denying access to the information about what happened before the New York tragedy; tripping up the investigations; planning the attack on Iraq long before the tragedy; the inability to find bin Laden (who was in the employ of the CIA for many years…which is suspicious in itself); the convenient death of Senator Paul Wellstone; the illegal and humiliating internment of people denied even the most basic human rights at Guantanamo; the backing of Sharon’s atrocious subjugation of the Palestinian people… just how many more outrageous and “evil” acts must cross the television screen before people wake up and inquire into the goings on behind all these things? Bush should be subjected to an investigation at least… really he should be facing trial in an international court.

I am certainly not going to back down and quietly “accept” the state of affairs. Bush losing the election this year allows a great criminal to get away without answering for his crimes. That simply is not enough for me. Someone has got to say something, even if the outcry is ineffective. At least I am trying and not simpering in some cage. If Bush manages to get you to cower, then he has won. He’s managed to gain the crown without even really making much of an effort.

• I will find peace. If I hold fast to my convictions and practice loving what I love, if I get out there and protect the world and people who mean so much to me, if I don’t let someone bully and intimidate me, I will find the steadfastness within me and know who I am. THAT is what I will meditate upon, not some wilted stem that forgets who and what it is.

But it would certainly be easier and the going a little lighter if others of you would join me, if we would join hands and stand up together. Many small voices can chorus into a roar. Even mice have strength in numbers.

Categories
Journal Nature Stewardship

Quibbling Over Earth Semantics

I wasn’t quite sure I was reading an intelligent person’s take on things when I read the speech by Michael Crichton, posted by Dan on North Coast Cafe. What is it with this unreasonable fear of environmentalists? Why do environmentalists evoke such reactionary diatribes? Why is it such a difficult thing for all of us to take responsibility for the only place we have to live? No one would question a homeowner’s efforts to economize and better run their household and dwelling, and yet it seems as if everyone has to continually argue about the need for maturing in our practice of living on the planet. Crichton’s simplistic and willfully negligent speech, ignoring the years of painstaking research and sweat of serious scientists and environmentalists who daily live and see the effects of our actions upon the planet, only reinforces the tendency to stick our heads in the sand and hope the problems go away.

I believe environmentalists are in most cases realists who look the world’s problems straight in the eye and attempt to find solutions to seeming insurmountable odds. We (and I count myself among them) are attempting to break the old habits in favor of a healthier way of life, so that all benefit. Crichton almost seems to have been paid under the table somewhere… I mean, take this quote from his speech: “I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned.” Did he even research how DDT works to cause birds to die? Did he think at all about exactly what DDT does kill, besides the crop-eating insects that it is targeted for? Does he have an inkling about how the food-chain works and why an imbalance is so destructive? Did he take the time to read Rachel Carson’s life-dedicated scientific research?

Crichton thinks that because he is some hotshot Hollywood writer and moviemaker that he knows what he is talking about. But he is just that, a hotshot Hollywood writer and moviemaker, not someone who has spent his life trying to understand the natural world or to live within its demands. Even his description of people who go outdoors to experience it, with an attempt to justify his view that “The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It’s all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk.” by portraying an example of his trekking trip into the Himalayas, where he questions a porter about why it is necessary to take so much care in crossing a mountain river: his conclusion about the dangers of nature in a remote place only reveals his vast ignorance about learning to live in wild places so you don’t get hurt, which includes learning to cooperate with others rather than scratch and fight, and that this very uncertainty is part of the reason serious venturers into the wilds come back again and again to take the risks… it is a need and desire for many people to find a way back to our early roots of self-reliance, use of our innate intelligence, attempting to find some kind of real and practical relationship to our surrounding world rather than trying to dominate it on every level, and redefining and reevaluating what spirituality means in the sum of our lives.

No the natural world is not romantic… and what mountaineer worth their salt is romantic about the crags as they climb them? The insects in the garden eating your cabbages away are not romantic. I think environmentalists who deal with this daily have a very clear understanding of the price nature asks for survival; but that doesn’t mean that a person can’t LOVE the natural world. Anyone who would stop to gauge the romanticism and “reality” of children would probably never have them, seeing as children eat away your finances, causes innumerable inconveniences, disrupt well-laid plans, and often get into age robbing troubles, but, in spite of that, people continue to have kids, Crichton himself, most likely.

What Crichton fails to get is that we environmentalists LOVE our world, including the people in it. We want what’s best for it and will do what is necessary to protect it and make sure it is healthy, that it can grow up to have its own life when we are gone. For us the world is alive, not just some dead thing that can be chainsawed into firewood for the fire. Crichton calls environmentalism a “religion”. Perhaps. He’s assuming, of course, that “religion” is always a bad thing, that it cannot be molded into an aspect of our lives that does not necessarily prevent rational thought or change when it is necessary.

But then, perhaps he completely fails to grasp that environmentalism is probably something new, something beyond the dogma that he has his mind set to. And then, too, in spite of his acknowledgment that the environment needs to be protected, he gives absolutely no suggestions for solutions to the big problems. Kind of hard to believe his ability to perceive anything if he traveled to Nepal, but completely missed all those people living in abject, overcrowded, lacking-firewood-because-all-the-trees-have-been-cut-down poverty, isn’t it?

Crichton declares that all environmentalists live in a fantasy world… really, I ask you, who is he to talk?

Categories
America: Society Ecopoesie Iraq War Journal Nature

The New Tide

Seaweed Gatherers
Fisherfolk gathering seaweed, southern coast of Boso Peninsula, Chiba, Japan, 1977.
Seaweed Gatherers
Fisherfolk gathering seaweed, southern coast of Boso Peninsula, Chiba, Japan, 1977.

So many roiling emotions and thoughts lately about identity and the direction we need to take in the world today. The thoughts are rough and fleeting, like a cloud of bees, clarity alighting here and there, then flitting away into obfuscation, so that writing comes heavily and plodding. Several days ago I read the poem post by Madame Butterfly at Nehanda Dreams about the world’s tribes declaring pride and love in who they are, and then later her comment on my “Thunder” post, questioning the idea of race. It was a question that every non-white in the world, when subjected to the white world or other homogenous group, daily thinks about, in constant comparison to some amorphous image of perfection hovering over the psychic world.

Yesterday, as if on cue, I just happened to come across Barbara Kingsolver’s selection of essays “Small Wonder: Essays”, a last copy hidden in the corner of the bottom shelf of the tiny nature section of the Kinokuniya bookstore in downtown Tokyo. I thought the book was mainly about nature, since that is Kingsolver’s domain, but upon starting it, it became clear that this was her response to the New York tragedy, and, over time, an effort to comprehend what is happening in the world today. In the opening lines, her wounds are very fresh from the New York attack and still raw with grief and anger. I have to remind myself that her book appeared before much of what the United States is doing now took place, and that through the examples of her earlier work, I must remember that her mind is open to the minds of people in other places.

Then, today, I was watching yet another Discovery Channel documentary of one of our world’s smaller tribes, this time the Tauduram hunter gatherers of Palawan, the Philippines. In the last scene the narrator Phil Borges compares a shaman’s inability to heal a tribe member’s liver disease he had never encountered before, with the surrounding destruction of the forest. Borges wonders about the spiritual effect on these people, who until recently lived in intimate relationship with the mountain forests, of having suddenly to switch to a slash and burn economy and destroy the very forests that constituted the spirits of their ancestors.

It got me thinking about why it is that so many Native Americans lost the desire to live after the Indian Wars, and so many of them gave up after Wounded Knee, with alcoholism and domestic violence reaching epidemic proportions. I understood the sense of despair, but I couldn’t personally compare it to anything that I could empathize with. Until I thought of the New York tragedy and how Americans, and people all over the world, reacted to it. How the sense of the world coming to an end engulfed us all and wrought shock and despair. That must be how it felt, and still feels, to the Native Americans, their world toppled by an abrupt (if seen from their 10,000 or more years of history) and violent attack.

In addition the values that the Europeans brought with them, the very de-personification of the Land, of killing the spirits and gods as if the Land could be anything without them, must have shattered the foundations of what constituted their understanding of the world. What the Europeans brought forced them to adopt a world view in direct opposition to all that was true and right, in comparison almost as if a Christian were coerced into accepting the Antichrist as their god.

Madame Butterfly’s exclamation of “amandhla!” perhaps provides a glimmer of hope, a tiny first step for people around the world reclaiming their heritage and standing up to put the Christian god back in its place, as one among many in the pantheon. With her question of how we might understand race, I claim that we are now delving into something new. The old adages and proclamations need to be redefined, and a new understanding of what the human race is and how it needs to name itself demands discussion. People are mixing among themselves all around the world… the distances are foreshortened. It no longer means everything to claim you are American or I am German or she is Japanese or he is Nigerian. The borders are blurred.

So we are something new. The inability to clearly enunciate what this is illustrates just how new the changes are. Many people deny it and those who do recognize that all aspects of our relationship to ourselves, to each other, and to the planet are evolving, often react with anger and violence, out of fear.

But we are changing. And we must adapt. We must clear our minds of cobwebs and address the mounting problems that are overtaking the world. And we must learn to redefine what we are, once and for all ridding ourselves of the ignorance and intolerance that have plagued our history since we first formed societies. This is the new and fearsome frontier, blessed with peace and prosperity if we can truly learn from our mistakes.

Otherwise…

Categories
Journal Musings Nature

Cockroach Spray

The whole world seems to have plunged into a kind of “devil’s advocate” weather pattern: huge storms in Asia, freezing weather in the Eastern United States, record temperatures in Europe, and unending grey days in the middle of summer heat season, Japan. I think perhaps the Earth is finally coming around to making her opinions heard concerning all the hoopla from us headless-chicken mites swarming over her sensitive back these last two years. The New York tragedy must have startled her awake (“What’s all that fuss in the airwaves?”). The din of voices following, right past the attack on Afghanistan, must have made her sit up (“Now what?!?”). And the bombing of Baghdad must have sounded like a great banging on her door (“This better not be another oil salesman!”). When she opened it and witnessed the mess in her living room, well, Gaia just doesn’t like rude visitors, especially ones that don’t clean up after they spilled something. I take it that she reached behind the refrigerator, up there just past the Antarctic Circle, and brought out her cockroach spray. So far it seems to have been doing quite nicely in agitating the little creatures, but then Gaia is still half asleep. Hasn’t had her morning coffee yet. Wait until she rolls up her sleeves and takes to ridding the kitchen of the critters. “I’ve been meaning to do that for quite a while now, ” she sighs to Father Time sitting and reading the morning headlines at the dining table. “What a bothersome chore…”