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At a certain point, there’s only so much that can be done.
I’m far from the first one to think that our situation now should be no surprise. We’ve been recklessly asphyxiating, mowing, crowding, disrespecting, neglecting, destroying the planet for generations. Now nature is taking over. Science could never move as fast. Nature is in charge.
Nobody IRL wants to be the one to say it, or even think it. What fools we are. How self-important we have been as humans. The unchecked egocentrism comes now to this. Of course, it is our moral and ethical duty to provide people with the best chance that they can have at survival. We sacrifice for the sake of one another. We value lives.
Why then does our true primary source of life, our environment, the earth, get left out of the equation so often in our daily political and economic consciousness? This has been a permanent conflict of interest. Our growing population and extended life spans, without any truly impactful or sustained attempt to mitigate its burden on our environment, the earth from which we are largely alienated. Nature becomes something to visit and vacation, rather than to take as part of ourselves.
As much as we see and value ourselves, our society, our culture, we must too turn an eye towards this earth as our real and ultimate life support.
Now each one of us, any one of us, could die. We experience this die-off just as whole swaths of species have died at our inattention, our neglect. Few want to recognize how we ourselves have created so many of our disasters. It’s easy to get busy and look the other way.
We must learn more reverence for that which is old, which has already come before us, and in this case, the one true elder. We must care for it, above and beyond our own self-interests. Nobody wants to say these things out loud, not me either. How uncomfortable we are with nature doing the job that it does, to the extent we must do whatever it takes to regain control over it. How uncomfortable we are as a culture with death, dying, aging, changing — not just in this instance but with the natural cycle of life, as we rebel more and more against these inconvenient truths.
Which brings us to the most difficult question of all. Are we even responsible enough, to extend our own lives? And what exactly would be the point, if we can not even breathe the air, drink the water, draw nutrition from soil, or exist without intermittent unprecedented calamities anymore?
Who wants to sit down and take the time, a long time, to regard nature with the respect it deserves? Because ultimately we are not in charge. The river is in charge, the glaciers are in charge, the ocean is in charge, the mountain is in charge, microorganisms are in charge. Everything is different now as we can not pretend that’s not true.
We can not ignore another kind of science – climate science, environmental science. So I don’t really want to hear them talk about science, until they’re ready to talk about that.
March 23, 2020 – March 31, 2020
(links added later)
(Lockdown Journals Part VII, FINAL THOUGHT, II)