The dead wombat has been there for a couple of days now. The stench tells the story, as do the flies. The painted stripe down its back is another thing – a sign to those who care, that this one has been checked. Its pouch is empty; no babies need to be rescued from its dead body. Drive on, like everybody else does. We’re in a rush, or going too fast, or we’ve just seen it so often it doesn’t register anymore.
Roadkill – it’s an everyday reality for those who drive, especially long distances on country roads. It’s the collateral damage of the road trip. And it’s a sign of the times, a symbol of how we live, the things we can’t change, the fast pace of modern life and the way we treat the rest of the world (aka nature). We cut straight lines across the land, just as we do across the seas and skies, in order to get from one place to the next as fast as humanly possible.* Because we have business to do, people to meet, more immediate concerns than caring for the land and the planet that is our home. More important stuff.
That’s how we got here – to the precipice of the ecological emergency, which afflicts the entire earth now, the cliff over which we are hurtling since the feedback loops started to kick in. We burn greenhouse gases and turn the plants and animals into agribusiness and treat them all like grist to the mill. Any cereal grain or docile beast unfortunate enough to be domesticated has been ‘farmed’ – or more accurately, industrially exploited – to the point of complete depersonalisation.
You couldn’t do to battery hens, pigs, or feedlot cattle what is routinely done on behalf of obscene profits if you actually had to face what these animals feel. We couldn’t decimate the insect population and pour countless trillions of litres of chemical run off, of pesticides and fertilisers, into the sea, creating desolate coastlines and Great Barren Reefs, if we cared about the rest of the earth’s population.
It’s all about the wheat, the rice, the cotton; not the birds, the bees, the native grasses or traditional remedies that used to grow here. Where? Anywhere.
This dead wombat is one of the dozens I see every week on my work commutes. Smashed to death by a metal bullet hurtling down the road at 100kmh, another human being at the wheel. Almost inevitably, we won’t stop to witness the passing of another life at the hands of modern society. It’s just what we do. Kill thoughtlessly, randomly, impersonally, as an inevitable side effect of our hustle and bustle. This is what we have done to our planet and home.
Roadkill is a symbol for our times.
For more on the mythology of straight lines, see the ecomythic doco “City Living, Nature Calling” here.
Of course it is OK to have white skin. Just like it is OK to have black, red, yellow or any other shade of skin colour. But this isn’t about race; it’s about culture. Specifically, it’s about feeling as if the culture you identify with is under siege. Displaying the sign, or supporting a Senate motion, asserting that it is OK to be white, is a clear symbol of distress. This signalling shows that, for some white people,who they are and what they stand for seems to be under threat. Specifically, in this case, that the privileges they previously took for granted are being taken away.
You get it: once you have gotten used to having something, you get a sense of entitlement pretty quickly, and it gets hard to let it go. No-one likes to lose ground, face or privilege. So how did white people get here – to the place that some of them now think they’re losing? This goes back to the industrial revolution, which took place in Britain and Western Europe a few hundred years ago due to a large number of fortuitous factors, or a kind of ‘Golden Age’. In short, there was support for scientific enquiry, intellectual freedom of thought, a willingness to apply findings in the name of development (bloody capitalism again!) and a previously untapped resource. Add coal to the steam engine et voila, you have global dominance.
We all know what else came with this age of rapid machine age colonisation. White people spread across the world, taking their newfound freedom to move around, extract a seemingly unending stream of ‘resources’ such as fossil fuels and forests, and processing them into … modern society. The dominance of cities, buildings, railways, ships, cars and planes all grow exponentially. With this came modern medicine, huge monoculture crops and food security, roads and other infrastructure (cue the hilarious scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian on “What have the Romans ever given us?”).
But even to the extent that these can be experienced as ‘good’ things, they come at a cost we are now seeing more clearly with each passing year. Modern society and rampant technological development relies upon treating our environment as a set of resources available to us and used for our benefit; as these are depleted so we see the devastation we have wreaked upon the earth in the name of progress. And just as the machine age of the military industrial complex has chewed through the earth, so it has treated the people of the land; colonising without hesitation, in Australia even declaring Terra Nullius as if the First Peoples didn’t even exist, simply because they didn’t subdue nature and build civilisation the way our ancestors did.
All of this is part of white privilege; of sensing that ‘we’ are the winning team, the unassailable leaders of the rest of the world, the winners in the race for more stuff. Now, lots of other people have caught up and even overtaken western leadership in terms of technological evolution. Globalisation makes us more even with other societies and their markets.
The “It’s OK to be white” movement is part of a knee-jerk reaction against losing privileges that came from fortuitous circumstances. It is also part of a slippery slope towards fascism, which we are seeing way too much of in the west of late. If we want to be leaders now, we need to recognise the cost of what has brought us all here, to the precipice of climate collapse and the IPCC’s recent 12 year warning that we have to change fast or risk inevitable collapse. No matter what racial or cultural alignment we identify with, we all need to evolve into better ecological citizens and lead wider society to do the same, or we’re screwed.
We can only succeed in the radical transformation of modern society required to pull this off if we work together; this is a movement that makes skin colour, like sexual orientation, less important and more a matter of personal choice. Choose something more deeply rooted in the earth than cultural politics and side with becoming more mature ecological citizens, as self-aware primates capable of conscious evolution, compassion and generosity. Lead with that and it won’t matter whether you’re white or purple.
Mindfulness is a state of being, or at least it becomes one if you practice it. Being more aware of the moment, we feel more alive. The smells, the glint of a button in the sunlight, the sound of a bird chirping as we walk by … these are the sorts of things we notice if we get a chance to, just before we die. Don’t leave yourself open to too much regret; wake up to these beautiful passing phenomena right now.
As well as opening you up more consistently to the moment of here and now, a meditation practice can help you to become more aware of the patterns that constantly run through your mind and model the way you think, that speak as the voices and act as the judgements and assumptions that keep us limited by the way our personal history has shaped us. A meditation practice helps you to evolve in consciousness over time, if you stick at it; as well as open you up to surprising levels of awareness in no time at all.
This video doesn’t distill my teachings around the skills that can help you meditate better, but it gives the flavour, and so it might help you to set the mood for sitting in quiet contemplation. Sit in peace and walk with compassion.
Geoff Berry will present an experiential session of meditation to celebrate Mindfulness Day on Wednesday September the 12th at the Narooma Library from 10.30am. He also offers meditations skills and guidance via www.naturecalling.org
You couldn’t do to battery hens, pigs, or feedlot cattle what is routinely done on behalf of obscene profits if you actually had to face what these animals feel. We couldn’t decimate the insect population and pour countless trillions of litres of chemical run off, of pesticides and fertilisers, into the sea, creating desolate coastlines and Great Barren Reefs, if we cared about the rest of the earth’s population.
This dead wombat is one of the dozens I see every week on my work commutes. Smashed to death by a metal bullet hurtling down the road at 100kmh, another human being at the wheel. Almost inevitably, we won’t stop to witness the passing of another life at the hands of modern society. It’s just what we do. Kill thoughtlessly, randomly, impersonally, as an inevitable side effect of our hustle and bustle. This is what we have done to our planet and home.
