by admin | Aug 20, 2019 | Zen Animism
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.
by admin | Oct 29, 2018 | Uncategorized
What can we say about the recent IPCC report and its 12-year timeframe?
Climate scientists have long been balancing on a thin wire, trying to communicate the peril we are in without sounding alarmist or as if they have a political agenda. From an environmental activist point of view, they’ve been criticised for being too patient and cautious. Yet one thing we can be sure of now is that their language has gotten more urgent as time has passed and more evidence has accrued that we are passing the tipping points of a planet safe for human habitation. The IPCC (the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have gone over review after review of their predictions, based on the best modelling we have at our disposal, and everything points to things being worse than they ever predicted. Oops – party stopper!
The Guardian article on the recent IPCC report is here
So let me try something, by putting this in everyday language … can we finally say, without sounding alarmist, and with the knowledge that we are starting to look really foolish and cowardly if we don’t, that we are now officially at the precipice of ecological collapse, as the environmental devastation of global capitalism runs amok and governments fall like dominoes to far right aggression? Can we talk about it yet? I’ve written before about how and why the “big man” caricature wins in dangerous times and it’s sad to see that I was right, in early 2016, and that it just keeps getting worse; now see Brazil’s new far right champion.
To get to the bottom of this phenomenon, I went back to the origins of large-scale civilizations to see what we can learn from them. When people get scared, they look for protection – even if the gang leader is the most threatening character in their world! In fact, that’s how classic standover tactics work: pay the thugs to make sure no-one harms you, with the strong insinuation that if you don’t, those very thugs will burn your house down overnight, whether you are in it or not. Now the house is the planet and the thugs are transnational corporations and the politicians that protect their interests. I don’t think we can hide from that anymore. What might have sounded like conspiracy theory 20 years ago is mainstream political analysis nowadays.
We’ve got to keep working on resilient communities; securing our own local food sources, finding ways to become less dependent on fossil fuels, getting together and sharing and taking care of each other. But we may need to start extending things like refusing single-use plastic and demanding food without poison in it, to actions based on the civil disobedience model. Here are a couple of examples:
Extinction Rebellion are standing against the unprecedented global emergency of the ecological crisis and the sixth mass extinction we are in the midst of, by asking for massive truth bombs about the real dangers we currently inhabit, shorn of media white washing and political inaction. They also feature a cool wallpaper-like set of visuals that neatly convey their core messages:
And Deep Green Resistance state that “Our best and only hope is a resistance movement that is willing to face the scale of the horrors, gather our forces, and fight like hell for all we hold dear.”
I loved reading Henry David Thoreau when I was first in university. He loved nature and fought for the truth; and it was he who coined the term civil disobedience. It is supposed to mean turning away from the law as it is encoded by vested interests, when you can tell there is a greater truth arising from reality. As I reiterated recently: Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 we have known that industrial civilisation threatens the health of our planet. It is time we started to really act like this shit is getting real and getting out of our comfort zone. We deserve better, so do the next generations, and so do the animals and plants that have so far survived the onslaught of modern technological civilisation. And hey, we might even enjoy getting down to it! Maybe it’s not the end of the party after all …
