GROWING UP

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

—STANLEY MILGRAM

 

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice.

—SYDNEY J. HARRIS

 

It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.

—JOSIAH CHARLES STAMP

 

 

 

SOME PEOPLE AREN’T CHILDREN; aren’t magical thinkers; aren’t so afraid of what Daddy will think that they cannot openly acknowledge (and act on) their love and concern for the natural world; aren’t so afraid of the pain of despair that they must avoid looking at the horror that is this culture; aren’t so afraid that they cannot face this culture and our predicament head on. They recognize that this culture is irredeemable and that having orgasms or taking off one’s clothes or putting plants on truck factories or having conferences on sustainability that avoid the two primary preconditions for sustainability (the land comes first; and we need to stop these mother-fucking psychopaths no matter what it takes) is utterly insufficient to the crises confronting us. There are not merely some people who feel this, but many, with numbers increasing every day. And some of them write to me. These more empowered (and honest) emails outnumber the others by a ratio of probably twenty to one. I want to share one of those honest emails now, in great measure because it so well articulates the pain and confusion of the process of breaking, a process I’ve been through so many times, a process gone through by so many people I know, an almost necessary part of the questioning and confusion and pain and sorrow crucial to growing up and leaving this culture behind.

I had never heard from this woman before. She wrote: “I got up this morning and worried that my pants were far too wrinkled to wear to work, which happens to be a public school. At that moment I had a flash of who I have become. I wish that I could merely worry about the socially acceptable wrinkliness of my pants. But what I want more than pressed pants is answers. Answers that are detailed, specific, hard-core descriptions of what I need to do to fix things.

“Here’s my issue: I work with kids every single day. I feel like there’s a giant monster among us, as a matter of fact right in front of us. Our kids live in its shadow each day. I’m beginning to view our kids as the ‘shadow of the monster kids’ (in the most unconscious and Jungian sense).

“Question: Why do we have a generation of kids who cut, pierce, burn, choke, and do a multitude of self-destructive behaviors? They say they do it to feel something, anything, to help solve problems, to get a high, and to get attention—attention from friends, families, counselors, teachers, anyone willing to give it. Where did our sense of connection, our sense of honoring self—body, mind, and soul—go? When did self-harm become a form of expression and/or blatant and crazed addiction? What’s missing? How did we get here? Please tell me how to get out of here.

“Question: Why is it that kids come in talking about seeing spirits, dreaming of the devil and sensing energy? They read Harry Potter, watch Ghost Chasers, and play Zombie video games. But when they approach us with these visions, we wonder if they are schizo. How can I help them frame their spiritual existence in a world that is rampant with messages and images of false or fabricated or mediated spirits, but is void and neutered of real conversations about spiritual experiences? How can I remove this taboo?

“Question: Please tell me why we have laws to protect children [obviously the analogous is true for the natural world], but in the state where I live, I’ve only met one lawyer who will consult with a child without parental consent. Those giving consent are those who beat, molest, and degrade our children. If I was that nasty and controlling I wouldn’t give consent. Would you? I sent him a five dollar gift certificate for coffee and my thanks and gratitude, because I didn’t know what else to do. Please tell me how we make what is legal the same as what is right and ethical.

“Question: Why is it that I felt guilty that my daughter had to tell her classmates that she didn’t like Hannah Montana, because this was less embarrassing than telling them she doesn’t know who Hannah Montana is? (We don’t watch TV.) Why is it that after two days in the ‘happiest place on earth’—Disneyland—I spend a day weeping uncontrollably? Why is it that I feel a tinge of guilt when I write on my daughter’s birthday invitations ‘We’d love your presence, not your presents’? And that when I allow her toys (and myself stuff), I suffer with the indigenous peoples and forests who were destroyed in order to create them? Can’t I shelter her one more hour, day, year, decade from the realities of this culture? I can choose to ignore this cultural cancer, but if I don’t, if I can’t any longer, please, please, please, tell me how to treat for it?

“I could go on and on and on with my concerns, but I have to go to bed so that I can get up tomorrow to worry about how wrinkled my pants are.

“For a while I felt proud. I’ve armed myself against the giant monster in my presence. I have a grain of sand or maybe as much as a pebble to throw at it. I drive my hybrid car to the coffee stand, hand over my steel mug (no disposables for me), and fill it up with organic milk and a shot of fair trade espresso. I hurl my pebble while at the grocery store, where I purchase recycled toilet paper and vinegar and baking soda to clean my kitchen. I arm myself with compost piles, green energy subscriptions, and climate change talk circles. I toss my pebble at the monster with all my strength, but the monster is now so enormous that my pebble doesn’t reach the top of its big toe. I pray that David and Goliath is a prophetic metaphor, but where the hell is my sling shot? I pray that Lilliputians were on to something. If there are enough of us, can we tie this sucker down and subdue it? Please give me the answers. I need the reassurance.

“You wrote in your book that you could either write or blow up dams. I don’t want to write. I want to blow up dams. Since I’m afraid of explosives and too sensitive to survive in prison, my dams will have to be emotional dams, cultural dams, religious dams, normative dams. And then I’ll just have to pray that someone else who isn’t so afraid of explosives will do the other necessary work.”

And now I want to share this anonymous note I was handed at a talk—and which I soon destroyed—written in a thirty-something woman’s handwriting: “I am ready. I have learned self-defense, and how to use a gun. I have gained other necessary offensive and defensive skills. And I’m no longer willing to stand by while this economic system kills the salmon. I love them as much as it seems you do. I am primed and ready, and I’m only waiting for someone else to act first. I am waiting, as I believe so many others are, for a spark to set us all off. But I cannot wait forever for that spark, because the salmon cannot wait forever for that spark. I have set a deadline, and if nobody else has begun by then, I guess it will be up to me.”

Once again, the fact that so many people go through this process of dying to this culture and being reborn as human beings doesn’t mean that this process is not painful and confusing, but merely means that pain and confusion and sorrow can be crucial to growing up and leaving this culture behind.

There’s a poem I read long ago, of which I remember only a few lines. These lines were very important to me in my twenties, as I—the socially constructed I—fell apart, and the me I was becoming was not yet emerging. These lines are: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead/The other powerless to be born/With nowhere yet to rest my head/Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.”

The Apostle Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

If we’re going to grow up enough to stop this culture from killing the planet, we’re going to have to put away many childish things.

We must first and foremost put away the childish, narcissistic notion that the world exists for our use. It doesn’t. And it doesn’t matter whether God told us we have dominion over the earth; or whether, equally plausibly, Elvis came to us in a dream and told us the same thing; or whether capitalists tell us that land is “unused” just because no human is using it for fiscal purposes. All the pretending in the world ain’t gonna make it so.

Contrast the Christian/Capitalist/Civilized ethic that God gave man dominion over the earth with what Vine Deloria said to me about the point of life from the perspective of a native North American: “In this moral universe, all activities, events, and entities are related, and so it doesn’t matter what kind of existence an entity enjoys—whether it is human or otter or star or rock—because the responsibility is always there for it to participate in the continuing creation of reality. Life is not a predatory jungle, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ as Westerners like to pretend, but is better understood as a symphony of mutual respect in which each player has a specific part to play. We must be in our proper place and we must play our role at the proper moment. So far as humans are concerned, because we came last, we are the ‘younger brothers’ of the other life-forms, and therefore have to learn everything from these other creatures. The real interest of old Indians would then be not to discover the abstract structure of physical reality, but rather to find the proper road down which, for the duration of a person’s life, that person is supposed to walk.”

So, on one hand we have an infantile notion that everything in the world belongs to me, me, precious little me, and if it’s not used by me it’s wasted, and on the other we have the attitude that we are the younger siblings of our earthly neighbors and must learn from them how to play our proper role in a grand symphony of mutual respect. Gosh, I wonder which of these two perspectives will more likely lead to the murder of the planet, and which will more likely lead to sustainable cultures?

If we wish to live sustainably, which at this point means to continue to live at all, we must put away the childish notion that we have the right to take whatever we want from nonhumans.

We must also put away the childish notion that humans are particularly special, or any more special than flying squirrels, sockeye salmon, red cedar, solitary bees, Steller’s jays, or oyster mushrooms. Once again, it doesn’t matter whether Christianity teaches us the flattering notion that humans are the only ones with souls, or whether science tells us (again and again, ever more frantically) the equally flattering notion (indeed the same notion) that humans are the most intelligent species on earth. Pretending ain’t gonna make this so either.

So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.

Today I received this note from an activist in Australia: “Just back to work after a two-month reprieve from wage slavery (enjoyed river restoration and littoral rainforest replanting in Northern New South Wales—penance for working for a TV station). The ocean spoke to me when I was there. She told me she was sick and she needed me to help stop them killing her. While I was foraging for mussels she told me that she wanted her babies back, and that I should only take them if I really needed them, if I was really hungry. I’ve long known that indigenous peoples talk of listening to the world speak, but I’ve always felt there must be something wrong with me because I haven’t been able to hear or speak to my nonhuman neighbours: I’ve thought perhaps I’d lost that sensitivity or something. But hearing the ocean speak when I was out there made the answer obvious: it’s very difficult, almost impossible, to be a wage slave, work in a fluorescent tomb for eight hours a day, live in a concrete bunker, and then expect to have a relationship with living beings. The question remains: what took me so long to realise that? As you’d say: duh.”

Another way to say all this is that we must put away the childish notion that the world consists of resources (“a natural source of wealth or revenue”) rather than other beings with lives and concerns as important to them as ours are to us.

We must put away the childish notion that humans are exempt from ecological principles. Most of us understand that if rabbits overshoot carrying capacity, they will destroy their surroundings and undergo a population crash. But humans have clearly overshot carrying capacity, and are clearly destroying their surroundings, yet they continue to breed like, well, like they say that rabbits do. They seem to consider themselves the smartest creatures around, and they incessantly claim they care about human life and that human life is amazingly wondrously sacred and special, yet they are making no reasonable effort to avert or alleviate this crash (which will be the result not merely of overpopulation but the culture as a whole, of which overpopulation is merely one symptom among far too many). In fact, anyone observing this from outside would probably come to the conclusion that these human creatures are doing everything in their power to make this crash as painful and deadly as they can.

We must give up on wishful thinking. I wish the US would stop invading other countries (but I’m not going to stop it). I wish I had a pony (and maybe I’ll get one for Christmas). I wish the industrial economy would stop killing the planet (but I’m not going to dismantle it). I wish I had a bicycle (and I’ve been so very, very good this year). I wish dams would stop killing salmon (but I’m not going to remove any myself). I wish we would end up at a sustainable population without anyone dying. I wish we would be able to stop those who are killing the planet without harming (or inconveniencing) anyone. I wish we could consume the entire planet without killing it. I wish. I wish. I wish.

Some children can be notorious for short attention spans (some are not). This culture has enshrined short attention spans in its economic system, which is as short-sighted as it is possible to be: would you rather have a living planet forever, or cheap consumables now? We needn’t speak our answer out loud: it’s already manifest in our actions, and inactions.

Years ago I knew a woman with several children who briefly dated a man who lived in the country. Their relationship ended when one day he showed her children a bird’s nest in a tree near his home. He told them of the fragility of the baby birds, and told them to observe the nest only at a distance. The woman’s oldest son, who was six at the time, waited till the man’s back was turned, climbed the tree, and intentionally threw the nest to the ground. The man realized he did not want to be in a relationship with such a horrid child (this action was in no way out of character for this child), nor with a parent who would countenance such behavior. The planet will soon say the same to us. We need to grow up such that when the Earth tells us, increasingly sternly, to clean up the messes we’ve created; to metaphorically and physically stop wantonly throwing birds’ nests to the ground; to not ignore (or more to the point, abuse, torture, suffocate, cut, rape, murder) the Earth; to not smirk that horrid smirk we’ve seen on the faces of so many ill-behaved, aggressive, spoiled-brat children as we continue to destroy anything we feel like destroying for whatever stupid reasons we manufacture; to not destroy the planet; to not continue to create whatever messes we feel like (once again for whatever stupid reasons we manufacture) and to only slightly mitigate those messes (perhaps by putting plants on truck factories), then look around proudly as though everyone else is supposed to somehow approve of us being only slightly—and I mean slightly—less destructive, yet still dreadfully ill-behaved, aggressive, spoiled, and indeed sociopathic. It’s all bullshit. People sometimes speak of the Earth as our mother, yet any good mother would see through all this in a heartbeat. And the earth does. As the wonderful philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore wrote to the CEO of an oil company, in response to an ad stating that “Mother Earth is a tough old gal”: “If the Earth really were your mother, she would grab you with one rocky hand and hold you under water until you no longer bubbled.”

Here’s something else we must give up. Have you ever interacted with a child who pretends that covering his or her face conveys invisibility? More or less all of us do this on at least two levels. One is that we pretend that just because we have chosen not to look at the problems we’re facing they must not exist. If we switch senses, this is all the equivalent of plugging our ears and singing “La la la la,” behavior that describes the bulk of this culture’s discourse, politics, “resistance,” and philosophy. The second is that many of us seem to believe that if we perform slight actions to make ourselves inconspicuous, the attentions of those in power will never fall on us. So we resist less and less, in less and less effective ways (“free speech zones” anyone?), and still the glaring light of the Panopticon keeps us in view.

Related to this is another childish behavior we must put away. One of the central means by which abused children maintain the pretense of control in uncontrollable, abusive situations, is to pretend—and of course you’ll see the similarities here to simple living “activists”—that the problems are caused by them, and not by their beyond-their-control abusers. They pretend that if they can only be good enough children, can only clean the dishes well enough (or on the larger cultural scale, perhaps not drive a car), can be quiet enough (become vegetarian or vegan), and so on, that the Dreadful will not happen. But the Dreadful has already happened, and continues to happen, and will continue to happen again and again, incessantly, until this culture has crashed (or been crashed) or killed the planet, no matter what good and pure children we are.

But that’s only if we are children, and understand as children, think as children, are powerless and dependent as children. Adults have other options. Grow up, find these options, and follow them.

We must put away the childish notion that the health of our communities is not our responsibility. Children need not take responsibility for the health of their families, and their larger communities. Adults must.

We must put away the childlike passivity manifested by so many activists toward those in power. So many of us seem to think that those in charge are (emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually) adults, and that they have our best interests at heart. We seem to think that the Great White Father will handle everything for us. So many of us seem to believe we are too small to do anything ourselves. We believe the fate of the salmon, or polar bears, or life on earth, are all out of our hands. All of this is false.

We need to grow up enough to recognize that others exist.

We need to grow up. We need to take responsibility for ourselves, and we need to manifest responsibility to our communities.

And that growing up can require a death and rebirth. And this death and rebirth can be painful, and full of despair. Yet some people do it. Some people do it.

Others don’t. Even many who’ve made it through earlier stages can get diverted at this stage—perhaps because the pain is too much—into a sort of pseudodespair that does not lead to rebirth, but rather to stagnation. This pseudodespair often arises among people who continue, whether or not they admit it, to identify more with the culture than with life, which means, once again, that in their perspective, the end of the culture would be the death of life. That’s pretty scary right there, but the people who’ve made it this far in the process usually also have realized that this culture kills life. So they’re stuck: if they decisively act to stop this culture from killing life, they destroy that which they (incorrectly) identify as life; if they don’t decisively act, all life will be destroyed.

So they do nothing. This pseudodespair often leads to a sort of fashionable nihilism that declares there’s nothing to be done; or that the culture’s destructive momentum is too fierce for us to effectively resist; or that it’s too late anyway. Excuse after excuse to do nothing. As with the “enlightenment” we discussed before, this form of “despair” and “nihilism” very well serves both the fiscal needs of those in power, who face less resistance because of this “enlightenment,” “despair,” or “nihilism” on the part of those who, if they were sane, would surely resist; and it just as well serves the safety needs of, in this case, the “despairing” and oh-so-hip “nihilists” who (of course) not only need not now resist, but, because they are “way past” all of that “simple living nonsense” need not even be inconvenienced in the slightest.

I have absolutely no respect for those who remain in that state.

Those who’ve made it this far, past the pseudodespair and despair, even past this death and rebirth, can still get distracted from the real problems, and the real possibilities. Pretend you no longer (or never did) fall into (and for) the spectacles, the frenetic and meaningless attitudes and activities that keep so many people distracted from the murder of the planet, distracted from their own role (and more importantly acquiescence) in it, and distracted from themselves. Pretend you not only did not attack those who reminded you that the culture is killing the planet, but you also have psychically and physically survived attacks made upon you for this same reason. Pretend you understand that the damage this culture causes really is damage. Pretend you keep your magical thinking to a reasonable minimum. Pretend you understand that the problems are the culture’s fault, and not primarily yours. Pretend you do not take on what is not yours. Pretend you have felt and survived the despair that comes to any sane being even remotely honest about this culture and the horrors upon which it is based, the horrors upon which it has always been based. Pretend you’ve been able to break your identification with this culture. Pretend you understand that the culture won’t last much longer.

What do you do?

Some people, at this point, simply walk away, and consider that sufficient. Even someone as brave as Lewis Mumford ended his brilliant work The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power with, “On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by ‘going with’ its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man’s vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the mega-machine’s meaningless existence. But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.”²⁴⁰

There are many people who, having gotten this far, “walk out” of the “technocratic prison” and then . . . well, then nothing. That’s as far as they take it, and they consider themselves done.

Unfortunately that’s not really helpful. There is, remember, a real world being killed, and from the perspective of the salmon, it doesn’t matter so much whether you continue to participate in the system or whether you psychologically and emotionally and spiritually “walk away.” It’s great for you that you’re out of the “technocratic prison”—except of course that you’re not: since this prison culture has enclosed the entire world, at this point you can’t walk away; you can only pretend to: when dioxin contaminates every mother’s breast milk, where would you go?—but the salmon need for dams to come down, and they need for oceans not to be murdered, and they need for industrial logging, fishing, and agriculture to be stopped, and they need for global warming to stop, which means they need for the oil economy to be stopped.

There are some who take it one step further than simply walking away. They begin to learn survival skills so they may personally live through civilization’s endgame. They learn how to make fires with flint and steel; how to catch, kill, and clean animals; how to identify local edible plants. They stock up on beans and rice, put caches of weapons and medicines in the forest so they can find them when trucks no longer bring food into cities. They’re attempting to be as ready as they can for this culture’s inevitable—and by now impending—crash.

None of these are bad things to do. As the economy—and then this entire civilization—crashes, I want these people on my side.

But preparing yourself and your family for the crash—a common phrase for this these days is “making a lifeboat”—is no more sufficient than walking away. Indeed, it’s merely a variant of the same thing. The people who do only this are doing nothing to halt this omnicidal culture.

They’re not helping the land. They’re not acting such that the world is a better place because they were born. Ultimately, if their concern is primarily for their own safety and the safety of their families (me and mine) with no significant and primary concern for the land that gives them life, they are still, for all the work they’ve done, stuck in the same narcissistic, anthropocentric mindset that holds our own survival separate from and superior to the survival of the land. Rich people hoard cash, gold, and weapons in their gated compounds, ready to fend off the rabble they know will try to take their riches during the breakdown of civil society; and anticiv survivalists hoard rice, beans, and weapons, then prepare to fend off the rabble they know will try to take their food—at least these riches are less abstract—during the collapse of civilization. Salmon, polar bears, and redwood trees ask, “What’s the fundamental difference?”

It’s not sufficient for us to break our identification with this culture, if we merely transfer our primary identification to ourselves: to do so is merely another variant of this culture’s narcissism. We must recognize that there exists something larger than ourselves, and it is not the culture. It is the land which gives all of us life. We must recognize that we have obligations—joyous obligations, terrifying obligations, deep and meaningful obligations—to this land. The real, physical, land. The real, physical, water. The real, physical air.

Survivalism isn’t enough. Nor is it enough to make a “lifeboat” that you hope will not sink through this culture’s chaotic collapse, a lifeboat designed to carry you and your family and your friends.

Far more important than our own personal survival is the survival of the land. Far more important than making a lifeboat for me and mine is doing something to protect the land where I live, to make it so that not merely I and mine will have a somewhat better chance of surviving, but doing something to make it so everyone—human and nonhuman alike—has a better chance of making it through that imperfect storm.

Someday you will die. It is possible to act such that you make the world a better place before you die.

This is the pledge I make to the land where I live, to life on earth, and to you: I will make the world glad I was born. I will make it so that my birth, my life, and my death make the world a better place than had I never existed.

Here is why I write: if my books help catalyze or cause people to better resist this culture, and if these people help stop this culture from killing the planet, the world will be a better place because I was born. If not, then I will have to do something else. Because I will live and die such that the world is a better place because I was born, because I lived, and because I died.

What pledge do you make? How will you make the world a better place because you lived, and because you died?