Rennie Court
London Se 2
Less and less matters. The history of each day is the history of human beings—the newspapers are telling us—the television says, too. This history is more than ever, mostly, to face the truth, about money. Goods and services. Profit is the only aim. But the history of the planet, of the circle of life, the swirls of interspersed turned, interdependent phases of chrysalis into butterfly, fetus to baby, to baboon and man, the clouds watering the trees that shelter the ground that cradles the streams, the chains, rhythms, flows, and whirls of smooth slippery life are everything of value, while mankind artificializes everything he sees and proclaims it alone, his doings, the only reality. Everything. Irony is too feeble a word to characterize this madness. Nothing. Everything else is everything. Man kind’s all is naught. This attack he will repulse with murder, so strong is the grip of greed and the lust for things manufactured, in his spirit and in his groins.
The meadow matters. The spotted owl and the doe and the lizards and the brook and the ancient redwood tree and the tortoise and the leopard and the babies and the dust of Ethiopia matter. We don’t know this. Even our sacrifices are hypocritical. We will defend the laying off of workers at the automobile factory in Detroit and the release of thousands, many just short of tenure that would guarantee a life’s pension, from work in the steel mills. We will allow—even excuse—corporate leaders who have profited mightily while petting huge companies—we will accept, and bid good lucks in your next phase to these giants profit-making leadership when they dissolve solid companies and leave town strewing in their wake thousands of loyal workers too old to start again or to learn a new trade or to be desirable to any other employer. We say that big business must be allowed to grow. But when we say we must put out of work people who have been engaged in destructive enterprises that pollute the planet and threaten all lives on it, the objectors from the giant corporations that support the raping of the planet cry in righteous indignation that it is too cruel to think of disenfranchising innocent people for a traditional, if wrong-headed activity. The forest cutters, the whale and dolphin killers, the chemical makers and toxic smoke producers will have to rearrange their lives. Pity to kick them out. Wait! It is not pitiful of the profiteers to let people go, but this move, a temporary, short-term loss for a long-term gain, we can reasonably assume, which will bring ultimate profits of immeasurable worth to all, this admission of wrong doings and willingness to swallow hard, pay the price and ultimately rejoice at a recaptured cleanliness and harmony; this rearrangement of activities for the good of all is not good business, is it? It is, in fact, are only business left. It is an uncompromising reality. But human beings are not inspired by goodness or rightness. Human beings are immediate materialists. Even our imaginations want satisfaction now. But even our imaginations have been dulled half to death. We seek pleasure that punishes, relaxations that aggravate, food that “tastes so good” but harms us so badly, things that burden us and ‘conveniences’ that irritate and make us ill. We do not know how to live. A vacation is a shopping trip or a cluttered trudge among steamy hoards and a nervous struggle to avoid being overcharged. It is likely to be too costly and so painful and debilitating that we return from such a holiday looking forward to being safe at home again in order to recover from all the grueling activity of our leisure. We don’t see and experience. We buy ugly souvenirs and snap dozens of very bad pictures. If you want to be entertained, you buy something. If you wish some recreation, you purchase it. You get another thing, you plan a trip, and save a bunch of money to make it. You drink more alcohol or soft sugar drinks or you go somewhere where the music is painfully loud and the smoke is thick and the place is crowded. Yes, you do that. You. Almost all of you. Us. If the school is failing to teach well, just spend more money and the teaching will improve. If you wish to run for office to try to help society as a city or state leader, you raise money to run. If you want to feel better about your limited capacity to buy things you don’t actually need, you spend beyond your means and feel worse, because the things don’t help and you’re worried about making the payments you’ve incurred. You don’t know how to live. We don’t.
We don’t start the eliminating of the eternal combustion engine, we build more roads. We call nuclear waste that has a deterioration life of 500 years a “low grade” substance. The experts, relatives of those irresponsible, ignoramuses who smiled and assured us that the nuclear tests in the South Pacific in the 50’s would cause no harm, these authorities say this nuclear waste now can be safely stored in concrete tombs in Washington state, in Colorado, and in New Mexico, and will not harm anyone. How can I, a mere inexpert citizen, how is that I can know that this is a lie? How is it that I, but not they, can see that nuclear waste cannot be stored safely, not here nor beyond the planet? How? They speak as priests of power, the government, clergy, and servants of commerce, businesses messenger boys. They are among the true sociopaths, unfeeling and insensitive to reason. Dulled and determined and deadly because of greed.
Once upon a time, we were swayed grateful whenever we saw pictures and accounts of the foul air and cluttered conditions of life in cities too poor to support large populations. We said we were sorry for those unfortunate people, but we appreciated all the more our own affluent world and ease of transportation and recreation and especially our modern sanitary conditions. Has no one at the top noticed? Virtually every large city in the world is a pitiful miasma strewn with unmanageable garbage dumps, with a acrid air, tainted water, and inefficient transport and unaffordable, unsuitable housing for thousands. The general welfare is not being promoted as the U.S. Constitution orders. Welfare, in fact, is a dirty word.
To the credit of the British, on one recent Sunday late morning and early afternoon, I saw a television in London, a program on the subject of herring and the way they “listen to the signals of the sea.” Another documentary film featured the story of the dangerous undercover work done by agents of the RSPCA and regulatory agencies to expose men engaged in cruel badger baiting practices. A third program is tracing the “pupae count” of moth eggs in Elcho’s Forest, including such details as male moth population in 1979-80 and the development of “mating disruption” plan to reduce the population of destructive moths. When I was a boy I had a recurring fantasy, to be a forest ranger, in a neat little cabin in the woods, with a lookout platform near the top of the tree. But I worried about being bored out there, so I never went so far as to work out the details of that existence. I know now that I couldn’t work it out because I had no pattern of living at that young age, or I didn’t feel I had. I hadn’t accumulated enough in forests, like soaking beans and improvising a dish by adding an Indian garlic pickle sauce to them and ladling them over brown rice made quickly—and neatly—in a microwave oven. I didn’t begin to write these essays, which relax me and helps me feel useful, until I was forty nine—last year. I hadn’t yet lost all faith and respect for human beings. Now, I’m a planetarian. I have faith in the cycles of harmonies, in the vibrancy and purity of nature, and I respect all other creatures.
The Spanish invaders were ‘horrified’ by the human sacrifices practiced by the Aztecs, so they tortured and murdered the Indians and burned their city. The Aztecs performed rituals of sacrifice and cannibalism to appease the gods, so the sun would return every day. They were preserving life itself. The Spaniards wanted gold and goods, so they sacrificed an entire nation to get them. Religions kill other religions and governments attack other governments. Forty-thousands die every day in THIRD WORLD countries around the world. We could stop the carnage due to neglect by contributing the cost of a fighter-bomber. We spend $4 million to try to rescue two whales and spread the news of the attempt.