It’s Down to You and Me and Everyone We Know
What would you do to save life on earth? Are you more angel, or more demon? Are you more selfish, or more altruistic? Do you know your own character, abilities, and possibilities well enough to craft a personal solution to a species-wide problem to which each and every human is called to respond?
To paraphrase Wendell Berry, if you aren’t losing sleep over questions like this, you have no idea what’s going on inside or outside your body, and no one can do anything about that but you. If you have thought rationally about your place in the body of life, welcome to the process of maturation particular to this instance of epochal change. Life is calling out for your unique contribution to its continuation, and you are on the way to your destiny as a lover of life on earth.
Our modern complex systems—especially living ones like the body of life—baffle us, all the more so when we overlay them with artificial systems that try to bully life rather than cooperate with it—or, better yet, cherish, celebrate, and create along with the One Life that gives us life. Can we do the latter? The answer is yes—because the alternative is dead oblivion and the taking of the lives of many species other than our own: bees, salamanders, salmon, pets, livestock, birds, and all the rest that we love. Not to mention the unborn descendants whom we will betray in the worst possible way, along with the gods we have created to explain and better ourselves in our bid for the heavenly life we would be throwing away. No passing the buck; it stops with you—and me, and everyone we can imagine knowing, past, present, and future.
Failure is, as usual, easy for loggers and lost souls who blame a dog-eat-dog world for the miseries caused by our own bad habits and willful ignorance. In Owls of the Eastern Ice, Jonathan Slaght describes people who drink themselves to oblivion, eyes closed to the remnant of miraculous wildlife that calls them to become their best selves. In Happy People of the Taiga, the documentary film by Werner Herzog, we see many who savor the savage gorgeousness of evolved habitats while cultivating their souls in the still-cold north.
It will be easier for you to eschew failure when you remain aware of how easy it is to mess up and to view all other human struggles and failures with condescension or contempt. Doing so eventually invites the cynicism that prohibits change. A good rule of thumb is to forego the conceit that comes of judging a person, place, or time that lies beyond your life experience. With hindsight, each and any era examined in all its complexity can appear as a horror show or a progressive enlightenment; each is, perhaps, both. Take the past century, with its flagrant genocides and cold and hot wars, as a cautionary tale, along with the ills of earlier centuries of the modern era with their slavery, colonialism, and the Inquisition.
The horror show of the now is vitacide, which threatens the whole of life on earth in the way of the asteroid that dashed all species of dinosaurs but the birds to dust. If we mend our ways, our descendants may forego viewing us with disgust for leaving life in tatters. If we and our descendants save our world from ourselves, their forgiveness will be the measure of our progress—and theirs.
Do we deserve to survive? We have it in us—and, we have no choice. In this we have rendered ourselves helpless. We must tend lions and lambs—and lupine sapiens—like ourselves. As the Bard, the voice of the modern era, put it, “treat each man after his just deserts and who shalt ‘scape whipping?”
Who shall survive? A species that acts on an incontrovertible desire to survive by thriving—to take the needs of the body of life as a sacred trust that requires no intermediary but life itself. Does that include you? If so, you are one proof that sapiens may redeem the perennial sin of vitacide and earn survival. Are you acting wisely to realize your sacred trust, and to create a living future? If so, you have every reason to think that we can create a living future.