Shucking Oysters: Still Life With Restless Thoughts
By Alex Allen
It’s been barely over a year in Lord Rump’s second term; and with all due respect, we’re fucked. This ugly psychopathic maniac has got a grudge against the world and nothing will stop him from his deranged cruelty – not even Melania. What am I scared of? I don’t know and that’s the point. The unknown, because as we have all seen, especially in the last year, there have been some pretty nasty curve balls tossed our way.
Experts are always reminding us that perspective is everything. Take what you are afraid of and break it apart. Look at it from a new angle, and it loses it power over you. Call I be cynical? Really? Mark Twain said it best, that we don’t know “whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
There are so many disparities. The world is all about us and them. The wild and the tamed. E car drivers and gas car drivers. Homeowners and the homeless. Half full and half empty (the correct answer is 8 ounces in a 16 ounce glass). We all know who the wealthiest are and it does not bode well.
The tech companies are destroying something precious which is the possibility of contemplation. They have created a world where we are constantly watched and always distracted. Their most precious asset is our most precious asset, our attention and they have kidnapped it. Franklin Foer wrote that the lineage of tech companies, like Facebook and Google goes back to communes. In his words, “that experiment ended in shambles – the communities dissolved into cults of personality, small villages riven by rivalries.” All the hippy visions of democracy and oneness culminated in authoritarianism and crushing disappointment.
We homo sapiens have lost our way. The obscene wealth of some individuals is not just inhumane, it is inhuman. As someone said, a watch tells the time; a $200,000 Rolex tells people you’ve got issues. As most of us know, many traits characteristic of psychopaths are celebrated in business: ruthlessness, a convenient absence of social conscience, and a single-minded focus on success. It’s not that people without a soul become rich, it’s that being rich tends to corrode whatever soul you have got left.
And speaking of us and them. We seem to be still trapped in this distorted view of human nature and the natural world, two faces of an enemy to be feared and conquered, rather than an ally to be honoured and nourished. This is the deepest species-level psychopathology imaginable. How did we go from flowing with the natural world to living in a zoo of our own making?
We contaminate streams, rivers, lakes, aquifers with industrial waste, pesticide runoff, and fracking chemicals, and then we are sold “pure spring water” (often just tap water) in plastic bottles that breakdown into microplastics that find their way to oceans, whales’ stomachs, and our own bloodstreams.
Paul Huebener bluntly wrote in Nature’s Broken Clocks, “from the sudden acceleration of the warming of the seas, to shocking storms and unprecedented fires, to the distress cries of birds that no longer know when to migrate, the environment can no longer be seen as a stable backdrop to human affairs.”And ironically, the few events that still seem to happen with predictable regularity is that every few years a group of scientists warns that we have only a few years left to take action.
Many say that we are living in the anthropocene era; that human nature is the cause of climate crisis. Far from it. We are living in the “capitalocene.” The real issue is the “voracious ecological appetite and wilful irresponsibility of capitalism.” Capitalism not only alienates and commodifies nature into products and transforms humans into consumers, it also alienates and commodifies us. The economy does not create value for the real world: it destroys the real world. Is industrial civilization the thing that has to be saved? Or is it the destruction that has to be stopped? Think long and hard.
And green technology. As Derrick Jensen wrote, a perverse shade of green. Electric cars (along with solar panels and windmills) also contain electronics, circuit boards, and other computer components. Only one company in the world recycles lithium ion-batteries. Why? Because the process makes no economic sense. It’s complex, hazardous and expensive. Substituting a “greener” alternative isn’t always the solution. For example, almost all recycled paper is made using non-recycled pulp, often from heavily logged and degraded forests.
Our so called “forest management” has destroyed 98% of this continent’s old growth forest. Scientific forest management has been and continues to be about maximizing profit and killing forests. We are not born indifferent to our surroundings. If we were more widely taught that forests create rain, drive winds, manage water, seed the oceans, provide the foundations of much modern medicine, cleanse the air of man made pollution and disinfect the atmosphere, it would be much harder to cut them down.
We need to learn how to think like a forest. The elders have long shared this knowledge. Can we not just let the forest manage itself; let the animals manage themselves? In the meantime, the bliss of listening to the sound of the winds rustling the trees. This enigmatic sound – psithurism represents one of the many mystifying sounds of nature. Jasmine Dawda noted with unbridled lust: “If the human mind was to take a leisurely stroll among trees, it would metamorphose into being a towering, resilient force like the noble giants and their fronds, fluttering under the wild sky as the stars regale their ancient tales of flowers spouting towards the light and the rivers rippling at night, with the mysteries of the universe hidden in the sounds!” Did you get goosebumps?
And finally, I leave you with the words of Rainer Maria Rilke: “If we surrendered to the earth’s intelligence, we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
