Why is it so hard to accept that we are part of a whole?
Why do we suppose that there is no consciousness but ours? Or will? Or mind?
Why can’t we accept limits and death?
Why do we impose human qualities on everything? If there are gods and spirits, why should they resemble humanity in any way? Further, why would they care much for humanity?
Why don’t we care?
As the pace of biophysical collapse speeds up and the effects spread a blanket of misery over the planet, I’ve been wrestling with whys such as these. This summer has been crushing. A majority of people and places on Earth have been affected by the multi-crisis, and yet still — still! — there is no change in our behavior, nor even a slight bend in the trajectory of our behaviors. There is no reason to suppose that we will be doing anything different in five, ten, twenty years — except that we will run out of resources to waste and the planet’s responses to absorbing our wasteful culture will upend everything. The planet is taking mitigation and remediation out of our hands because, obviously, we are incapable of changing ourselves, nor even cleaning up much of the mess we’ve made. So it will end, but not because we ended it gracefully or in an organized fashion. It will end, it is ending now, in chaos — and it is ending painfully.
We could have avoided this. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that it was possible to avoid this. It may still be possible to avoid worse effects of collapse. There is no reason we can’t pull back from the things we know are causing greater and greater degrees of harm. No reason except ourselves. So maybe we never could have avoided this and Tom Murphy is right — given humans, this disaster was and remains inevitable. Murphy calls this path modernity. We might just name it for what it is in practice: self-absorption.
But — good god! — is the self so stupid that it’s incapable of self-preservation? I honestly don’t know how people are looking around at the world, or even their small part of it, and not fearing for their lives. Shouldn’t just a handful of this summer’s disasters have scared at least some people into change, just to save their own skin? It is incredible that we’re still plowing along making more mess and complaining about the inevitable effects — like we didn’t cause them! It is astounding that those who have felt those effects are not all crying out for change. It is depressing that nothing will change and this “but why?!?” will be the refrain for the rest of my life.
My hope has always been in the small. It would be nice if we could curtail ourselves and become small with intention, thereby saving a great deal of painful contraction. But that’s not how it’s going to go, is it. After this summer, I’m thinking the path to small will be laid out by nature. It will be muddy. It will be gross. It will burn and thirst and hunger. It will be sickening and exhausting. And there will be no sense of stability or control. The path to small will be a winnowing down until only the margins remain — and they will be bent and broken and will have come through the decades and centuries of disaster with gritted teeth. These marginal people are our inheritance and our descendants — and they will not love us. But I am fairly certain there will still be humans to curse our memory. There will be human survivors of us.
Along the path to that future, perhaps humanity will learn to curb its appetites. Perhaps nature will “select” that self-centered trait right out of us. Those who come through will only do so by becoming more than human and less than modern humans, small and benign enough to fit in our places but once again an essential part of the whole of being. I would love to meet any average human from that time. After begging forgiveness, I think we would have a great deal to talk about.
But perhaps there are a few already here on earth who are intentionally stepping away from ourselves and back into the world. I might count myself on that path. I think many of those who are reading this essay are on parallel journeys. For you I’d like to share a few books that I’ve read recently that have made me feel less alone, that have reminded me that I’m not alone, not even among humans, certainly not in the part of the world that holds me. These are the sorts of stories that make me think — “If only everybody could read this, then…”
Sadly, I still don’t think there would be much change…
But here are the books…
Being Pagan by Rhyd Wildermuth is not a story of faith and rule. It is a definition of a verb. I might call it pagan-ing. Or maybe earth-ing. It is a narrative of finding place and emplacement. Wildermuth playfully and carefully reveals relationship between these human bodies and their world. And it begins as simply as walking out under the night sky and looking at the moon.
Merlin Sheldrake shows just how deeply embedded our bodies are in this world. Entangled Life is a narrative of fungi, but Sheldrake is really telling the story of life on Earth through the lens of the apex Earth-beings — who are not us. This is a lesson in both humility and love. We are not as dominant and clever as we believe, but we are also more loved than we know. We are gently enfolded into a web of being from before birth to after death. We are eternal when we are bound up in these material bodies of rot and decay and regeneration. Understanding fungi means understanding our bodies, understanding life.
And finally, David Abram delivers a sensually delicious definition of being human in Becoming Animal. As he so adroitly shows, our animal bodies are constantly reaching out and responding to the world around us. But sadly, we are only rarely cognizant of our interrelationships; our words and selves stand in the way of understanding. Abram shows that we can reach around our words into our sensual bodies to mature into embodied beings of Earth — animals — that we are capable of this re-membering of our-selves and that we are most happy when we get there. We want this. We want to belong. We want to be animal. This is perhaps the most hopeful message I know. Because maybe this desire to be embodied in place and time will — finally! — deliver us from our selves…
©Elizabeth Anker 2023
By My Solitary Hearth 
Living in a topsy-turvy country such as I do, it almost seems pointless to hope for a better future and yet … if there is no hope there would be no point in going about our daily business of life. We try to be kind to the small part of the planet we inhabit, as do many people I know, and I try not to be swallowed whole by the political upheavals and environmental hurt around me – whilst remaining on the alert. Always on the alert.
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