The Children are Clued In
In an introduction to his poem “Technology”, my son, during his eighth-grade graduation speech, wondered aloud if our technical advances were the hallmark of a New Age, or in fact its death-knell. His words rang with youthful and categorical vigor which is harder to come by in middle age, and so strident that they are easy to dismiss… until one picks up the newspaper.
This morning, for example, the New York Times published one of those articles which have recently come back into vogue: real data concerning the state of the planet. Apparently considered to be adverse to sales, and certainly politically unpopular during the current administration’s puerile governance, stories which whispered wisdom and spoke of the road not taken were rare, and support for anything but the paradigm of War seemed beyond our national conscience.
Now these stories come thick and fast, fueled by hope, perhaps, where wells run dry. Today’s taste of Armageddon is the disappearance, over the last three or four decades, of vast numbers of common wild birds. The field sparrow, the bobwhite, the eastern meadowlark, the common grackle, 20 species of birds whose populations, on average, have declined 68%.
Instead of a hunt to the death of the passenger pigeon, we hunt species of the natural world with inattention and overindulgence, our technological society fueling a haste and self-absorption in which millions of birds are so much road-kill.
And in the uncomfortable reality of mortgages and maintenance, two-car families and streaming media – which dims the stars and the sounds of nature as effectively as Manhattan’s lights which never sleep – our uncomfortable comforts freeze us in place, and make divestiture of such belongings seem a Herculean task. Or perhaps the better analogy would be Sisyphus’ stone, the weight of our own human population, and the hill which would not go away.
I write this note on a laptop computer which sooner than later will be dumped into a landfill – pretty word for a seething pit of refuse in the backwoods of the State of Maine, whose contents were originally dropped without thinking into a bin, shifted into a can, collected in trucks, transferred to semi-trailers, and in a confluence of many small tributaries of trash, heaved into an earth where there are too few humans to complain.
My laptop computer, I hope, was a good purchase, which will not be added to the river anytime soon. Still, an adequate accounting of my being on the earth must include some depreciation of long-term items: how many bits of all this stuff I own could be considered junk per year, an hour-glass of waste whose grains slowly make their way north, and in whose wake the bobwhite and the field sparrow and the eastern meadowlark lose their habitat and their clean environment and their lives.
Oh, it’s not that bad. You’re being as dramatic as your teenage son.
Actually, it is that bad, but it is gradual, so we push it aside to deal with more pressing issues, many of which we have created ourselves - wars fought to protect resources we should not need… There are solutions, of course, most of which require some moral fiber, some moral muscle returned to a flabby, over-fed population. Yes, we are: if you travel at all it is one of the first pictures you will take, and likely the first you will discard.
While I write dramatically on my laptop during the day, at night I work with a group of people who hope to create an Ecovillage, a sustainable model of living that relies on tighter technologies and the strength of community to change the way we live on the world. By working together in community, values of frugality and reuse which are as ancient as human community itself are more easily embraced, and the habits of living which give only marginal and ephemeral pleasure can be left behind. By working together, Middle Americans such as ourselves may find the capital and energy needed to make an intention into a reality of net-zero-energy houses and limited refuse.
It all begins with a strident voice, like a stone thrown into a placid lake, and the resulting waves to wash the shore.
