It is, predictably, 17:32 on the 31st of August, i.e., there are six and a half hours remaining in which to write the monthly blog I set out to write and which I have neglected for the past two months.
Beside me on the bed, cradled in his mother’s arms and sleeping soundly, is the cause for the neglect as well as the inspiration to write further.
Three months ago I described a flood. If we humans are not merely the cause of the flood but the water itself, I asked, how might we direct our energy—our love, to which can be traced our abundance—to include all life on earth? And implicit in this question: might we in so doing construct the lifeboat of our own salvation?
In other words: the human species, through our prolific love, through, one might say, our parousing, has brought itself in a short ten thousand years (the time since the dawn of what Daniel Quinn would call totalitarian agriculture) to the distinct possibility within the next 100 years of an ecological collapse not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs. The extent to which this occurs, and the degree to which humans survive it, will depend in large part to the degree in which we can broaden our perspective. The degree to which we can recognize that our own well-being is inextricably linked with that of other species one earth.
In the last couple of months I’ve given myself the luxury of some non-medical reading. Three seemingly disparate stories stand out in particular as relevant to the above question.
The second story distracted me from the first: while visiting my dad in Oregon, I commandeered LL’s book-club selection, Ender’s Game, and didn’t really put it down until I’d finished. In crisp prose Orson Scott Card tells the story of a civilization so bent on total annihilation of an alien species that it is willing to risk its own end in one final war. What struck me about the novel was not as much the terrible outcome as the degree to which the soldiers—who are children—are inculcated from day one with the sense that they are utterly alone. That, ultimately, they must destroy or be destroyed.
The third story I’m in the middle of reading. It is the tale, in two books which LL’s dad has compelled me to read, of the “death of the Snake and Columbia rivers”. Apart from his urging I might have read these on my own. I used to guide on the Snake River where it still flows wild through Hell’s Canyon. For a while I’ve been aware of the direct link between declining orca populations in the Puget Sound and the dam system on the Snake-Columbia watershed that has reduced salmon populations to 1% of their pre-dam numbers. The blatant disregard for salmon and the Native Americans who depended on them was sad but not surprising. What did shock me was the degree of collusion between government and corporations. We taxpayers pay $870 million a year for dam upkeep and such “unforeseen” but totally predictable costs as dredging, to keep shipping channels open as silt piles up in dam-induced slackwater—while rivers die and the electric prosperity that was supposed to go to all citizens is awarded, by means of preferentially discounted rates, to giant corporations.
The first story I come to last because it was the most immediately relevant: an article in the Atlantic, by Anne-Marie Slaughter (former Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department) titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Slaughter highlights the very real differences that still exist between men and women in social and economic worlds. Without in any way trying to downplay these important differences, I thought in many respects her title could have had “Families” in place of “Women”. The article discussed how the higher one went in a career the more difficult it was to maintain a healthy balance with a family life.
Put another way, as it was in a parenting book that asked me to ask myself why my child isn’t sleeping: “Look at your own life first. Are you too busy?”
The common thread in these three readings was for me the unquestioned first priority to self, progress, career. What is lost—somewhat ironically, because it is the fire driving population growth and thus ultimately all economic development—is time for love and family.
In a science-fiction novel a little boy is the pawn for destroying another world, only after which is he allowed to try and understand it. In the very real and ongoing history of the American West, in author Steven Hawley’s words, “dams are performing their usual dirty work: transferring wealth for the profit of far-off interests,” and wiping out entire ecosystems in the process. In a lament for the impossible double task of raising a family while functioning in a patriarchal career, a State Department official comes to understand that the forward progress of nations somehow does not include the health of the families that comprise them.
Were I to end this here, “this” being this particular entry as well as the larger effort of continuing to reflect and write, I would be doing a dis-service to the authors I reference above. For each in their own way puts forth ideas, solutions, seeds of dissent from the status quo. But in the interest of preventing this from becoming an even longer ramble, allow me to grossly over-condense the advise I took away from my reading into a single word which I have failed to apply to this very writing: simplify.
The tired phrase that one “must love oneself in order to love others” rings true. If we hope to expand our flood of love to include not just our immediate selves but our larger human community and the ecosystems we are part of, we must first simplify to the family level and take the time to nurture our children.
Thank goodness that this job is made easier by the fact that LL and I have, as do all new parents, the most beautiful baby in the world.
*see May’s entry, Flood
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