Deciphering the Hieroglyphs
“Objects are hieroglyphs in whose dark prism social relations lay congealed and in fragments… a thing is never just an object, but a fossil in which a constellation of forces are petrified. Things are never just inert objects, passive items, or lifeless shucks, but consist of tensions, forces, hidden powers, all being constantly exchanged.”
In ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs represented the sacred words of the gods. If it’s true that objects are modern hieroglyphs, our garbage tells us a lot about what we hold sacred. The evidence is enshrined in the toxic residue of everyday items we can neither fully reuse nor destroy, including the fragments of plastic now lodged in every body, including bodies of water, and the forever chemicals found in every umbilical cord of babies being born today. Because the Natural World is a world of relationships, acts of heedlessness persist, no matter how small. Articles of disrespect remain indigestible.
The solutions are problematic as well, especially recycling, which has fallen to abysmal new lows, and isn’t ecologically defensible anyway. To recycle plastic, it must be sorted, shredded, purified, melted and extruded into pellets which are then re-manufactured into new products. Some plastics are depolymerized with heat and solvents. Other plastic is heated and compressed in oversized tumblers. All are processes that require epic amounts of fossil fuels and toxic chemicals. The same is true for glass that must be sorted, washed, crushed, melted and molded into something new. Even paper must be soaked in chemicals to strip away ink, glue, staples and plastic; mixed with water; mixed with new pulp; and spread onto rollers to be heated and dried, before being shipped back to factories.
At first, recycling seemed like a panacea. We thought we could keep buying and tossing, if only we could build more facilities and convince more people to use those blue and green containers. Besides being energy-intensive and toxic, recycling hasn’t reduced the obscene quantity of new products, hasn’t curbed our use of fossil fuels, hasn’t prevented litter and pollution. Barges of unprocessed refuse float between continents, looking for a taker. The poor, and poor animals sift through garbage dumps as the Pacific and Atlantic gyres continue to expand. Marketing and bins don’t work because they aren’t the locus of the problem.
Something is off here, and it isn’t just our indifference, or even the false promise of recycling. It’s the pain of our ambivalence, enshrined in objects we can never be rid of. Fragmentation is a hieroglyph that illuminates the gap in our hearts between what we want to believe and what we deeply know. And, in that gap, is something precious - the ache of dissonance required to live as if we can simultaneously repair and destroy. It’s enough to exhaust the best of us: we’re trapped between the momentum of consumer culture and the experience of watching the planet die at our hands. Perhaps that fundamental ambivalence is the societal equivalent of the ‘still, small voice’ of conscience we try so hard to ignore.
What are the social relations petrified in our garbage? What are the tensions, forces and hidden powers? Some answers are easy to see: consumer culture, relentless commodification and marketing are a cluster of hidden powers. Our industrial, growth economy is the not-so-hidden force behind that. It translates into a cascade of social relations encoded in systems and laws that protect corporate greed, and politicians looking for votes. Those are the levers. We are the cogs.
Even the breathtaking vision of Yvon Chouinard - founder of Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company, misses the mark: all future profits - billions each year, will be spent to combat climate change. It sounds wonderful, but as a recent editorial in Al Jazeera pointed out, this grandiose generosity will cost the planet dearly by driving up sales. Giving back is fine. Not taking so much from the planet and its people in the first place is what would really help.
COP 21 has the same failing. It’s words on paper, decided in a roomful of jugglers and thieves. It does not contain commitments to Earth, earned through careful listening. It does not contain vows spoken to the wind, or the ocean or the trees or the future or each other. Only people with schooling, computers, papers and pens, can create such documents. Only they can sign them. Only governments can enforce them. Alas, climate collapse is no match for profit.
We can’t explain how it is that COP 21 translates to action, because it doesn’t. The changes required are deeper than treaties and headlines - as deep as the particles embedded in fetal tissue and lodged in undersea trenches.
William Shatner put it succinctly: after decades playing Captain Kirk on Star Trek, and now in his 90’s, last year he rode in a space capsule (courtesy of Jeff Bezos). I was crying, he said. I didn't know what I was crying about. I had to go off some place and sit down and think, what's the matter with me? And I realized I was in grief. It was the strongest feeling of grief he had ever experienced. I saw more clearly than I have, with all the studying and reading I've done, the writhing, slow death of Earth and we on it. It's a little tiny rock with an onion skin air around it. That's how fragile it all is. It's so fragile. We hang by a thread ... we're just dangling. There’s a name for what Shatner experienced. It’s known as the Overview Effect - the sight of Earth from space, recognized as home.
In our Humpty Dumpty world, the pieces seem separate, though of course they’re not. We’ve known since it first appeared that the image of Earth from space was a hieroglyph. For a time it represented the overwhelming unity we experienced in response to the Overview Effect. But in the years since those first images appeared - those hieroglyphs of mutuality and belonging, we have failed to create an alphabet of caring. The unity we perceive is real, but the experience of unity brings grief because the two are intertwined. The way to untangle them so that unity guides us is to allow ourselves to fully experience both. Embracing grief strengthens unity. Unity is medicine for grief.
