Gathering The Strands
“Loss-in-connection, connection-in-loss, is the emotional tone of wisdom.”
One recent early morning (after Ukraine, before the recent shootings), I sat at my desk, suspended in a haze of concern for the world. No words came, neither solace nor outrage, just a pervading sadness, sticky and inert. I glanced up from my desk to see a female goldfinch clinging to the edge of a rain gutter, gleaning strands of empty spider webs from the gap between the roof and the eaves. Goldfinches use spiderweb filaments as glue to hold their nests together, so tightly woven they can hold water. Watching the goldfinch brought unexpected comfort; it was a reminder of the surprising strength of a few delicate strands from a disused web - rolled into a ball the size of a lentil, carried in a mother’s tiny beak.
I think a lot about the lingering legacy of destruction and the in-built violence that pervades our culture. In all we do, we behave as if war were the only choice. We’ve been at war with the Natural World and each other for so many centuries, we’ve forgotten how to stop and consider another way. Then again, if we pull that thread, it all unravels because we are forced to face the savagery of our entire way of life. If we question war, we question everything.
Let’s question renewable energy. Solar panels require silicon extracted from strip-mines (40 billion tons of it annually, as of 2021), transported via massive earth movers powered by diesel fuel, then ‘purified by crushing, milling, washing, and screening’ before being heated (by fossil fuels) to 4000°F. After that, coal or coke is added and the silicon is refined again, in a graphite-insulated steel furnace (more mining) heated to 2500°F. Then comes hydrochloric acid and copper, and after that boron or phosphorous (copper, boron and phosphorous are also mined), resulting in ‘purified’ silicon, representing just 20% of the original silicon that was refined the first time – the rest is waste. The manufacture of the panels generates a host of toxic chemicals, many of which are released into the air, soil and groundwater. These include hydrogen fluoride, hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, lead, trichloride, titanium dioxide, ethyl vinyl acetate, and more. The manufacture of solar panels also generates massive amounts of greenhouse gasses. One of these, hexafluoroethane ‘is 12,000 times more potent than CO2, is 100 percent manufactured by humans and survives 10,000 years once released into the atmosphere.’ Spent solar panels cannot be recycled.
Wind turbines are worse: they require steel-reinforced concrete to anchor the towers; blades made of wood and fiberglass; massive amounts of copper and rare earth minerals; fossil fuels for solvents and lubricants and huge amounts of land (or ocean) co-opted for wind farms. The latest suggestion from scientists for combating future shortages of rare earth minerals is to mine the ocean floor, which would result in massive dust plumes that would smother whatever sea life is left. The current projected goal of generating 19,000 gigawatt hours of global wind-power capacity translates into bird kills of more than 100 million birds per year - more than 3 per second, and 250 million bat kills - more than 680,000 per day, 28,000 per hour, 400 per minute, 7 per second. Batteries for electric cars and battery storage for solar energy? Recycling? Equally hopeless and destructive. How convenient it would be to find a way to keep destroying the planet while telling ourselves that we’re saving it. (Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, & Max Wilbert. Please read this book.)
All the things we depend on for survival are untenably violent, from fossil fuels to factory farms; microplastic to marketing; weapons to wind turbines. The violence is often indirect, carried out by proxy, through the actions of corporations and the State. Because we refuse to address the underlying violence of who we are and how we live, we must find ways to dissociate in order to function. Meanwhile, the climate continues to unravel and so do we.
In the spaces between what we know and what we cannot bear, a kind of moral scar tissue forms. Like bodily scars, the psychic version grows thick and unfeeling. It shields us from the overwhelming questions of what we have done, what we continue to do, and who we have become as a result. We can neither imagine how the damage can continue, nor how to make it stop.
The agile goldfinch invites a change in perspective. It shows us the power of the small and the surprising reach and longevity of fragments of intactness. Instead of rushing toward grandiose solutions which require us to change nothing, we might consider allowing ourselves to dangle in a cocoon of questions. Marinate in the discomfort. Surrender to the not knowing so we can begin to grieve and allow the Natural World to teach us. Since we truly don’t know what to do, anything is possible. For now, we can let that be enough. In a world gone mad with loss and accumulation, enough is a blessing. Enough is enough.
