Pockets of Wisdom and Memory
“It is a forest that forgives everything but forgets nothing.”
In 1955, ten years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. slid into war in Viet Nam. Perhaps it was inevitable: when the aftermath of violence remains unexamined, it has a half-life of its own that haunts us and pulls us close, even as we seek to outrun it. The tally of human casualties for Indochina and the U.S. varies widely: from one to three million in total. Even the minimum estimate of one million human deaths is a staggering number, though not precise, except to the victims and their families.
Equally shocking is the harm inflicted on Viet Nam’s forests, farms and water: during our tenure there, the U.S. defoliated more than five million acres of forest and cropland… more than 7,700 square meters of forest. Between 1965 and 1971 alone, we exploded 26 billion pounds (13 million tons) of munitions in Indochina… the energy of 450 Hiroshima nuclear bombs… an average of 142 pounds of explosive per acre of land… 584 pounds per person… 118 pounds per second. We left more than 26 million craters that cannot regrow trees nor be used for crops. From the air, the soil was so pulverized that it looked like gray porridge. We destroyed vast swaths of Viet Nam’s unique hardwood forests (containing 10% of the world’s species), and permanently altered the hydrology of the Mekong Delta. It was a war against the land as much as against armies. (Westing & Pfeiffer, Scientific American: The Cratering of Indochina, May 1972).
What is the illness of the soul that propels such behavior? If this destruction were the result of one troubled individual, we would be alarmed. Why are we not alarmed by our collective frenzy of aggression toward the Natural World? Why are we not alarmed at the stubborn amnesia that undergirds our way of life? What would it look like to stop, as a nation, and take these things in?
For most of human history, we have been at war somewhere, and sometimes nearly everywhere. The war in Ukraine is happening now, but there are other wars, including the ones we thought were over, whose effects continue to shape us. How could they not? Over the past hundred years, there has been a surfeit of brutality to marvel at: the Holocaust, Stalin’s Great Terror, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, apartheid, genocide, and the day to day violence of modernity. Ukraine is just a continuation. Environmental consequences are seldom considered.
A quick internet search reveals countless articles on epigenetic trauma among humans, particularly trauma related to the Holocaust, and the ways it is passed from one generation to the next. But what of the trauma of the Natural World, the restless dead of our beyond-human kin - those Selves that author and teacher Martin Prechtel calls Feeling Beings? They, too, hover nearby. Human and beyond-human trauma are neither separate nor separable.
As an academic field, ecological epigenetics is in its nascence: it’s the study of how epigenetic changes can alter behavior, adaptability and resilience in plants and animals without changing their underlying genetic makeup. Though we know the Natural World is wise, we do not yet understand how wisdom and resilience are passed down among Feeling Beings in the beyond-human world. We do not know how memory is stored and communicated. We do not understand and have not considered the epigenetic memory of ecological systems and biomes.
Ecological pressures create risks: changes in diet, maternal behavior, salinity, drought, disease, exposure to chemicals, trophic cascades and outright destruction of habitat mean that Nature is constantly having to respond to life-threatening stressors created by humans. Changes in plant structure, fertility, niche breadth and behavior can spell trouble, or they can improve resilience and adaptability. (Kilvitis, Foust, Alvarez & Schrey, Ecological Epigenetics, available at ResearhGate.net)
Some adaptations happen with surprising rapidity, such as the tuskless elephants now appearing in parts of Africa where elephants have been been slaughtered for ivory. In forests, though we know something of how trees pass vital information to each other, we do not understand how forest communities use stored memory to recover from prolonged assaults nor do we comprehend the complexity of forest wisdom. We know that trees are good mothers; that they are communal beings who recognize other trees that are kin; that nurture the young ones by sharing food and water, and warning of danger. We know that, in a forest, there are no rugged individuals: all are nourished by shared roots and an infinite network of mutuality above and below the surface. Virtually all Beings and biomes share this mysterious complexity. Yet we are slow to recognize their sentience and even slower to accept that Feeling Beings and biomes have agency. Data is useful, and scientific studies are long overdue. But scientific inquiry is limited by its linearity, and dependent on the ‘objective’ language of data and controlled, replicable experiments that may not have the complexity of natural systems in the wild. Yet, our bodies speak the language of limbic resonance: the direct, felt connection with each other and beyond-human kin. Life is an invitation - and, for survival, an imperative, to cultivate intimate connection with fellow earthlings of all stripes.
Our large-scale assault on the Natural World is painful to reckon with, especially for those of us responsible, directly or by proxy, for egregious harm. Our twenty years in Viet Nam is a compelling place to begin unwinding the spiral of our violence against the Natural World and the descent into madness it has required.
Violence is at the root of western industrial culture. Europe and the U.S. were founded on genocide and slavery. We are the only country to have dropped a nuclear bomb. Our culture, our political system and our economy are adversarial by design. In this global evolutionary moment, we have the opportunity - and now, the urgent obligation, to cultivate a different sort of leadership, one that is much more daunting: to show by example why and how it’s time to look in the mirror.
It is tempting to imagine a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Crimes Against Earth. Even more tempting to gather data and write reports. But there is a step we must not skip before we can craft an intelligent response: it is the discomfort of admitting what we have done, of knowing what we know, and what we do not know as we grasp the scale of our brutality. Recoiling. Being knocked down. Feeling overwhelmed. Not knowing is required in order to stay with the awful truth and to access the chasm of grief underneath. Proper grieving is required for humble receptivity. Humility is required for change to occur.
Without truth and grief, we are doomed. This is the precipice to which Fate has delivered us. Will we accept the challenge? It seems a bleak prescription. And yet… the gift of not knowing is that, if we truly don’t know what to think, feel or do, we are free to see without illusion. Free of expectations. Free of answers. Free of solutions. Free to receive the wisdom of the countless Feeling Beings who will also be freed from our tyranny as a result of our naked courage. This is the moment when anything is possible, including a new culture, so desperately needed, in which humility and respect bind us to all our living kin. In that moment, the distance from doom to possibility may not be as far as we fear. All we need is all of us, or maybe just enough of us, willing to go there, together.
