Crossroads
“It is at the crossroads of contradictions that strategies for change may best be found.”
Picture two roads, both well-traveled. One takes us to empire, the other to all life thriving. Contradiction is where they meet - the place where intention and reality diverge: principles and actions; policy and practice; truth and advertising.
The contradiction within the contradiction is that most of us also benefit from the compromises that our systemic contradictions force us to accept. It is an untenable dichotomy that asks us to tell the truth about who has been hurt and what has been sacrificed, including the damage we have done to our sense of ourselves. Repair requires a reckoning.
Contradiction relies on seduction. Consumer culture convinces us that we must have that mango in winter, though it travels way too far in order to reach us. A gizmo manufactured elsewhere will save us time or money. That foreign-made car has already arrived, too late to worry about container ships, whale strikes and ocean noise. The system entices us with a wonderland of choices, a false freedom that dazzles us as the reward for looking away. Indifference builds up like scar tissue, thick and numb.
A few weeks ago, a baby sparrow flew into the grill of my car. In the rearview mirror, I saw it drop to the pavement. There was no place to turn around or pull off the road and a truck was following close behind. I drove on. This morning on the way into town, I saw six more dead birds on the road. That makes seven - a lucky number for humans, perhaps, but not so much for birds.
In the afternoon, I arrived home to find an old friend who had stopped by to ask for help prying open the door of his car. He had just hit a deer on the highway. His third. I could see in his face the struggle to put distance between his life and theirs. This sort of distance has become a commodity - a luxury for which we pay deerly. It's the distance we seek from the lie of renewables; the distance of our armchairs from politics and war, including war on the Natural World; distance from the false promise of consumption and the plague of plastic we generate. Though its scale is overwhelming, the Pacific Gyre garbage patch is far from view. How could one less mango or gizmo or car make an appreciable difference?
Beyond what goes in our houses is the where and how of how we place and build them. A friend in Encinitas speaks of the 4-acre lot in front of their house. Coyotes take refuge there: it's the last scrap of open space surrounded by human habitation. Because the lot is empty, my friend and their neighbors can glimpse the ocean and feel its cool breezes. But the city has no ordinances that protect breezes or views, much less coyotes: construction will soon begin on ten two-story houses that will fill those four acres and the sky above. Surely the builder has their rationale - if we don't build it, someone else will. Compromise wins, sliver by unrelenting sliver.
Us and Them thinking is the fulcrum of consumer culture. Yet, though we feel trapped by the either-or dilemmas of the system we live in, there is actually an immense and spacious terrain to be found there. The tighter the constriction, the more room there is for change: it's an expanding space that grows in inverse proportion to the squeeze. No sweeping solutions are required, just a shift in perception that flips GDP from Gross Domestic Product (gross, indeed) to something else, say, Gestures of Devotion and Purpose. A different Mind creates a different Culture - Thinking Like a Mountain, and what dance friends teach as See, Hear, Love like a Tree. Each decision we make that nourishes integrity realigns us with what matters most.
Forests have much to teach us about both harm and resilience. In an intact forest, as trees are felled to create clearings for crops, each treeless patch increases the area where forest and clearing meet. These bare patches in newly-cleared forest are the places where humans and wildlife interact. This is why the proliferation of scattered clearings made it possible for Ebola pathogens to cross from wild animals to humans in Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo during the epidemic of 2013. Gloves-off vitriol and violence is created in the same incremental progression as bare ground in forests. Pathogens of disregard accumulate to create an epidemic.
Slash and burn agriculture is practiced by more than 500 million people worldwide, primarily among Indigenous communities. Many of those communities are now under pressure from governments and NGO's to curtail that form of cultivation, including pressure to use fertilizers and other chemical inputs that further deplete damaged soil - chemicals that are produced and sold by industrialized nations to poor ones.
While it's true that slash and burn farming exacerbates deforestation and the risk of pathogen spillover, the damage caused by industrial clear-cutting and commercial timber farming is also cumulative, on a much larger scale. The deliberate disconnection between them tilts the focus toward the risks posed by small-scale subsistence farmers and away from global deforestation caused by colonial and now industrial destruction. It's a sophisticated form of victim-blaming as well as a glaring contradiction: philanthropists, governments and NGO's that make a lot of noise about programs to eradicate poverty are silent about the fact that their wealth is generated by resource extraction dependent on exploitation.
Like the subsistence hunters deemed to be poachers by English colonists who had confiscated the tribal lands that sustained local communities, Indigenous farmers and the poor are now a convenient target that deflects attention away from the scourge and scale of industrial culture. The contradictions that reveal the harm we have done and the gaps that need bridging are camouflaged by advertising: as trees are toppled to make way for cattle ranches, Nestlé sends boats up the Amazon, laden with sweets and snacks, and now large numbers of Indigenous youth suffer from diabetes because they prefer processed foods to traditional ones.
It's shocking to realize how accustomed we've become to a diminished landscape shaped by diminished concern. This includes the social landscape, whose unraveling correlates with deforestation. As societal norms are uprooted, disrespect and violence flourish in the civil desert where community cohesion withers. There is a direct correlation between violence, human rights abuses, organized crime and deforestation, including slave labor, violence against women, and armed conflict.
But damaged forests also teach us about repair. The roadmap to healing is revealed by pockets of harmony, just as, in deforested areas, stumps and shrubs point to intact root systems, and remnants of intact cultures, whose locations are still known to those who understand where and how to water the roots to revive them.
