Tending to the Entanglements
“We are called to account by nothing less than the entirety of life on this planet, for all the ways in which, during our own brief lives, we help to shelter or destroy the entangled diversity of forms through which life makes itself at home in our world.”
World leaders are a reflection of the consciousness of the people they govern. When consciousness dries up, Earth dries up and governments turn their attention to consolidating power at all costs. Looking at our current global leadership, that's a sobering thought. What sort of consciousness do we need in order to pull a viable future out of the political hat? What is our relationship to the folks we disagree with and how do we bootstrap each other to a higher level of awareness and behavior?
The dynamics of extinction might help us. When a species goes extinct or is reduced to a handful of isolated individuals, the process of interconnected unravelling has already been long underway. Each species and therefore each individual in a population isn't an individual at all, but a node of connection for interactions and patterns that sustain the intact world. It's an interactive commons in which all species share, including humans. When individuals and species are lost, there are consequences well beyond each individual death. Scientists don't know how many extinctions are one too many; they can't predict which extinction is the last of the last straws.
Each tree consumed by wildfire or cut down without thought devastates the forest and the circle of Selves that depend on that tree for housing, food, shade, and microbial alliance. Each ephemeral stream that dries up erases the future for incalculable numbers of insects, birds, reptiles, animals and plants. Each drained wetland is a drought not averted or a flood not absorbed. Each river that is dammed starves underground food webs and deprives the ocean of oxygen and silt. Each desiccated delta is a coastline eroded, currents disrupted. Each war means pulverized soil and polluted waterways in addition to the humans who perish. The unravelling of relational complexity radiates in all directions; it affect neighboring biomes and, eventually, planetary weather.
We need to learn to see human beings in a similar light. Maybe our obituaries, like our extinction headlines, need to make clear what the magnitude of each loss actually is because every loss is a loss of consequence. Every individual is a member of a family in a community in a biome, internal and external. In addition to each life cut short by violence or disease, every mother, doctor, teacher or friend who is flattened by grief cannot attend to themselves or those that need them. Maybe if we saw each other as communities rather than as individuals, we'd be less cavalier about who or what is expendable, who we want to get rid of and who we can do without.
Israel is currently the incandescent example of of the consequences of disconnection as a way of life. The contradictions run deep: My friend, Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, is an Orthodox rabbi and settler in the West Bank. He speaks openly now about who he was when he first arrived: a zealot who literally didn't see his Palestinian neighbors. For his first couple of decades in Israel, he didn't know a single Palestinian; he had never met a Palestinian person, even though they literally lived next door. Now, and for more than a decade, he has been working with Palestinian peacebuilders to bring Palestinians and settlers together. They are criticized, ignored and attacked. It's an imperfect alliance but they continue to persevere.
In Israel, many of those who have been historically aligned with liberal or progressive ideals seem to be afflicted with a similar inability to perceive the suffering of Palestinians. Israeli media participates in this willful looking away by avoiding coverage of the destruction and casualties in Gaza. Instead, news reports focus on the funerals of Israeli soldiers and on the Hamas leaders who have been caught or killed. The spiral continues as a wider war looms.
Humans share a similar refusal to see the 'others' of the Natural World or to understand their predicament. When we do see them, we tend to perceive anonymous individuals rather than Selves who are related to countless Selves related to countless Selves.
Likewise, in the current political climate in the US and elsewhere, reactionaries and progressives who disparage each other reveal the failure or perhaps the inability to perceive adversaries as constituents of larger human ecosystems that matter. Nor do we perceive the true costs of living in a state of defensive amnesia.
Omer Bartov is a veteran of Israel's IDF who is now a scholar of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Israel. In an article in the Guardian a few days ago, he wondered what might have happened if Israel had chosen a different, more inclusive path: I ask myself, what would have happened had the newly created state of Israel fulfilled its commitment to enact a constitution based on its Declaration of Independence? That same declaration which stated that Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions... (https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov)
A few years ago I dreamed I was in a theater watching a play. There was a woman sitting a few rows behind me who was wearing a floor-length dress covered in black sequins. In the middle of the performance, she abruptly stood up and walked over row after row of people, stepping on others so she could get to the stage. In the dream, I understood that she was wearing a Nazi gown. When I woke up to write the dream, I realized its message. The woman was wearing a Nazi gown. Nazi. Not See. By refusing to see, she trampled everyone else in order to take center stage. Now, as we stand at a global precipice, how do we truly see and nourish the intricate ecosystems that we are?
