Standing up for nature
“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic.” ― George Carlin
The corporation is killing us, and we should be on its case morning, noon and friggin’ night.
And yet, look how much (and many) of our lives depend on it.
If you want to crane your neck and look inside LinkedIn (I wouldn’t advise it), you’ll get a burnt ash taste of the somnambulist chant that has come among the majority of the people I observe, be that in the back-slapping promotions, the awards ceremonies or the great places to work which seem to be what everyone thinks is job #1 of every corporate beast, even though in my time in the trenches it was a myth – at best – or more likely a lie.
To prove my point, not that I need to do that given the ‘evidence’, you could do worse than read Professor David Whyte’s book, Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before It Kills Us. In many ways, it feels incomplete – i.e. it doesn’t really tell us what to do once we’ve dismantled the corporation – but it gives a jaw-dropping insight into how all these behemoth companies have ravaged the planet, generating great gobs of wealth for so many people.
I realise that the mood music is subtlety changing: a few more companies are being and will be held to account in a court of law (I follow the reported cases very closely) but it’s not enough, and will never be enough given the tension that exists between a multiplicity of governments who depend on the company for their growth plans and to provide all us with a comfortable life which includes well-paid ‘jobs’, universal health care and a social care system that can deal with our increasing frailty. That’s code for saying that there will be, if there isn’t already, a conspiracy to make sure that nothing changes.
And, in the meantime, you’ll have the earth-law aficionados who believe that we need to grant nature (more) ‘rights’ to arrest or abate or ameliorate the harm that’s done and being done to the natural world. Not that I think it a bad thing – every little helps – but there’s a part of me that feels this form of legislative relief very anthropocentric and/or solipsistic. Truth is, and if it wasn’t already obvious from the way Covid 19 tipped the scales, nature doesn’t need us to grant it rights: it simply needs to be left alone and not treated as a commodity.
By now, you’re probably thinking that I’m not a very hopeful guy and you’d be right. That’s not my thing, namely, trading in hope:
“You know how it is when you have a mortgage. Many things that once were possible are no longer possible. Once you did things that now, for good reason, you no longer will do. You will put things on hold. You will wait. You will do without. You will do less with less, and all of this you’ll do because the mortgage gives you some guarantee that the sacrifices you are making will come out well in the end. You live in your mortgage, and because of that one day, all going well and you don’t sell, it will become your house. Hopeful people generally have their one good eye on a future they imagine, the more jaundiced eye on a present they mostly tolerate, and both eyes on a past they have a hard time remembering well and letting go of. Hopeful people do not as a rule hope for what they have. They hope for what they do not have. They hope for what they once had to come again. Hopeful people do not in their hopefulness often vote “yes” to the present. They vote for the future. Even those with a greater agility of hope, who hope for more of what they have, they are still voting for a future in which to have it.” – Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
And of course that doesn’t make me someone you want to spend too much time with if your ‘message’ is hopeful or leaning in that jaundiced direction. For me, there is such a thing as too late and whilst I can’t be sure if we’ve passed the Rubicon of our demise, I do know, be it housebuilding targets, or the way we import our food from the four corners of the earth or our lust for the latest thing, that nothing appears to be changing, despite all the good work that’s being done out in the boondocks. (Please don’t get me started on the corporate BS which is ascribed the label ‘greenwashing’. All I have to do is to think about the number of jobs that depend on proselytising a junk message, and it’s enough to send me over the cliff edge of sanity.)
One last thing. Actually two.
Antinatlaism; and
Misanthropy.
(They’re sisters in many ways or perhaps one leads to the other.)
I remember reading that when Arne Næss wrote his magnum opus on Deep Ecology there was a backlash because he dared to mention the number of people that could be supported by the Earth. I haven’t followed the debate very carefully and it’s probably apocryphal, but I’d be very surprised if you didn’t see a similar backlash if anyone dared to mention the fact that our population growth has largely gone unspoken about – i.e. its acceleration over the last 100 years – and if anything the dominant narrative is about declining birth rates (think Japan).
For now, I’m not going to be drawn into a tendentious debate about the right number or how, if at all, you control the likely increase in population up to 2050 but all I’ll say is that like so many issues connected with saving humanity, it gets very little attention.
As to misanthropy, I’ve heard Mr Jenkinson say that it’s not the same thing as having a conscience, and I’m sure he’s right. Me, I’m more in the Charles Bukowkis camp and quote a little from his poem, The Crunch.
there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. people so tired mutilated either by love or no love. people just are not good to each other one on one. the rich are not good to the rich the poor are not good to the poor. we are afraid.
In the end, there is no one-size-fits-all all solution to the issues at hand but let’s just say that there’s more than a little portent in the words to the song Fate by Gregory Hoskins and Stephen Jenkinson:
“Be prepared to be stopped.”
Sorry to end on such a bum note, but you hopefully get a wee insight into my mindset when it comes to saving us and the world.
Take care dear weary pilgrims of the Substack universe.
Much love,
Julian