We can’t go back to normal, because “normal” is a disaster. Normal, at least anywhere that industrial civilization is dominant, is deeply destructive, based on exploitation and domination of people, plants and animals; subjecting the entire biosphere to the demands of profit and power. These are turbulent times, by turns encouraging and dispiriting, but there is no viable “normal” to return to for anyone living in the industrialized world. Whatever comes from the current protests and the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the growing movement to safeguard Black lives and the authoritarian impulse to suppress dissent, going back to the way things were a few months ago is simply not an option.
A Listening Walk With Clover
Last week I sat for an interview about nature sound recording with Clover the lamb.
Stopped In Our Tracks
“…all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… This is the way our universe is structured… We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of reality.” Martin Luther King, Jr. A Christmas Sermon On Peace (1967).
This may fall into the category of “be careful what you wish for.” For decades I have been saying that the trajectory of human civilization is so destructive and the psychological barriers to essential change are so formidable, that we, civilized humanity, need an intervention. We need some force from outside of us to stop us in our tracks. The examples I have given have mostly been positive: meeting a whale, observing the limits of the mind, dwelling in silence. I have certainly been aware that there are negative interventions: loss of a job, loss of a loved-one, loss of a sense of purpose. Anything that disrupts our normal routine can intervene in the perpetual mental activity that turns wild reality into domesticated illusion, forms our most fundamental worldview, and has led us deep into a disconnection from the living world. I was also aware, given the stress the planet is under, and given how ubiquitous global travel and transportation are, that a global pandemic was certain to occur at some point. I never wanted what we’ve got. There were a million ways to do this gently, the intervention revealing our destructive self-constructs, not threatening our lives. Continue reading “Stopped In Our Tracks”
Everything Is Connected
The essence of any ecological spirituality is interconnection and interdependence. That is what ecology is about. Organisms are shaped by the community of which they are members, and they in turn shape the nature of those communities. It is all about relationship. The question I pose is how broadly and deeply that interdependence goes. Can anything be separated from its role in the whole system and still exist? Continue reading “Everything Is Connected”
Right Whale Crisis
Two years ago I reported several times on the unprecedented deaths of right whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Twelve were found dead over the course of that summer, mostly from ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear. This year is not much better. So far, six whales have been found dead, four of whom were breeding females. These losses are devastating for such an endangered population.
Again, the causes seem to be entanglements and ship strikes. Right whales have moved north in search of food as the north Atlantic Ocean waters get warmer and their cold-water prey moves north. In recent years they have appeared more often in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is heavily fished and heavily trafficked by ships moving in and out of the St. Lawrence seaway. It is not at all clear what can be done about any of this. I think many of us who love right whales and have been trying to protect them and educate others about them are feeling pretty powerless right now. Decades of protection work are falling apart because global heating is forcing the whales to leave protected areas and move into more dangerous areas.
These whales do not have decades more to wait for us to get it right. Slower ship speeds and altered shipping lanes and ropeless fishing trap technology can help, but I still maintain that the only solution is a wholesale change in human behavior and the human economy that demands limitless growth and global shipping and massive consumption of fossil fuels. But again, social change on that level would normally take generations, and the right whales do not have that kind of time. We haven’t given up, but the future of the North Atlantic right whale is looking very bleak right now.
You can follow this unfolding story in the gulf through the New England Aquarium’s right whale research team twitter feed.