6 am April 23/23
As night, seamless, shifts
the tide toward daylight, sweet hope
is my heart's river-blood. A
crescendo of birdsong swells banks;
anything is possible.
Jill MacCormack
This Earth, this blessed, complex, beautiful beyond describing, Earth; I love Earth so! It's love which fuels my desire to learn more about how we can live in greater communion and greater connection with all Earth beings. Oh the wonder of such possibility!
It was E.O. Wilson who coined the term biophilia or love and connection to nature and all beings. (Jeremy Lent, p. 280)
Biophilia sounds like a fancy term but it is something you most likely have felt and something I feel deep within me.
As a person with more than their fair share of sensory perception, I come alive and feel my best when I am outdoors in forests, fields or by running waters rather than stuck in poor air and poor lighting indoors.
When I am in wild-ish places I dwell as near to freedom from a sense of self as may be humanly possible. I soar on moth-wing and frog-song and the fragrance of bracken fern like the human animal I am. Melting into the wild caress of natural textures, I forget where I end and the velvet seed head of cattail or fruiting body of lichen begins.
Being in wild and vibrant spaces makes me more well and reminds me of my wholeness.
Likewise, when harm comes to nature, it disrupts my well being too. And as many are increasingly becoming aware, it threatens the very well-being of all Earth's creatures, great and small.
Witnessing tracts of trees and wetlands bulldozed for more roads and more shops pains my heart. Seeing large scale plans for more makes me feel wrecked. Knowing all the diverse wildlife that will be destroyed in the process crushes my spirit and makes listening to the spring peepers and seeing wildlife living in the yet-to-be developed land all the more difficult and so incredibly poignant.
Land is a living system filled with complex mycorrhizal connections between plants and fungi and those myriad symbiotic relationships that comprise the invisible web of all life in and on and beneath the surface of land. Land which is viewed as inert and own-able under neoliberalism/capitalism is land that is easy to harm and land which is bought and sold as "property".
Imagine a culture where we took only what we needed and shared what we have. Imagine restoring dignity to land by removing it from the speculative real estate market (an eye-opening read with wildly unbelievable global development pictures) by protecting it in perpetuity as commons whose usage is stewarded by democratic processes to serve the community of all Earth beings. It is possible and occurring elsewhere in the world, friends. And how beautiful could this be on this small Island in the sea?
The soil and the living world is made of so many interconnections between so many creatures whose very lives and complex communities and vital habitats are too oft destroyed for the benefit of human enterprise with little thought to where the wildlife goes when their habitats (viewed solely as land up to be developed by persons who think it possible and justifiable to own parts and parcels of the living world) are bulldozed, plowed under, paved over.
Where are the wildlife corridors that were recommended back in 2017 for this little town I live in? What happened to the biologist's dream of 40% remaining natural as a baseline within any development in order to sustain bio-diversity of life? When will we stop paving and constructing a world based on speculative usage and formed on fossil fuels? Who are the beneficiaries of such processes? Who suffers the greatest toll in the process of development as per usual?
Instead, what about Community Land Trusts as a means to ensure humans are housed in a manner which brings dignity to humans and to land and other beings? What about the preservation of natural areas based on evidence of abundant and varied non-human life rather than only on at-risk species? (We are all at risk under late stage capitalism.) How might such a protective approach deter encroachment of invasive plants, animals and insects and protect biodiversity?
I am not alone in knowing in my bones that we are nature, not a species with special permission to live outside the confines of ecological limits and that something truly has to shift.
Kate Raworth has some good ideas here on economies designed to thrive, not grow.
As Nate Hagens, a leading systems thinker on potential consequences of living beyond planetary limits, says in his film The Great Simplification:
...our current economic system has an imperative to grow in order to satisfy prior financial commitments. We can't stop, nor can we slow down or the system will crash. A system lens reveals that the road ahead is closed to our current cultural expectations yet we continue to bear down on the accelerator.
This can cause a crushing sense of loss and panic as the unfettered rate of development as well as the ever escalating, yet fundamentally vapid twins, consumption and production, under the neoliberal agenda, continue onward without pause.
It's enough to throw your hands up in denial or despair.
Yet we should not lose hope!
Rather, hand on heart, we can pause and breathe with the enormity of the task at hand and offer ourselves an immensity of kindness as we find our collective way to the possibility of a more equitable tomorrow.
A more beautiful and equitable tomorrow because our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren deserve to inherit a better plausible future than where we are headed. To do so we must enter into more thoughtful engagement with this blessed, living world from which we all have come.
As Jeremy Lent, author of The Web of Meaning, posits in his book, there are so many good people working on many good projects world wide, but until we shift the narrative from a human focused one rooted in individualism and corporate greed, we are in trouble.
But how?
This requires a deep shift in values from our mainstream anthropocentric presumption that nature exists only to serve humans to a recognition of the intrinsic value of life itself and its inherent right to flourish in all its glorious diversity. (Jeremy Lent, p. 282)
E.O. Wilson, in a grand final act before his death, started the Half- Earth Project in order to raise awareness of the urgent need to ensure that there are viable habitats for all living beings not just for humans and human enterprise.
While there is birdsong in the trees that are left standing, we could honour these beings and be courageous and caring enough to welcome a shift in narrative into our hearts. This world belongs to no one and to everything. To ignore the acceleration of the social and climate crises is purely folly.
Let love and joy be our guides and we will not go in error.
Aldo Leopold gave a succinct expression of this ethos when he famously declared, : A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.(Jeremy Lent, p.282)
Like Emily Dickinson, I dwell in possibility and the hope that it contains.
Two tankas from August 2013
Early morn rising-
gleam of pale yellow light pours
over sky in shades
of birdsong; cacophony
of crows, sparrows sing of dew.
While sparrows sing, crows
caw out their morning prayers
and watch nocturnal
creatures scurry from the light
towards home with sleepy time eyes.
Thanks for reading!
Jill MacCormack
postscript:
9pm April 23/23
Just back from a most glorious, impromptu evening tromp along the Crown Point Rd where we followed the plaintive sound of a Wilson's Snipe doing a springtime aerial mating display.
We followed the "haunting" winnowing sound for quite some time until our birding son, Lucas, sighted it flapping high across a low lit, hazy blue-grey sky beneath the waxing crescent moon.
From Audubon Society: "At night on the nesting grounds, the ghostly winnowing flight sound of the males often echoes across the marshes."
Upon our return home we learned that the sound it made, which we first thought was its call, is rather the sound of the wind passing through its tail feathers.
Pure springtime magic on a crisp late April eve. Oh what joy this world still holds and my, how we must protect it.
well-written Jill-you speak so well for all of us....Love ma xxxooo