Extinction's Agenda
Greetings All,
This is a strange one. I almost wasn’t going to post it. I wrote it nearly a month ago, in mid-February, and it’s been sticking around in my head ever since. Then, today, I read this recent essay by Cynthia Bourgeault. She says it all so much better than I, so come back and read hers after you finish mine, if you’d like. But I had to add my voice to the chorus she summons…
One of the perspectives I try to hold in my life, at least as a lens through which to view things, is the belief that humanity is not other than nature, but that humanity is exactly nature and nature is exactly humanity.
Now there are, of course, many perspectives one can take from which this is obviously not true, but I’d ask that we put those aside for a moment. I don’t mean to disagree with them, but I do want to look at what might be seen when we do. Because the thing I want to look at through this ideological lens is the current climate crisis.
It’s an interesting picture.
The standard narratives are either (1) it is not really happening, or (2) it is happening, it’s not supposed to be happening, it’s our fault that it’s happening, and we need to do everything we can to stop it.
And in that second narrative, when our best efforts seem unable to do stop any of it, we despair and hate each other and feel hopeless.
Now, I want this to avoid any potential climate catastrophe as much as the next person (though its becoming more and more obvious that that isn’t on the table any more). I am not here to advocate a cliff diving “YOLO!” moment. I say that now because I worry that what I say next could be easily misinterpretted.
But what if this is supposed to happen?
In the past, there were several mass extinctions on earth. When oxygen first appeared, it was a major extinction event. Though it was so long ago and life was so microscopic that it is difficult to find conclusive evidence), it’s believed this was caused by cyanobacteria who had developed photosynthesis.
Suddenly, they can take in sunlight and off-gass oxygen, and oxygen is now EVERYWHERE. Oxidation is happening, and if you couldn’t breathe oxygen you are pretty much dead. As wikipedia puts it “The oxidative environmental change, compounded by a global glaciation, devastated the microbial mats around the Earth’s surface. The subsequent adaptation of surviving archaea via symbiogenesis with aerobic proteobacteria (which went endosymbiont and became mitochondria) may have led to the rise of eukaryotic organisms and the subsequent evolution of multicellular life-forms.”
Which, in simple English, means there was both an over-production of oxygen AND an ice age at the same time, and that this devastated most of life on earth at the time (life consisting of “microbial mats”). Yet, it was through adaptation to these conditions that multicellular life eventually evolved, thanks in no small part to the evolution of mitochondria (which you may know as the powerhouse of the cell).
Does anyone think we should go back in time and convince those photosynthesizing cyanobacteria jerks to stop what they were doing? That in their arrogance and greed of eating as much light as they could and off-gassing oxygen, they just needed to stop?Would the planet be better off if life was still just clusters of microbial mats?
There are plenty of other extinction events that happened “naturally” (which I guess we take to mean without humans being implicated in them). I won’t go into them all, but you can read about them here.
However, as I stated above, I am no “drill baby drill,” coal burning enthusiast. I do not support the people who think they can simply keep polluting the world, acting as if there won’t be consequences, and getting away with it. I’m simply saying the forces at play are, through this particular lens, possibly much larger than they seem.
They way I see it, the drives behind the pollution are actually good drives. These people think it maintains their safety, security, and enjoyment of life. That it expands their possibilities for happiness.
All that is good stuff. We don’t want to lose those drives.
The problem might be that they have coupled these drives to money. Though honestly, even that is the problem, because that is true as well. For many, many people in the world, more money WOULD provide safety, security, and all that.
No. The problem is that the humans who are driving the climate crisis are using the accumulation of money as the means of solving those issues BUT ARE NOT NOTICING WHEN THEY ARE SOLVED. There is no awareness of what experiencing “enough” is like.
This is something I’ve tackled here already, in regards to our ongoing numbness to feedback loops:
But, for this article, I fear we may have lost our earlier lens. Let us return. Humanity IS nature, we ARE the activity of life on this planet. We are not separate from nature, we are not “other” to it. Our actions ARE nature’s actions.
So, if we momentarily take that as true, then WTF is nature (as us) doing right now? What is so important that yet another mass extinction is, most likely, being set up?
From the perspective of this lens, we most likely won’t ever know. Do you think those photosynthesizing, oxygen farting, cyanobacteria jerks knew they were going to be huge, glorious trees one day? Or that they were paving the way for oxygen-breathing entities to come into existence, to create the beautifully balanced 02 to CO2 exchange that, up until recently, sustained things quite well?
To think that purely curbing our use of gasoline or adding filters to our factory smokestacks, or treating water with more and more chemicals is going to stop a change that the whole planet has gone through time and time and time again seems the most arrogant foolishness. And yet, I still do not want to let those money-grubbing polluting capitalists off the hook.
So if, through this lens, we think of ourselves as caught-in-and-part-of a natural process, and yet we keep the proper rage and horror at the parasitic few who are driving this whole cycle, what lesson can we learn from all of this?
It comes back to those feedback loops.
I believe the planet desperately needs us all to become more aware of “enough,” of “balance,” of “belonging.” This is what the climate crisis is forcing upon us. There is no greater lesson than this: we must come to know our needs, what they truly are, and what truly satiates them.
And then we must trust that this very world can provide them to us.
This may not be something humanity can achieve for many thousands of years. But the sooner we get started on it, the less damage the ecosystem is going to have to wreak upon itself (including us).
If we can manage this, humanity might finally become what we are meant to be.
This rollercoaster’s well on its way to (or past) the tipping point. It’s time we started building, within ourselves, the coming evolution of humanity. Because, the thing is, that’s what humans provide as parts of nature. We can, through divine guidance, shepherd processes so there is less of a painful impact and more fluidity.
That is what humanity is: shepherds of what is already happening.
We simply have to know ourselves and attend to the feedback loops already present in our minds, bodies, souls, and the world around us in order to become so.
With love,
Ian Reclusado
of The Kind Knife