I don’t know about you, but every day, for at least a few minutes, I think about the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and the dreadful news that the Amazon jungle — considered the hydrological heart of the Earth — is rapidly approaching irreversible tipping points. According to many scientists, this incredible, gigantic bequest of nature’s wild genius, with untold millions of species that spans five countries may collapse as a functional ecosystem within ten to fifteen years.
Everyday I think about this for at least a few minutes — and I almost feel that this, more than anything else, is the only thing that I or anyone should care about or focus on, and I feel accompanying pangs of panic, dread, failure of responsibility, grief, stupidity.
I honestly can’t believe how stupid and asleep I am and we all are, allowing this to happen. And I feel so powerless when I think about the massive greed and human desire, the political and economic forces on such a huge scale that are pressing us toward oblivion.
I have signed the various petitions that indigenous people have begged for us to sign, but I can’t even believe how utterly futile and sad it feels to sign a petition that I know is barely even a symbolic gesture.
I assess myself as an ecological citizen, and give myself medium marks. I do travel, I do eat meat at this point in my life, I do buy some new things. But I don’t buy very much. I don’t own or drive a car. I don’t have a country house or much money. I don’t invest. I live in a small apartment in the middle of a dense city — one little bee in the big human hive — and mostly bike or take public transportation. However I know if I am honest, my ecological footprint is large enough, heinous enough, compared to a small farmer in the Global South (poor Bangladesh!) or the various indigenous cultures around the world.
Have you ever thought about what you would give up in your own life if it could actually be shown to be beneficial for safeguarding the Earth’s natural resources like the Amazon?
I would be completely ready to reduce travel to, say, once a year, to reduce the variety of my eating for the rest of my life to basic grains, vegetables, and whatever can be relatively sustainably produced, to commit to only buying recycled or second-hand clothes, if I had any idea that this would make any difference or help the world in any meaningful way. I just can’t convince myself it will at this point.
In fact, I feel, from ten or twenty years ago, even the idea that we as individuals should seek to radically or even slightly curtail our consumption of goods and energy in order to support the health of the planet has receded from consciousness. I think basically the unspoken agreement, now, is that it is too late for us to do anything about the ecological crisis as individuals or even local communities, so we may as well just get on with our lives and do whatever we feel like, ignoring the pangs of guilt and deep sense of grief and futility that we might feel when we pause to consider what is happening to the oceans and coral reefs, the burning forests, the melting ice caps, etcetera. This all just feels outside of our frame of possibility, so it is pointless to think about. And meanwhile, life, for many of us, is pretty good, if not great.
I would even say there is a sense among many intelligent people I know that it is “cool” to not really focus on the details or think about what is happening. A lot of the smartest and coolest people I know don’t really read the news anymore, in any case. They see it all as a lower frequency, that it just creates agitation and anxiety that leads nowhere. Instead, the focus is on raising one’s personal vibration or energetic signature, the incessant process of self-healing from trauma, the quest for a higher “consciousness” that somehow is believed to be separate from this horrifying ecological and geopolitical meltdown we know is happening, but prefer not to address or fully confront.
Who wants to deal, on an ongoing basis with the existential confrontation with the reality that our collective action as a species is literally killing the Amazon rainforest which is so unbelievably amazing, host to millions of incredible species and also so many incredible, precious, unique indigenous cultures and also ayahuasca along with many other sacraments that have had tremendously profound effects on many of us, opening us to Spirit.
We are obviously in a severe circumstance where the stewarding of natural resources upon which the entire future of humanity and all species on Earth depend cannot be left to nation-state governments and their corporate partners — on the whole aggregate mindset of exploitation, Capitalization, corruption, development. This needs to be popped like a zit.
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