I have a confession to make. I am a nature racist and I have slaves. More later…
For thousands of years civilizations have risen and then fallen. The causes have been pretty much the same each time. They are typically some combination of:
1. Destruction of the ecosystems that support growing food, the availability of water and that provide a safe environment for people
2. The rise of powerful religious and political elites in the society, the changing or amplification of religious and political “laws” that concentrate power and wealth for the elites.
3. The society’s development becomes increasingly complex causing decreasing marginal returns from the use of the society’s diminishing wealth
3. Climate change creating increased uncertainty about the availability of food, water and weakening the population
4. Wars or conflict over increasingly “scarce” food and water
5. Wars about cultural/religious symbols, i.e., my story of the world is the correct and only story of the way the world is.
6. A destructive lack of responsiveness of the elites to the gathering crisis
We are now in the same situation but on a global scale.
Who am I? Just an “average middle class” Canadian. And yet herein lies the problem and why I and many of my fellow humans in developed countries and many past humans are nature racists. A nature racist in my opinion is a person or really a culture of persons who deliberately or passively use nature as a resource with little to no consideration for the effects of that use on the plants, animals and the remainder of natural ecosystems they are part of. Nature is ours to lord over and use, except we say, steward and manage. Same effect, just the use of language to distance culpability. For example the United States navy has applied to the U.S. Department of Fisheries and Oceans to incur 33,000,000 million incidents with living creatures in the world’s oceans where it tests its technology and weapons. The meaning of incidents is the killing and maiming of living beings in the ocean and destroying the places they live. The estimate is considered low by some writers and will occur over the next 4 years. 33,000,000. Another example. Humans have used farm animals for their labour for thousands of years. Many of these animals were abused, misused and then killed. Consider that in many cases they could have been seen as important beings with rights in and of themselves and treated in a way that is humane and given a decent retirement.
How do we get around the thorny issue of our own survival being put before the survival of the ecosystems that we are deeply embedded in and interdependent with? As far as I am concerned we are now beginning to truly reap the full reward of our folly of being nature racists. If we live in a story where we cannot relate with our hearts and minds to the content and effect of what we do, and in fact deny and repress our true guilt in these matters, then I think we are doomed as a species. In essence through our religious dogma, narcissistic politics, free market economics and deadened language especially that of materialistic science, we have made up a story that nature is relatively soulless. Soldiers are put through grotesque training regimes to kill or deeply repress the soldiers connection to his/her heart and soul to be able to kill. Often a story is woven about the “enemy” to make them appear soulless and evil so that they can be killed without guilt. Given that our story of nature being soulless has been around for hundreds of years our ability to kill nature with barely a glance back over our shoulder is a piece of cake. Most of us do this. To me this sounds just like the way people of different races have been and are treated by imperialist nations in order to be able to enslave, use and kill them without much internal disquiet for the slave owner. This story is ongoing and permeates most everything we in developed countries consume.
As I mentioned above I am also a slave owner. I do this in two ways. The first as a consumer of goods produced by the slave labour of people in developing countries supposedly the fruits of globalism for me to enjoy but generally hidden is the poverty, repression and murder of those workers. The second according to Andrew Nikiforuk in “The Energy of Slaves” is that I control the equivalent of approximately 300 energy slaves (machines) to do my bidding so that I can live the middle class lifestyle that I do. I have gradually awakened to the stark, staring in my face fact that my consumption contributes to the degradation, enslavement and death of nature and human beings that I will never meet just so I can be comfortable. With the greater consciousness that I have come to over a number of years and the present state of affairs on this planet I can no longer continue to live as I do now which is not excessively consumptive from our societies standards. If I must kill other living beings to live this way just doesn’t square with what I feel in my heart anymore.
So I ask just where does the knowledge that our form of consumption is likely enslaving and killing other living beings especially in nature go in you? Where does it go in your heart?
AND
Can you open your heart to more fully feel what our consumption is really all about? Are you able to deliberately look at what is hidden deep in yourself and behind the veils of our good life? Recycling and other conservation band aids are useful in small ways but do not address in any substantive way the story our racist and slave holding tendencies, our unconsciousness destructiveness or our emptiness.
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