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Moving On


Moving OnVoice Narration - Jennifer Hill

A neighbor moose.
A neighbor moose.

The catastrophes add up: calamitous weather whips up hurricanes and heats the oceans; basic rights and the sense of human decency evaporate in genocide cravenly labeled as self-defense; the wealth gap becomes ever more chasmic as a statistically insignificant number of billionaires purchase power and access; a flighty rush to adopt the newest technological tools swamps grade schools, high schools, and universities with neurologically stunted young people; all while a food system based on extractive profits delivers mountains of calories harmful to human health.

 

Global capitalism continues to exploit the life-giving abundance of Planet Earth. Human trash – from CO2 to plastic bottles – invades our basic bodily functions. A habitable world can no longer be assumed. I often adjust my time outside because of searing heat or air so thick with smoke that my throat and lungs hurt, as a swollen red sun hangs in a torpid sky. Around the world, humans struggle with increasing floods, fire, and toxic breastmilk.

 

These tragedies exist, but it’s all getting a bit old. Violence and destruction play out in movies as dramatic and noteworthy; in the literature of my youth, potential apocalypse focused attention and generated action. I imagined that if ever I encountered a world-ending challenge, we’d gather round, gird our loins, and heft cast iron pans and cattle prods in preparation for an all-out fight. We’d know we were doomed, but we’d know it together. In contrast, actually living during an unfolding apocalypse is tawdry, sad, and monotonous. Instead of girding, I’m groaning. Instead of action, there’s influencing.

 

Dead zinnia, layers of petals still in place.
Dead zinnia, layers of petals still in place.

I’m tired of apocalypse. According to Google, apocalypse is the complete and final destruction of the world, damage on a catastrophic scale. By that definition, we are in the midst of it, with each day marking another milestone in our collective march through catastrophe and into certain ruin. But looking back to recent American history enshrined within the covers of my 1956 Webster’s dictionary reveals an alternate definition – apocalypse was, just sixty years ago, understood as “a revelation, a disclosure.” The word is drawn from Greek – apokalypsis, to uncover – and until recently, the term conveyed a sense of comprehension, a knowing, the unmasking of underlying systems, that revelatory experience when the scaffolding and structure of complexity are revealed.


Our current moment is weighted toward the destructive, more contemporary use of the word, and ignores the import of comprehension. In witnessing the catastrophic consequences the globe is living out in this moment, the clear and unvarnished facts are also revealed. The evidence exists – in overwhelming detail and depth – to explain the causes of our crises.


Much of contemporary well-meaning discourse calls for agreement on our apocalyptic moment. Yes, we want those around us to acknowledge the severity of the situation. Yes, consensus on our mutually assured destruction might be reassuring. But we focus on the level of danger, longing for detailed agreement on granular particulars, instead of seeing the operating structure of capitalistic behavior exposed and rotten to the core. In getting to this point, underlying systems have been revealed. And in those candid displays of profit, subjugation, and drive for power-over, a course of action is visible.


 

Increasing fossil fuel emissions wreak havoc with our weather. Othering of humans – the creation of any and all hierarchies, whether they be based on gender, race, sexual identity, class, cultural heritage, or any other social construct – destroys human decency and stands in the way of basic rights and civility. Capitalism violently extracts from land, air, water, and people, pushing to monetize the most generative human activities (like care, generosity, and the sharing of resources) that we depend on to bring meaning to our lives. Industrial production of food severs the relational bonds and embodied reciprocity that human physiology depends on. The dominance of the digital puts us in a state of constant stress and robs us of the emotive and relational interactions that human connection depends on.

 

In short, we can work to ditch oil, abandon hierarchy, torch capitalism, and embrace in-the-flesh human connection in our relationships, including our eating habits. Decades of thoughtful study and dialogue around these issues have established the causal factors. Artists, scholars, scientists, and writers, knowledge, data, human experience, creative expression, and moral codes – they all line up. We might not like the conclusions or the desperate need for reconsideration and revolutionary change, but it is not information that we lack.

 

A coyote, pausing as I pass.
A coyote, pausing as I pass.

The American way of driving, striving, eating, and being is the manifestation of a culture based on extractive short-term profits. Capitalism excels at delivering ball point pens for pennies apiece, but lays waste to stability, connection, safety, and generosity – just the conditions necessary for human flourishing. We need a radical course correction that embraces a generative cosmology and an economy based on care. These changes will likely take decades and even centuries to implement. There is no quick fix, and we are getting to the point where it is possible there will be no fix at all.

 

My frustration in our current moment is, in part, a manifestation of my dislike of waiting in lines, of wasting time, of inefficiency. But it is also a heart cry for those things that I love, and those spaces where acting on that love is stymied by our current constellation of challenges. I hold unbounded affection for all those forces and creatures with whom I share space, my co-inhabitors of this beautiful planet – oceans and mollusks, sunshine and stars, wind and grazing elk. I feel for their suffering, for their instability and out-of-balance-ness. The joys, discoveries, and intimacies that result from the creative efforts of our species are gorgeous and inspiring. Seeing one group of humans demonize and destroy another group is a searing pain, a violation of all that can be good about human creativity and imagination.

 

This is a heavy time. But even in the midst of planetary death, we can act in love, we can encourage each other, and we can name our own commitment and course of action. We can imagine and act; we can dream and work.

 

At the Patch, I will create a space of co-existence for all sorts of life forms, from mycelium to pack rats, from magpies to the proliferation of slugs in the greenhouse.

At the local prison where I run a book club, I will show up, bearing witness to the wrongs and celebrating the laughter, even within the horror of incarceration.

In my college classes, I will offer substance, care, and challenge.

In my writing, I will push for honesty, for thought, and for kindness, to myself and those who read my words.

In my being, I will cherish aliveness in each moment, holding all those that I love in the embrace of this particular planet, to which I am devoted.

 

Is that enough? Not at all. But I refuse to be immobilized by the hand-wringing of unending apocalyptic measurement. I refuse to be denied the most precious of human actions, the will to love. There is a way forward, and I am ready to move on. I’ll see you on the road ahead.



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