How does each of us relate to our environment? More often, through formal channels such as the news, or simply with our friends we speak of how we relate to society; talking of the interdependent relationship we have with the environment is more a special moment chat when the stars have aligned, Saturn is waxing, the Moon has risen in Mercury and a black hole has swallowed Elon Musk’s Starlink.
From my own experience and observation, how much more important it seems to each of us to deal with the immediate aspects of our life, work, romance, food shops, keeping ourselves entertained. We critique the government, our bosses and authority and declare that we “can do a better job!”. Gossiping on the comings and goings of the lives of our co-workers and friends take up endless hours of time. We realise at some level that we are a small cog in our society and we fulfill our cogly-role of selecting a job enabled by the government, consuming everything we want and need, and giving voice from the sidelines on how our lives could be lived better if x, y and z changed, with never walking onto the field to participate in the game of life. But how often do we really consider that we are also an even smaller cog in an even bigger “machine” of the Mother Earth and that every one of our actions influences our environment? How insignificant our lives then appear to be, in fact, so insignificant that we go back to burying ourselves in alcohol, drugs and dopamine-inducing entertainment.
Until recently, I did not spend all that much time contemplating such things. I didn’t have my head totally buried in the sand; I sorted my recycling, I made sure to never burn plastics or harmful materials on garden bonfires, I enjoyed being out in nature and I didn’t fulfill my role of being a consumer all that well. Yet there was a marked disconnect within myself that I could feel, but not quite explain.
I have found that you can watch the entire collection of David Attenborough’s, you can study Zoology at university, read countless books on natural history or even go to a zoo and you will still not understand nature to the same depth than if you were to sit outside and simply watch. In fact, I’ve found the less you know about an animal and it’s habits, the more connected your experience as you tune in at a deeper level to what it’s doing. Once you’ve associated a behaviour you’ve watched from a documentary to an animal, you now assume you now know what it’s doing, now you stop paying attention. This is not to say that there isn’t validity to nature documentaries but they are merely a band-aid to keeping us slightly connected to what’s going on in the natural world. When I first got here I didn’t pay such close attention, birds flew past but they all flew the same. Not until I started paying attention did I notice, with enthusiasm, that the crane extends it’s legs some time before landing much like a plane deploying it’s landing gear on a run up to the runway, sometimes dipping it’s toes into the water; or drongos that seemingly perform Red Arrows style flying maneuvers with barrel rolls and loop-the-loops whenever they take flight (I sometimes think they would get where they’re going a hell of a lot faster if they just cut that out all together); or house martins flying against stormy winds tack across the sky like boats battling waves.
A few weeks ago I discovered with my mum, two mist nets at the bottom of our garden, on the other side of our wall. These are used to catch birds. Made of fine netting strung up between two poles (thing of a volleyball net), the birds blind to it, fly straight in and become ensnared by the net. A menagerie of birds had already been caught and hung there, alive, yet immobile. It was a horrifying and sickening sight, it reminded me of tiny corpses being strung up to ward off any other dissenters. For a while we ourselves were immobile. What should we do? Every cell was screaming we should cut them free and release them, it was cruel and barbaric, this is no way to treat animals but the conditioning of society quietly crept in. The net isn’t on our land, we are foreigners in this country and shouldn’t involve ourselves with the locals business, maybe this person is struggling to come by food in this lock-down, maybe they have a family to feed.
After much too-ing and fro-ing we released the one bird we could, a young zebra dove (one of its parents and sibling were also caught in the net) that hung lower and closer to our wall than the rest. Our hands shook as we worked to cut the netting away. The entire time it remained totally calm and I could feel it’s heart beating slowly, far slower than mine that was racing, afraid the person would return and catch us in the act. For a few precious moments I held the zebra dove in my hand until it seemingly felt ready to leave, broke through my light grasp and took off. It was some hours later that a man showed up to remove the birds and we politely asked him to remove the net, which he graciously obliged.
It was very distressing to see the birds caught in the net and yet the man could not be blamed for what he was doing, in fact he handled all the birds very softly as he removed them from the net and placed them in a sack. He was doing what he could do best to survive with the tools and conditioning he had available to him. These sorts of behaviours cannot be pinned on a certain type of person, a community or a nation, it lies in each and every one of us with our lifestyles, our spending habits, the fact that we have spending habits and our incessant desires that we have no awareness or control over. When we can’t control how products are made and disposed of, how natural resources are harvested, government policies and greater societal cogs, the one thing we can control is ourselves. The more we can still our minds, ease our egos and desires, the more possibility there is for the likes of circular economies to exist, advanced communes, reduced pollution and sustainable co-existence with the environment. The only reason we’re not there yet is because we’re not ready to be there.
I for one think product design should include how the item will be dealt with once its finished with; do existing recycling methods allow for it to be recycled or do new methods need to be created. If a new recycling method needs to be created then a company should pay into a “pot” to create the new technology to deal with this. I feel the nuclear energy industry sums this up nicely – let’s create an energy that requires minimal resource and creates “only” steam as a by-product (sounds like the perfect source of energy), however in terms of dealing with radiated waste, let’s stick it in containers for now and work out how to deal with it later (are you mad?), now apply that scenario to your smartphone, your tablet, your fashionable trainers, your fridge. A zero waste economy (or as close as) would mean everything made serves a function of the highest order and can be reused, recycled or repurposed. This self-realisation on how society and the economy could better operate starts with me and know I am only at the start of this journey.
The poor who live hand-to-mouth have not the livelihood to protect the planet.
Those who live in comfort chase desire for money, status and power and have not the self-control to save the planet.
The rich, consumed by their greed have not the purity of soul to safe-guard the planet.
Those who have stilled their mind and desires have the serenity to rescue Mother Earth.
And yet, there are so few.
If you want to save/fix the world, save/fix yourself.
(Photo of the rescued juvenile zebra dove)
TheForceOfDao 