Hello everyone:

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

“The farthest star and the mud at our feet”

I worry often that the writing I do here sings to an empty hall. Not that I don’t have an amazing (and growing) group of readers and supporters - each of you sitting in the front rows - but that each Anthropocene song of ecology, poetry, information, and empathy fades completely before reaching the ears of emotionally-bankrupt men making cruel and self-serving decisions for an (increasingly) ecologically-bankrupt civilization. What is the value of paragraphs that celebrate rewilding or “the community of life” when weighed against a week of Trump’s toxic executive orders? How do I find balance amid the impossible?

Spending a day wading knee-deep through a marsh, it turns out, helps quite a bit. I did just that recently, helping an ecologist do a site survey. We mucked about in a cold, steady rain, him in his warm chest-high rubber waders and me mildly if cheerfully hypothermic in sneakers and rain gear. Red-winged blackbirds sang from last year’s cattails, ducks and geese swerved away from the strange humans tottering through the wetlands, and a marsh wren swore at us for approaching her nest. I talked to an eel and a painted turtle we’d caught and inspected.

The predators and parasites of the political/corporate world fall into the meaningless chasm that spawned them when we pay attention to the real world. Everything is community, all life is beautiful and strange and largely unknown, and the deeper we look the more connections we find. More and more, in fact, I envision life as connections and flows rather than species and habitats. Individuals do not exist. We turtles, humans, marsh wrens, and cattails are perhaps better described as astonishing microbial assemblages, and better understood as communal nodes in a sea of interdependence, nutrients, and light.

And as unique as the blue-green Earth may be among the dotted vastness of space, it is just an island in a sea of islands, everything we see and don’t see built of the same strange miraculous stuff. As the poet Mary Oliver says, “The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family…”

And yet here we are, somehow the self-appointed clan leader of a planetary community newly ill with conditions we have invented and spread. We are increasingly separate from the terrestrial and oceanic kin whose fate is in our hands. There are many mallets driving that wedge, but I think it’s fair to say that our obsession with tool-making is chief among them. We have reimagined the world for our purposes, and then imagined into being the technologies that made real those dreams.

The problem during the last few centuries is that our dreams and our population grew wildly out of sync with what life can sustain. And the problem that lies immediately ahead is that we scarcely understand the power of the tools that we are about to unleash - AI and quantum computing, in particular - much less whether they will amplify or ameliorate our planetary impacts. In Ways of Being, perhaps the best book to address this question, James Bridle explains what should happen:

If we are to address the wholesale despoliation of the planet, and our growing helplessness in the face of vast computational power, then we must find ways to reconcile our technological prowess and sense of human uniqueness with an earthy sensibility and an attentiveness to the interconnectiveness of all things. We must learn to live with the world, rather than seek to dominate it. In short, we must discover an ecology of technology.

I love that phrase, “an ecology of technology,” though it might be more accurate to say we must reshape our technologies to serve ecology. A technological culture whose purpose is to sustain and celebrate the living world - rather than build up empty edifices upon its ashes - will more likely endure, in large part because it will have recognized the necessity of making the world sacred again.

I think, though, that this is less about theology and faith than about attitude, perhaps less spiritual than metaphysical, though all are welcome at the altar of common sense.

“Our dignity and our chances are one”

Writing last week’s Pope-quoting post reminded me that - as I've written here before - I have neither religious bones, nor flesh, nor even ideas (the least of our body’s miracles). I was raised free of any church - each with its own steeple tuned skyward to a particular holy frequency - and unbound by their texts. But that blank slate came at a cost. It meant growing up 1) ignorant of how much of human existence has been articulated, 2) separate from the faith that binds many human communities, and 3) having to explore the moral geography of my life without the usual cardinal directions... but I've enjoyed wandering the wilderness. The world’s sacredness was never in doubt, even if my path has been unclear.

I’ve had no end of godless revelatory experiences of the power and mystery of the universe. I’ve been awestruck in wild places and felt the trappings of mind and culture stripped away in fleeting but powerful moments. All that is holy is contained wherever you are at any moment, and no special destination is required - a good sunset will do - but I’ve had the luxury of feeling a deep, resonant joy from the Himalaya to the Transantarctics, and from the wild fjords of New Zealand to the island-dotted bays of the Maine coast.

I’ve lost myself – which is really finding myself part of something larger – sitting quietly above tree line, hiking above the clouds, camping on a vast ice cap, walking amid ferns deep in an old forest, canoeing along the shore of a remote island, or just watching intently a small pollinator doing its ancient work in a summer meadow.

The more we feel woven into the warp and weft of life’s tapestry, the more aware we are of the beauty that surrounds and includes us, the more our attitude or faith is integrated with whatever it is that generates our awe and wonder, the more likely it is we will be driven to save all we can of this astonishing world. We recognize that the fate of all life is our fate too, but more than that, we understand that a life lived in service to the more-than-human world is a better life.

Or as Mary Oliver said so elegantly, “our dignity and our chances are one.”

Even without a defined faith or belief, though, there is still somehow in the air the question of my "relationship with God." It fascinates me that we have a foundational expectation of this bond with a religious idea, but no similar assumption of our ties to the wholly real Earth. "What's your relationship with nature?" is a question we never ask, despite it being the foundation of our existence and the most vital query of this era.

Like the weird inversion of “fiction” and “nonfiction,” that which we acknowledge as real is for some reason secondary to that which we know we have written into being.

I don't mean by this that anyone's faith or spiritual reckoning is somehow unreal or diminished by my detachment. My path entwines with all of those who wander in the same direction and arrive at the same truth about the sacredness of the world. Nor, to be clear, do I mean that God is necessarily a fiction. Like everything we think - from lullabies to love to logic - God is a story. It may be The Story, or it may be a comforting tale against what we fear is the darkness of an incomprehensible universe, but in this as in all stories we are unreliable narrators.

What I mean is that the beautiful mystery that pervades everything is more real than all we think we know. I mean that we must stop waving flags because it’s far more important that we fall in love with the wind.

“We are each other's destiny”

I love how the birch tree in the photo that opens this essay embraces its neighbor the stone. “Embrace” is a loaded word, I know, and I mean it only as a physical metaphor, but theirs is a fascinating coexistence nonetheless. The stone is a glacial erratic, a granite pebble left behind by retreating glaciers around 15,000 years ago. Those roots spreading across the stone are fed by the soil created as the tree, its neighbors, and its predecessors drop their leaves and needles. Meanwhile, moss and lichen work to slowly erode the stone back into mineral nutrients. Microbes, the true inhabitants of the forest, choreograph the show.

All of this is a byproduct of light from the Sun. The Sun, in turn, is a mote in the velvet nothingness of space. Although, to be honest, we don’t know what makes up 96% of the universe, or what (or when or where) the universe is, so we really don’t even have a working definition of “nothingness.” Perhaps it’s best to think of “space” and “the universe” as synonyms for our ignorance.

I feel in my bones that when we give a name to the unknown and unnameable, which is the vast bulk of reality, we are laying claim to it - no matter how humbly - as a human dimension. This, I think, produces two illusions: All that exists is brought down into our jurisdiction for review, and we are in turn raised up above all other life for special consideration by the divine. This is a narrowing, when the only real path toward truth I can imagine is outward into the labyrinthine delta of mystery.

For me, only life that contributes to life deserves our faith. The parasites that too often inhabit industry and politics do not make the cut. Nor does the culture of irreparably stealing the deep time of species and places who have evolved over millions of years, all to fuel mere decades of our selfish pleasures. Nor does the driving of wealth upward into the hands of a few while billions suffer. We are all - plants, animals, and microbes - in the same Earthly boat, or as Mary Oliver says, “We are each other’s destiny.”

These days, I usually find my awe while walking through the conversations between trees and stones, rain and soil, sea and sky. I see the sacred while looking down at a spotted salamander gently walking her annual small, damp breeding migration rather than while looking up at a pope (even an environmentalist pope) on a balcony. I will always choose getting lost in a forest, or even getting hypothermic in a rainy swamp, over feeling small in a cathedral.

I’m not sure what effect this writing has, but I am reminded often of what is necessary to say, of what it needs to be in service to. Thank you, as always, for showing up and listening.

Finally, then, I should tell you my little secret and introduce the only paragraph that matters in this essay. The section titles, as I noted, are from Mary Oliver, all from her essay "Winter Hours," in the essay collection Upstream. In fact, all three phrases, and the title of this post, come from a single paragraph. It is a mark of Oliver’s astonishing powers as a writer that one paragraph can be so endlessly rich. As she surges in the essay to a conclusion about her quest for a quietly spiritual writing that inspires “wayward minds and unawakened hearts” to care for - to reattach to - the real world, she writes this:

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From

Spring always tugs me in two. A season of hope and blood, tenderness and butchery, babies and corpses. It does me well to remember I am built from nature’s rules, not the other way around. While I owe her my life, she owes me nothing.

From

From Earth Hope, a good post on the news that oil refineries in California are shutting down, in large part due to the successful push by the state to shed the absurd shackles of a fossil-fueled economy.

From Yale e360, indigenous communities in Mexico are fighting back against the surge in illegal deforestation and cartel violence that marks the rapid growth of avocado cultivation. These communities have developed ways to both grow avocados while protecting the forests which sustain, among many other species, overwintering monarch butterflies.

From the Revelator, an informative, good-news story of beaver reintroduction to degraded Oregon meadows.

From Anthropocene, a new turbine design may help many species of fish survive passage through hydropower dams.

From the Guardian’s “Age of Extinction” (AOE) biodiversity coverage (which I highly recommend you put on your reading list), a new important study of bird populations across North America finds deeply troubling declines in two thirds of species, especially in areas where they should be thriving.

Likewise, from the AOE section of the Guardian, decades of studying bird populations in some of the Amazon’s most remote and pristine forests have been a sad, strange process of bearing witness to their disappearance. After years of puzzling over the cause, researchers have finally determined that the warming climate has pushed the multitude of highly specialized rainforest species - each extremely sensitive to tiny changes in temperature and moisture - to the edge. “One thing I am becoming particularly tired of as a professional researcher,” said one expert, “is writing these obituaries for birds.”

From Vox, last year’s massive death toll from the U.S. government’s “Wildlife Services” agency, which includes far too much cruelty and anti-predator bias, is largely a taxpayer-funded subsidy for the ranching industry.

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