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:

I wrote last week at some length about the rewards of careful observation. There is so much awe and beauty and wonder to be found when we slow down and turn our attention to the real world. As we become more aware of slime molds and solar flares, and everything that falls between, we become fuller creatures and more connected to all that is good and green.

The downside to paying attention to the world, though, is observing what we’re doing to it. We are faced with the weight of human suffering amid widespread ecological loss, and we have to manage our anger at those most responsible. The destruction is everywhere and it hurts.

Paying that kind of attention is more or less the job description here at the Field Guide, both for me and you. For me it means that there’s a voice somewhere in my head that checks in frequently to ask, Are you overwhelmed yet? I imagine that you hear a similar voice as you decide whether to check the news or read whatever lyrical bomb I’ve dropped in your inbox.

There’s a line from the 1985 movie Witness that’s always stuck with me: “What we take into our hands, we take into our hearts.” It’s a pacifist caution against picking up a gun. I hear its echo as I think about what it means to observe the world and be overwhelmed by ache, grief, and confusion as we bear witness to a transformed and transforming Earth. What responsibilities does awareness bring? Which hurts more, carrying the burdens or pretending that they don’t exist?

One reason we’re overwhelmed is that we’re often the blind men in the blind-men-and-the-elephant parable, feeling one limb or another of the beast and treating it like an independent tragedy. It’s an ancient story, dating back at least 2500 years in what is now India, and reminds us a) that our personal awareness may not represent the whole truth and b) that there is a greater reality made up of the fragments we and others experience.

Every catastrophic megafire, industrial spill, open pit mine, or political roll-back of regulations feels like another punch in a relentless attack. But I don’t think that’s the right way, or the healthiest, to bear witness. For one thing, I’ve made a point here over the years of reminding folks that the climate and biodiversity crises are really just one crisis. They must be worked on at the same time - regreening the planet, restoring wild populations, and reducing emissions - or neither will end well.

But even that wisdom does not describe the entire elephant.

The Anthropocene is a cultural phenomenon with planetary consequences. The warming atmosphere and oceans, the accelerating extinction rate, our outsized population, and the ubiquitous toxins we emit like breath are the result of human behavior, behavior shaped by a culture that’s antithetical to life. I’m referring not to the diversity of national or other cultures that compose humanity, but to the larger culture that has bound us all for the last few centuries. Call it capitalist or modern, colonial or extractivist, but like any culture it sets the rules by which we live so firmly that we scarcely think of them. And those rules allow us to eat the Earth. That is the beast we face.

Describing this culture and its origins requires a library’s worth of information that I don’t have, so I’ll just say this: Our culture’s purpose is growth, but its meaning - from the point of view of most life on Earth - is death. (Or as Franz Kafka scribbled into his notebooks, “The evolution of mankind – a growth of death-force.”) Again, I mean this not as an indictment of humans per se, but of the dominant culture of this era.

The world that has been built for us grinds down the community of life to make a home for humans, in the same way that most human communities suffer unnecessarily in order to enrich a minority of wealthy people, mostly men. It’s the inevitable tragedy of colonial logic. This culture that harnesses the many (species or humans) to serve the few is unfair, unsustainable, and increasingly unlivable.

The elephant is everywhere even as real elephants disappear. The number of African forest elephants has declined by 90% in the last half century, and savanna elephants have dropped by 70%. Asian elephant numbers have been cut in half, and they’ve lost 85% of their habitat.

Not to confuse my analogy… but Anthropocene culture is the elephant in every room. It’s the sooty air we breathe and the PFAS-laden rain that falls on all our heads. It’s the innumerable scars across continents and seafloor, and it’s the absences in every ecological community. It’s the new normal we adopt because it’s human nature to normalize whatever world we’re born into.

Most of us pay some attention to the climate and ecological crises, some of us see that the conditions for life on Earth are rapidly deteriorating, and all of us (on some level) know that humans are wreaking havoc. But I think too few of us are talking about it all as a problem of culture.

Which makes sense, for two reasons: First, the sheer number of intractable problems we observe in the world every day suggest to us that we are facing a multitude of distinct ills. Second, it is against our nature to want to utterly transform culture. “Our lifestyle is nonnegotiable,” as Vice President Dick Cheney said. We might vote, lobby, protest, or hope for new policies, but entirely reimagining how we must live is the realm of the artists and theorists who we will never elect.

So it’s easier, and natural, to experience the Anthropocene as a parade of problems to be tweaked or solved rather than a wildly destructive culture that must be utterly transformed. Even as we’re faced with the consequences of our outsized population and its trade, consumption, and waste, we cling to the dream that the culture that is decimating the Earth will somehow turn to nurturing it, and will do so without any great sacrifice on our part.

What’s the benefit of knowing that all that ails us is rooted in a failed cultural experiment? Does facing up to ocean deoxygenation and declining grassland bird populations become easier if we see them as consequences of the same problem?

For me, it helps a little. It isn’t a cure for anxiety, of course, but I find it less overwhelming when I remember that the dark heart of this era is one large intractable thing rather than innumerable terrible things. I can look more or less in one direction - upstream - to find the source of the pain.

But we cannot simply walk to the source and turn off the spigot. A cultural problem requires a cultural shift, which requires most of us moving in the right direction while willing to change the rules by which we live.

In encouraging that shift, there’s a tension between individual change and social change. As Derrick Jensen wrote while discussing his book, The Boy in the Box, “there are no personal solutions to social problems.” Jensen does not pull his punches:

And honestly, it boggles my mind that so many books and essays conclude by suggesting ‘simple living’ as a solution to planetary murder. That response is incommensurate with the threat. If aliens came from outer space and were vacuuming up the oceans, heating up the planet, bathing the world in endocrine disrupters – murdering the planet – I’d hope our response would be more than to reduce, re-use and recycle. I mean, does anyone really think that bicycling to work or composting would have stopped Hitler, or ended chattel slavery in the United States?

But social change is often personal change writ large. It’s the bottom-up action created by activism. It’s not nearly enough on its own, but when paired with top-down action it can move cultural mountains. Meanwhile, for evidence of the power of top-down cultural shift, we need look only at the radicalized U.S. political party (represented by an elephant, no less) doubling down on the elite colonial impulse, gutting all law and policy that rein in industry and erasing all traces of compassion from the federal government, and all in a matter of weeks. These are blind men, alienated from the Earth, who don’t see the world they’re making, but they do provide a model of how to change things quickly.

Finally, though I’m advocating for a big-picture perspective to alleviate some of the stress of living in a hotter, more chaotic world, from a solutions perspective it’s far better to pick a toe or tail of the elephant to work on. Find what you’re good at, what you love to do, and that helps shift the culture. Better yet, I’ll repeat the wisdom of environmental philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore when she was asked, What can one person do? Her answer: “Don’t be one person.”

That’s wisdom that the blind men could have used.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From

From

From the Intercept, Big Ag and the FBI have conspired to treat animal rights activists as terrorists. “Animal rights and environmental groups have committed more acts of terrorism than Al Qaeda,” said one FBI agent.

From

From Anthropocene, the remarkable effectiveness of wildlife road crossings in Vermont built especially for amphibians.

From Heated, “Another Reason to Boycott Walmart,” which outlines the company’s recent backtracking on climate and other environmental goals.

Share