Dreaming the World

Yesterday was a cloudy, cool, calm March day. Perhaps as it has been so cool, there was little evident change in the outside world. Today is bright and breezy. The buds on the maples seem to have grown overnight. Across the landscape trees are showing collor!

We put off yard clean up until much later as we are trying to protect over wintering pollinators. These insects hibernate in grass, under leaves, and within and under twigs and branches. Early yard work kills something like 80% of the overwintering bugs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness, not so much personal loneliness as a larger existential aching. It seems to me that loneliness is the experience of the presence of an absence. For survivors of childhood trauma, the absent thing is often safety. For bereft lovers and persons who have lost loved ones to death, the absence is the other person or persons. To many of us, the absences are compound and include the ever diminishing presence of other species.

There is no doubt that the world is emptying out, that we are in the midst of a great extinction event. This Sixth Mass Extinction has been accelerating over the past fifty years and is now progressing at an astounding pace.

We see few bugs on our windshield: growing up we were constantly cleaning bug remains from our windshields. Often one found oneself literally surrounded by a cloud of bugs. Each spring brings less bird song and fewer individuals of many species. The world has, as Rachel Carson feared, gone largely silent.

If we humans are lonely, imagine the state of many individuals of declining species who may not find any same species companionship or a mate. When mating becomes this challenging individuals suffer great loneliness and species decline more rapidly.

There are visual silences as well, as native plant populations crash; where there were once carpets of wildflowers there now may be none. One of my great bewilderments is that many people neither notice the growing silence nor regard it as important. My parents told me about their loneliness as they experienced the world being less noisy and diverse than it was in their childhood. I say the same thing to folks younger than me, as do other people half my age. Children growing up now cannot imagine what they are missing and neither could I. The present is simply their baseline.

I’d like to believe that it does not have to be this way, but in a settler colonial world that favours extraction and consumption over life, change is a hard sell. One of my great disappointments has been the steady erosion of any land and nature ethic in the US over the past fisty years. The real strides towards maintaining a liveable world that were made in the Seventies are now largely erased, and the new ethic seems to be that any species (and any human person) is expendable in the service of economic growth and personal enrichment.

It is very difficult to know what to do in the face of so much loss, grief, and loneliness. One growing response is simply to record the disappearance of the natural world, to ache with sadness about the growing loneliness of so many creatures, and to share about the pain; for many of us human companionship cannot fill the void.

Sometimes bearing witness to so much destruction and suffering seems nearly unendurable, but ignoring it seems infinitely worse.