The storm is brewing. I feel the cool breeze on my neck, the rustle of the leaves and my hair whipping against my face. This storm has been shaping for a couple of hours already, but the one in my heart has been quietly brewing for a long time, thundering in the distance since my birth. Each year my shell has cracked a little more, my intellect has widened and the facade built around me has slowly started to crumble. Something is growing inside me, something I brought into this world with me, more dangerous than a weapon, more powerful than an army.
Through childhood it brought me to curiosity, dared me to ask questions, and drew me outside more often than I can remember. Through adolescence it brought me confusion, alienation from my peers, a feeling of guilt heavy as a quarry, a burden too big for a girl's shoulders to bear. It began to grow in me like a virus, but I didn’t want it to stop, I only wanted to understand it.
Through college it began to unravel before me the more I studied. I learned of the consequences disguised as triumphs of our civilization that we as a human race have brought onto this world. The guilt was replaced with anger, the burden with hatred. The more I learned the more questions swam in my head. Why must we control all “resources”, manage all species, decide what to exploit and what to protect? For a people so entranced by religious deities all over the world, were we not putting ourselves into a god-like position? The earth is literally falling apart at the seams, but we put our blinders of ignorance and greed on, and we march swiftly and strongly forward towards the cliff which we are bound to fall off in the name of progress.
Air pollution, water pollution, fisheries depletion, deforestation, rising water levels, massive amounts of extinction, exploitation and depletion of natural resources in a couple of centuries when most took millions of years to produce. We must be blind, deaf and dumb to keep all these realities out of our pretty little façade we’ve built up around us, filling our heads with sorting our recyclables, maintaining wildlife refuges and donating some money to “save our oceans” every year, thinking that these things will make the destruction go away, all the while we are being swept away with the current of the river that our society has created and are going to end up cascading off into a 1,000 foot fall.
Part of the thing growing inside me since birth is not answers but questions. How did things get to be this way? Were humans created with inherent flaw and desire to destroy the world? Where did we go wrong? And the other part of what has been bursting at the seams inside my mind is not an idea, but a memory. A memory that I did not experience directly, but my ancestors experienced and lived over 500 generations ago.
This memory is of humans living within the community of life, not apart from it. Humans just like you and I, taking what they needed, leaving what they didn’t. Humans that didn’t have a need to kill off all their competition or wage war based on the beliefs of different religious deities. These humans lived in close family groups, and had no need to slave away at an 8-5 job that they hated only to pay off their bills, for wealth was not coveted, prized and possessed or unequally hoarded. There was no need to create religious deities and doctrines all over the world in order to be told how to live, because these humans knew how to live in a way that had worked for over 200,000 years. Today’s way of living has been around a mere 10,000 years, which is a blink of an eye for such a massive destruction of the earth to take place.
My ancestors knew the key to life that allowed them to live peacefully in the world. They lived as one of earth’s species, all woven together side by side like the beautiful tapestry that is life. They did not try to make order, control and dominate every aspect of the earth. They knew what we have ignorantly forgotten; the earth was not made for us, we were made for the earth.
Yet here we are today, trying to take control over every process and species that takes place on earth, and if nature doesn’t listen to us (which inevitable does and will happen) we will try to tighten the reigns and dominate even more. We are essentially at war with our world, yet what we don’t realize is if the world loses the battle, what have we really won?
There are still people all over living peacefully on this earth like my ancestors once did, yet our culture points and laughs and teaches us to find them barbaric and primitive. They are living the way our ancestors successfully lived for 200,000 years, yet we are taught to see them as failures, missing out on the joys of a proper human existence, complete with air conditioning, French manicured nails and funnel cakes. And after exterminating, enslaving and confining to prisons disguised as reservations most of these people, we are bound and determined to wipe the last of them out, because their homes are worth millions as exploited resources and they stand in the way of progress.
Yet I’m sure everyone has had that brief awakening from the amnesia we have suffered from our “civilized” lifestyle and asked “Is there more to life than this?” The answer is yes, there is, and there has been for a very long time. As we plow through the jungles, trek across the deserts and sail the oceans to knock down the walls of these last living remnants of our successful and peaceful ancestors in order to flood our way of life over every corner of the earth to gain progress, ask yourselves, what are we really gaining, and more importantly, what will we be losing?
