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I feel chastened. For years I have been gnashing, fretting, and scolding about What We Are Doing to Mother Earth. My proud, smug recycling and various slight sacrifices were tiny Band-Aids of apology. I regret none of them and will continue until I die. It was the attitude, the phrasing, that went amiss.
This dawned on me, as notions usually do, when a series of chance remarks and observations piled one on top of the other. First, I read an essay in The Atlantic about Mary Shelley’s 1826 futurist horror novel, The Last Man. Her central character watches a pandemic move inexorably through the world, eventually killing everyone but him. An old theme, the causes of devastation altering in each iteration. But in this one, the point is that the lonely survivor finally realizes that not only is he kin to nature, but nature has its own relationships, interconnections, rhythms, and separate beauty. It goes on without us.
Before he reaches this insight, he endures a round of preaching, fervent until the preacher dies, about how humanity’s sinfulness is to blame. Shelley does not necessarily contradict this; nor would I, now, as we watch fires rage and ice melt and species die out. But she makes sure that the last man finds a resigned peace by realizing that humans need their planet far more than their planet needs them.
The mention of pandemic brings to mind those days that felt like healing, when lockdown quieted the chaos we have layered into the world and the birdsong grew sweeter, the air and water cleared, and the wilderness seemed set free. Romantics (like me) grew teary at the notion that the world could be renewed, was being renewed.
Then we resumed our lives.
Privately, I stewed. We needed heroes. Superheroes, even. They would swoop in, caped and powerful, and force us to live sustainably before we trashed the planet beyond repair.
What I should have thought was: “before we make this place uninhabitable for our species.”
The semantic difference came clear to me in one of Maria Popova’s lovely pieces, this one on the poet Robinson Jeffers. He was the sort of superhero we need, except that no one listens to poets, and he probably would have turned down the job anyway. Deeply connected to nature, he was less fond of humans. He saw our folly, which began with our insistence on seeing ourselves as separate and superior.
“I believe that the universe is one being,” he once wrote, reluctantly, to a nun who taught at a girls’ school in Massachusetts. She was putting together an anthology in which poets explained their spirituality, and he was shy about stating his private religious views. “All its parts are different expressions of the same energy,” he continued, “and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.)”
Poetry was a more comfortable language for Jeffers, especially when it came to talk of spirit. In his epic poem “The Beginning and the End,” he elaborated: “I believe / That the earth and stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life.” They all “have their various consciousnesses,” yet it takes the nerves and brain of an animal (he did not specify human) to bring that consciousness to focus.
This, I suspect, is why we so easily overlook most of the universe, concentrating on the obvious sentience of chimps and dolphins, swatting away the “lower life forms,” and treating what seems inert as ours to plunder. But thinking of the entire cosmos as connected and conscious would, for some, plug the human being, like a fat spider, into the center of that web. For Jeffers, it did the opposite, pulling attention away from human beings’ actions and our hopes for salvation. He had enough cool courage to see God as an impersonal force, not a Santa who knows us by name. In an interview, he stated that “for contemplation and for philosophical thought I should wish to uncenter the mind from humanity, to ‘fall in love outward.’”
Later, in his poetry, this shows up: “We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;/ We must unhumanize our views a little.” Not, however, because he had ceased to care. “I am sick and weary of the violences/ That are done in the world,” he wrote. And in “Nerves,” composed nine decades ago but easily applicable today, he noted: “Few minds now are quite sane/ nearly every person/ seems to be listening for a crash.”
That sense of impending doom commingles with guilt—and hubris. What would it be like to “unhumanize” our views? It would be respectful. We would acknowledge the damage we do to all the life around us, but we would not, in pop psych terms, “make it all about us.” Jeffers wanted “a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.”
His “inhumanism” never caught hold; ego resented the very name. But as he tried to argue, “It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy.” And that might be a healthier way to learn how we should act.
Earth is more resilient than we are. It will find new ways to survive; we might not. We are not trashing the future of the planet; we are trashing the future of us. That might be a more powerful incentive for change, among those who scoff at tree-huggers and weary of screeds listing crimes against the planet.
If not, we will have signed our own death sentence. And when we are gone, the real healing will begin.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
