Mr. President: The Gulf Tragedy Bigger Picture
Blog, Deep Ecology, Ethics & Whole Community | May 28, 2010
The gulf disaster is tragic. It is hard to grasp all the individual tragedies that go into such a large one…of course the people – our sympathy goes there naturally and easily. But each oil smothered or poisoned or starving bird, dolphin, tortoise is another suffering individual. As we focus on the stress on humans who are losing their livelihood, we should also focus on animals losing their lives, their mates, their babies. We just don’t see as much of that, as the cameras go where the people are. But out of sight, out of mind doesn’t erase the suffering.
I hear the President has asked for a “Listening Tour” of environmental organizations where higher-ups will travel around the country to hear environmentalists talk about how to connect children to nature. Part of that is helping them understand that we need to see, and value, each animal as an individual being with its own passion to live, its own griefs and tragedies that are vividly felt and also count. They are not just a “representative” of a species that we have to save - they are individuals in their own right.
If we truly enlarge our sense of community to include all living beings, and then treat them as members, that single shift in perspective would change many things, solve many “problems” that are a result of seeing only humans as individual beings. I would give a lot to be able to get that perspective across to the President in some emotionally impactful way. It is so easy to get lost in human politics and the need to save humans – but that will not do it. We need to understand that it is not just clean water and clean air…if we don’t learn to come from a place that values all life, we will not thrive in the end anyway because we won’t be attending respectfully to our place in the web of life and that respect is what will save us.
Four feet above my head in my writing cabin, on the top sill of the window, a thrush has built her nest in an impossibly tiny shelf. I know she is there. I see her flying up to complete another artistic piece in the nest; I see her flying up after getting herself a bite to eat before she sits again on her precious new life forming inside her eggs. Her mate is always around on one tree or another guarding, chasing away the egg- stealing magpies, aggressive and twice his size. But it is interesting – unless I physically see her she is out of my mind, even as she sits, life growing, 4 feet from me. It is a human and cultural phenomena that things are only “real” and “in existence’ (for us, not for animals) when they are in front of our eyes. There is a burgeoning new field of subtle energies, those not immediately detected by our five senses. A field developing as society slowly digests the implications of Einstein’s work and the continuing new discoveries in physics about how we are all connected; how we are all basically energy beings; energy slowed down enough that it becomes solid, at least to appearances. And I think about sitting in my cabin working on sensing the intense excitement and wondrous life energy that is going just above my head; tuning to it without being able to physically”see” it. It is a richly rewarding effort with the hint of the possibility of infinite expansion of feeling and learning the magic that is around us in nature.
Nomad Lives by Jennifer Sauer
