Animals, Water and Big Ag

I heard recently about a new documentary called Cowspiracy (see cowspiracy.org for some specifics on it.) And what caught my ear (I haven’t seen it yet), other than some of the facts we’ve long known about how damaging factory farms can be to the environment and our health, was a list of hazards presented by these rapidly-growing operations. So I went to the website mentioned above and found a list of “facts” that I’ll simply present here. You can draw your own conclusions.

            Before doing that, though, I want to refer to another book I’ve read recently, Animal Wise, by Virginia Morell (Crown 2013) just to give everyone an idea of what’s at stake in our usual attitude toward animals. Briefly, what Morell has given us is proof, from several areas of study including neuroscience, about a variety of animals from ants to dogs to elephants, that animals do indeed have minds. The traditional modern denial of this refers to fish that we catch on a hook: ‘Oh, they don’t feel anything because their brains are too small and simple to register any sense of what pain means.’ Well think again, anglers. As a researcher named Braithwaite, after meticulous testing, says: “Fish have the cognitive capacity to experience emotions, and are self-aware, and conscious.” As to their brains, what Morell shows us about archerfish (and you can see stunning films of this on Youtube), is that these amazing fish have the neurological capacity to aim at insects, even through the distortions of water, and hit their targets with water squirted from their mouths like, well, archers. The lesson: to calculate distortion, movement, and trajectory, these fish have to have some heretofore unsuspected mental power. Morell provides us with similar research on ‘thinking’ in ants, speech in parrots, empathy in almost all animals, long-term memory and grieving in elephants, and almost superhuman synchrony in dolphins. In short, when we slaughter animals for our daily dinner (always doing it out of our sight, and hence out of our minds), we are not killing dumb, senseless mechanical robots; we are killing sentient beings built on the same template, and with the same basic material that builds us.

            That said, we now turn to the aforementioned facts about the damage done by large-scale animal farming. The damage is done by the use of water—both to feed the animals, dispose of their waste, and grow the feed they consume—and by the emission of greenhouse gases (global warming) like CO₂ and methane into our atmosphere. To wit: 1) Animal Agriculture is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the combined exhaust from all transportation. When one adds the byproducts of animal agriculture, we get this: 2) Livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. And when it comes to water use, animal agriculture makes the savings we think we’re making by low-flush toilets and not watering our lawns appear downright paltry: 3) Animal agriculture water consumption ranges from 34-76 trillion gallons annually; and 4) Growing feed crops for livestock consumes 56% of water in the US. To get a bit more specific and low to the ground, think about that hamburger you eat. Well here’s the fact: While Californians, on average, use 1500 gallons of water per person per day (half of which is associated with meat and dairy products), 5) 2,500 gallons of water are needed to produce 1 pound of beef! (Actually the amount varies from 442 to 8000 gallons; 2500 is a median estimate from Dr. George Borgstrom, Chair of Food Science and Human Nutrition at Michigan State University.)

            Of course, one might think that milk products are not so wasteful. But one would be wrong. 6) 1,000 gallons/liters of water are required to produce 1 gallon/liter of milk. So if you have a big Mac and a glass of milk, you’re consuming what took a couple of hundred gallons of water to produce. Here's the overall comparison: 7) 5% of water consumed in the US is by private homes; 55% of water consumed in the US is for animal agriculture. And when you’re talking worldwide, 8) Animal Agriculture is responsible for 20% -33% of all fresh water consumption in the world today.

            Then there’s the waste produced by these immense concentrations of animals in factory farms. (This emphasis on factory farms is important, because in traditional agriculture, farms were mixed operations whose products fed each other: farmers had a few cows, pigs, and/or chickens and used the waste as fertilizer to grow their crops, including the feed they gave to their animals.) 9) Every minute, 7 million pounds of excrement are produced by animals raised for food in the US. This doesn’t include the animals raised outside of USDA jurisdiction or in backyards, or the billions of fish raised in aquaculture settings in the US. And to give you an idea of how much this really is, 10) A farm with 2,500 dairy cows produces the same amount of waste as a city of 411,000 people. To put it another way, 11) 130 times more animal waste than human waste is produced in the US – 1.4 billion tons from the meat industry annually; 5 tons of animal waste produced for every person.

            I could go on, but the mind fairly reels. Suffice it to say that all this waste produces immense quantities of greenhouse gases, not to mention the rivers of pollution it carries to our aquifers, our streams, our lakes, and our oceans, thus reducing the fresh water available for things like, say, drinking. And the worst part is that the planetary lands devoted to animal agriculture—to grazing cattle or dairy cows, to raising the water-intensive crops like alfalfa and corn and soy that feeds these animals—are the leading cause of rainforest destruction now imperiling our world. They are also the leading cause of habitat destruction for the irreplaceable species that are going extinct both in these rainforests and elsewhere. One final fact to hammer this point home: 12) 10,000 years ago 99% of biomass (i.e. zoomass) was wild animals; today, humans and the animals that we raise as food make up 98% of the zoomass.

            The conclusion ought to be obvious. All of these animals—both the ones we are driving into extinction and the ones we raise to feed us—are our relatives, our cousins, our evolutionary forebears. We are literally impossible without them. When we destroy them, we destroy ourselves. Surely the big-brained ape must be able to think up a better way.

Lawrence DiStasi

Autoimmune

Oscar Wilde once wrote: “Nothing succeeds like excess.” He was right as far as he went, i.e. inveighing against the timorous moderation of the middle classes. But Wilde’s truism pertains only in the short run. In the long run, success, and especially excessive success, can turn not only problematic, but disastrous. Consider the phenomenon now widely known as “blowback” (Shakespeare referred to a similar turnabout more poetically as “hoist by his own petard.”) The United States has suffered from this confounding product of its success several times in recent years. Perhaps the most well-known instance concerns Afghanistan. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Russians sent their forces to Afghanistan in order to keep it under the control of the pro-Soviet Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), but they ran into fierce resistance by guerilla groups like the Mujahideen (lit., one engaged in jihad; actually begun as 19^th century opponents of British rule). Seeing this as an opportunity to laden the Soviets with their own Vietnam, the U.S. Government (and others like Saudi Arabia) gave enormous caches of arms, ammunition, money and general support to these mujahideen, routinely referring to them as “freedom fighters.” Among these ‘freedom fighters’ was a wealthy leader from Saudi Arabia called Osama bin Laden. The mujahideen eventually (1989) forced the Soviets out, ousted the DRA’s last president in 1992, and consolidated into what Mullah Mohammed Omar called the “Taliban.” Osama bin Laden was then able, from this relative safe haven in Afganistan, to organize al Quaeda, and eventually its 9/11 attack upon the new enemy he had switched to—his one-time backers, the United States of America. The Taliban, of course, became the rulers of Afghanistan for a time, and, despite eleven years of war by the U.S. forces against them, continue to wreak havoc against US-backed puppet governments in both Afghanistan and Pakistan to this day.

            Blowback. Watch out what you hatch; it might come back to bite you in the ass. As, for another example, ISIS or the Islamic State now running rampant in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, is also the product of the idiotic American machinations in the Iraq invasion. We ousted Saddam Hussein, disbanded his army and de-authorized his Sunni military and government officers, and in so doing gave power to the Shia forces now allied with our presumptive enemy, Iran. We also paved the way for al Quaeda in Iraq to rise and grow (there had been no al Quaeda in Iraq before the invasion), and, they, allied with those Sunni forces we sidelined and offended, have become the core of ISIS, taking over half of the allegedly “free” Iraq we spent so much American life and treasure to “liberate.”

            Of course, it’s not just in international relations that this phenomenon exists. Consider the ‘success’ humanity has had, first when homo sapiens, with its big brain, out-competed all other apes to become the clear winner in populating the entire globe. So excessive has this ‘success’ become that the human population has now reached 7 billion and is on a path to exceed 9 billion within a few years (a mere 250 years ago, world population was only about 800 million!). Such runaway growth strains not only the planetary resources needed to feed, clothe and house so many human beings, but also the space that all other species require to live. And the waste products generated by this one runaway species, homo sapiens, have become a gathering menace to the oceans (think of the ‘islands’ of plastic now circling in several oceans; of the over-fished species now reaching the brink of extinction) and the land increasingly polluted by it. Allied with this, obviously, are the inventions that this one species has created to allow it to thrive. Forget fire and the wheel; antibiotics have succeeded in nearly wiping out several diseases that used to plague humanity. But their excessive use (not only for humans, but in keeping livestock ‘healthy’, which means humans consume antibiotics in their meat without knowing it) has contributed increasingly to the development of ‘super-bacteria,’ that is, those new strains resistant to antibiotics. The problem daily threatens to get out of control if any of these super strains outstrips the methods that are still able to contain them.

            All of these examples might be grouped under the one rubric of autoimmune diseases. Such diseases have become more and more prevalent as modern medicine has grown ever more successful in eliminating most of the conventional diseases that used to bedevil it. Little needs to be said about arthritis, except to point out that it is an autoimmune disease, i.e., one in which the body’s immune system attacks its own proteins, often with inflammation. The list of autoimmune diseases is amazingly varied and too long to include here, but it includes such diseases as lupus, rheumatic fever, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, eczema, some forms of diabetes, celiac disease, Addison’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Crohn’s disease, and many more, possibly including cancer itself. While there is no easily summarized general theory of these autoimmune diseases, one idea struck me as quite telling. Rob Dunn, in his 2011 book The Wild Life of Our Bodies, cites Tufts University researcher Joel Weinstock’s theory that sufferers from Crohn’s disease (wherein the immune system attacks the gut to cause severe digestive problems and intestinal blockages), found mostly in the U.S. and developed countries, were missing something that used to be common: intestinal parasites. Rather than the conventional idea that we get sick when foreign species invade our bodies, Weinstock theorized that our success in ridding the body of parasites left our immune systems devoid of their usual targets, the parasites like tape worms that almost all children used to have. In their absence, Weinstock theorized, the immune system attacks its own gut. Weinstock, Dunn reports, did experiments to show that by introducing parasites into the bodies of Crohn’s sufferers, many got better. There is more to the theory, but basically it involves the idea that the human body evolved with parasites to fight, and that without those parasites (including their possible production of compounds that suppress the immune system’s attacks against them), the immune system begins to attack its own flesh. And the more general point Rob Dunn makes is that our success in sanitizing our environment, our war against microbes, has upset the balance and relationship to all other life in which we evolved. And it is making many of us, no longer developing normal immunities, sick.

            The biggest example of the autoimmune epidemic, of course, has to do not with the individual human body, per se, but with the collective body and the planet on which humans must survive. Since the advent of the industrial age, humans have been burning fossil fuels to obtain energy, most significantly to run machines that produce power and heat, and machines to pamper us and transport us effortlessly around our cities and the globe. This burning of fossil fuels, mostly gasoline from petroleum but also fire from burning coal, has put enormous tonnages of CO₂ into the atmosphere, and created what is known as the ‘greenhouse effect.’ That is, CO₂ collects in the upper atmosphere and creates a kind of gaseous shell around the globe from which heat cannot escape. The result (heat coming in but not getting out) is global warming—a rapid warming of the planet that is unprecedented in human history, and threatens to melt the polar regions (already happening at an alarming rate) and raise sea levels to disastrous levels for coastal cities, and heat the climate so much that all flora and fauna, including those we depend on for food, will be negatively affected. The most important point about this CO₂ effect, this greenhouse effect, is that we humans are doing it to ourselves. There is no longer any serious question about this. Despite the climate deniers, virtually all scientists agree that climate change is human caused. It is our civilization that is at fault, we ourselves that are responsible.

            The most dangerous autoimmune disease of all, in short, is the one threatening civilization itself. Humans of the last 250 or so years have been amazingly successful in using our large brains to adorn ourselves with the kind of comfort and products that not even the wealthiest potentates of old could have imagined. Success is ours! We have triumphed over nature. Become free as gods. We have won.

            The problem lies in the blowback. Our very success in producing machines to make us dominant and mobile and safe has led us into what appears to be the gravest crisis humanity has ever faced. Our machines have paved the way for a deadly reaction by the planet itself, by its feedback mechanisms, by what we might call its immune system. And what those feedback mechanisms are telling us, in the immortal words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, is: we have met the enemy and it is us. What they are telling us is: Change the way you think, the way you see; for if you do not, you will perish from your own success. It is as if humanity has suddenly regressed to an ancient Greek theater dramatizing in slow motion the peril that the Greeks found most threatening—the peril of hubris. The peril of presuming to arrogate to themselves the prerogatives of the gods. Whether collective humanity can gather itself and humble itself enough to alter its current disregard for everything but its own short-term comfort remains to be seen.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Truth of Bibi's Lie

Every time one thinks that the rabbit hole of U.S.-Israel relations has reached its nadir, something comes along to dig it even deeper. This past week’s election in Israel is the latest ‘something.’ In the weeks leading up to the elections, Prime Minister Netanyahu evidently feared that his mandate for a fourth term was in trouble, and he resorted to extraordinary expedients. First, he flew to the United States to give an impassioned speech to a cheering U.S Congress in the attempt to torpedo in advance the Obama Administration’s current attempts to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, and to raise the specter of a new war. Still not satisfied, and fearing the desertion of his right-wing supporters, Bibi began to make desperate fear-mongering statements about the Palestinian threat: on the day before the election, he said openly what he had hinted at before, that there would never be a Palestinian state so long as he remained in office. Then he raised the fear level even higher, insisting that Israeli Arabs (who are citizens of Israel) were coming out to “vote in droves,” and indeed being bused to the polls by left-wing organizations intent on destroying the Israeli state.

            Each of these statements elicited a storm of criticism, both from President Obama’s White House, and from many European leaders, several of whom indicated that if Israel under Netanyahu was foreclosing the possibility of a Palestinian state—the core of U.S. policy for resolving the “conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians for decades—then the United States (and Europe) might have to rethink their policy of defending Israel, especially with vetoes in the United Nations. Nonetheless, Bibi plunged gaily onward, and when the election results were counted on Wednesday, he emerged triumphant once again. His fear-mongering and war posturing had apparently worked just as planned. The Israeli people, or enough of them to give him the victory, responded to the ‘security crisis’ he had evoked, and backed to the hilt both his racist remarks about Palestinian voters and his open repudiation of any idea of Palestinian statehood.

            But of course, that wasn’t the end of it. For Bibi Netanyahu is nothing if not a pandering, pusillanimous, prevaricating politician. Reading the alarm in both Israeli and foreign councils about what his remarks predicted, he knew he had to “walk back” what he had said so openly. And the walking back began almost as soon as he made his victory statements. He wasn’t going back on his commitment to Palestinian statehood, he insisted. He had merely said that conditions for that statehood, at present, were “not achievable.” As he said to ABC News, “I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. We have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.” Ah yes. Bibi wasn’t saying anything new (which he was, and only a craven press would let him get away with such open, outrageous lying): he was just re-emphasizing what he, and Israeli politicians, have always said: we need a partner for peace. We need someone we can rely on to uphold a peace agreement. And that someone would, naturally, be some brave quisling willing to ‘recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.’

            Ali Abunimah in his most recent book, The Battle for Justice in Palestine, has some crucial things to say about this last idea: Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. This is because, Abunimah points out, this alleged “right” is really an insistence that Palestinians must not only give up their right to self-determination (a right that they, as the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, have greater claim to than the Israelis who are not indigenous, but rather immigrants from Europe, and indeed, colonizers of the land once belonging exclusively to Palestinians), but also their right to continue as a people at all. Here is how Abunimah somewhat ironically puts it:

            “Palestinian parents are trampling all over Israel’s right to maintain a Jewish majority by having children,” and their babies, by virtue of not being born to Jewish parents, are violating Israel’s right merely by living and breathing. Israelis themselves see the births of non-Jewish babies—whether to Palestinian citizens of the state or in the occupied territories—as an assault on their rights and on the very existence of Israel. The routine use by politicians and media of the term “demographic threat” to describe these babies attests to this phenomenon (p. 23).

So if the Palestinians, to have any chance of a ‘peace process’ leading to a state, are to give up their right to continue (reproduce) as a people, then who would inhabit such a state? If they are to agree to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, which, according to writer Joseph Massad, translates into Israel’s right “to colonize Palestinian land, occupy it, and discriminate against the non-Jewish Palestinian people,” then what kind of state, what kind of self-determination can that possibly lead to? The answer, of course, is: none at all. And that is precisely what Israel’s real policy has been for years, and what Bibi Netanyahu, in his desperation before last week’s election, actually let slip from the shadows.

            This position—official Israel’s longstanding and usually covertly-expressed opposition to ever granting the Palestinians a state of their own—has been analyzed and understood for years by most informed commentators on the so-called ‘peace process’ that U.S. negotiators have long promoted. I wrote about this recently in a blog called ‘Fake Process, Fake Peace’ (July 29, 2013), reviewing Prof. Rashid Khalidi’s brilliant analysis of the “peace brokering” done by several American administrations in his book, Brokers of Deceit. Some of what that blog included was the fact that, even in the most-heralded ‘success’ in the American effort, that of the 1978 Camp David Accords, the chief aim of Israeli leaders has always been to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state. In fact, even acknowledging that there is a Palestinian people was written out of the Camp David agreements; for in a January 22, 1978 side letter to Menachem Begin five days after the Accords were signed, President Carter agreed that,

            wherever the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian people” occurred in the text, they “are being and will be construed and understood by you as ‘Palestinian Arabs.’” This was a term of art among those Israelis who denied that the Palestinians were a people. (6)

The seriousness of this denial was reinforced in a 1982 CIA memo (when Reagan was president) cited by Khalidi, which again refers to Prime Minister Menachem Begin:

“Begin asserts that the C[amp] D[avid] A[ccords] rule out the emergence of a Palestinian state. In Begin’s view, the agreements ‘guarantee that under no condition’ can a Palestinian state be created. In practice Begin effectively rules out any exercise of Palestinian self-determination except one that continues Israel’s preeminent position in the West Bank.” (19)

Most importantly, Khalidi made clear that this was the position of not only Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but “the enduring position of every Israeli government since.” So while there has been an almost endless procession of American “negotiators” diligently striving to forge a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine resulting in a secure state for each, this has all been a ruse—a way to drag out so-called peace talks endlessly, endlessly giving Palestinians and the world the illusion that a Palestinian state was right around the corner (as soon as knotty little problems like “facts on the ground” could be ironed out, or a “real partner for peace” somehow found).

            Now it can be seen how Bibi Netanyahu fits perfectly into this long and sordid sleight-of-hand. His real policy—which his fear of defeat forced him to let slip on the eve of the election—has always been the received standard policy of all Israeli politicians and the Israeli people in general. There can never be a Palestinian state, period. To the Zionist project, an independent Palestinian state sitting right next to Israel would constitute an ‘existential threat.’ The fact of Palestinians themselves, whether or not they inhabit a state, is considered an ‘existential’ threat—because ‘these people,’ these Arabs in ‘droves,’ keep having these babies which ‘violate Israel’s right to exist merely by living and breathing.’ Somehow, and this is what successive Israeli governments keep trying to buy time for with their lip-service to the ‘peace process,’ Palestinians must be forced to understand that their ‘right to exist’ does not rise to the same exalted level as the Jewish state’s ‘right to exist.’ Indeed, it does not rise to any level at all. It is, so long as the United States of America keeps supporting the rigged game called the ‘peace process,’ literally ‘nonexistent.’

            If all this were not clear before the past week’s Bibi Show, it certainly should be blindingly, revoltingly clear now.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Future Canceled

Not long ago (Jan. 15, 2015) I wrote a blog I called ‘Climate Depression.’ In that piece, I tried to express the truth as I understood it from the writings of Guy McPherson—i.e. that we are already, because of the CO₂ our industrial civilization has put in the atmosphere, on a path to the extinction of most life we know and value on this planet. Together with what other scientists have been telling us about the accelerating extinction of species, the expanding poisoning of the soil and the oceans, the destruction of rain forests, and other insults to the web of life—the prospects for the future of life on Earth (the only planet we know of with life at all) seem grim indeed. It is for this reason that Joanna Macy in her recent book World as Lover, World as Self (Parallax Press: 2007), makes this statement:

The loss of certainty that there will be a future is, I believe, the pivotal psychological reality of our time (p 151).

What Macy is saying is that not just her, not just me, not just scientists who measure it on their instruments, not just a few aware people on this planet, but EVERYONE is feeling the same uncertainty, anger, fear, and grief. We are all assaulted by the grim question—will there even be a future?—at every turn. We see the increasing severity of storms (including winter storms, which are only a more subtle form of the same crisis), the steadily increasing global temperatures (2014 was the warmest year, globally, on record), the steady melting of the Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheets and the snows and glaciers in the Andes, the Sierras, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the alarming evidence of methane seeps that could accelerate the whole warming process beyond even our worst fears. We see it, we see reports of it, and we tremble. We grieve. We mourn the loss of a livable planet for our children, our grandchildren, and all those who are scheduled to follow us but who, if the dire predictions prove true, may not follow at all.

            Unlike others, however, Joanna Macy does not stop there. She does not go along with the dominant paradigm which says, ‘just don’t think about it, don’t dwell on it, don’t bring everyone down by giving voice to your fear and your despair and your grief.’ No. What Macy says and promotes in her writings and her workshops is precisely the opposite: do give voice to your grief. Do not be ashamed of feeling what you do, for it is natural, adaptive and even healing to do so. Here is how she puts it:

When we mourn the destruction of our biosphere, it is categorically distinct from grief at the prospect of our own personal death.

            Planetary anguish lifts us onto another systemic level where we open to collective experience. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don’t apologize if you cry for the burning of the Amazon or the Appalachian mountains stripped open for coal. The sorrow, grief, and rage you feel is a measure of your humanity and your evolutionary maturity. As your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal. That is what is happening as we see people honestly confronting the sorrows of our time. And it is an adaptive response (152).

Macy goes on to say that expressing our grief for the planet and for all the beings that our insane behavior of the past 300 years has put at risk of extinction is precisely what we need to be doing at this time. More of us. All of us. This is because the crisis of mass extinction

derives from a dysfunctional and pathological notion of the self. It derives from a mistake about our place in the order of things. It is the delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries; that it is so small and so needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly consume; and that as individuals, corporations, nation-states, or a species, we can be immune to what we do to other beings. (152).

            If this—that the notion of the separate self is a delusion; that the self is actually more like some interactive process whose boundaries can hardly be named—sounds like something a Buddhist or a spiritual leader (like Pope Francis) would say, that is because it is. Joanna Macy is indeed a practitioner of Buddhism and her take on the crisis of our time is informed by her practice. But it is not just that. She also uses the systems theory of Gregory Bateson to shore up what might be dismissed as spiritual or religious or New Age mumbo jumbo. And what she uses Bateson to confirm is his idea (and many neuroscientists are now reaching similar conclusions) that the conventional notion of the “self” or “consciousness” cannot be reduced, as it normally is, to the “isolated subjectivity of the individual or located within the confines of the skin.” Rather, Bateson says that

“the total self-corrective unit that processes information is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or what is popularly called ‘self’ or ‘consciousness’”….and… “The self as ordinarily understood is only a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting, and deciding.” (153)

For Macy, of course, this notion of a self-corrective feedback system involving self and other approximately coincides with her main point about the Buddha’s teaching, i.e., that self and world are not separate, are not individual entities where one or the other is primary; but rather, self and world arise together, or co-dependently (the doctrine is called paticca samuppada: dependent co-arising). They are inextricably intertwined and cannot be separated. Self acts on other just as other acts on self. Mind acts on matter just as matter acts on mind. Neither can exist without the other, nor is one the primary cause of the other (recent news about how the Big Bang may not really be the origin of it all, for there may be no origin, period, tends to fit with these ideas). Once this wisdom is felt or absorbed or seen into, one can no longer contemplate or even countenance doing damage to any other being or entity in the “outside” world, for there is no outside world. You grieve when you see a mountaintop being removed as much as you do when you observe birds and bees being poisoned by pesticides or helpless children being worked to death in gold mines or polar bears being starved because they can no longer hunt from the sea ice necessary to their being. You grieve because you know via your senses and every other mode of perception that you and they and all the beings of the past and those to come are ineluctably connected; are one web of life in which every part, no matter how small or humble, is necessary and critical to every other part and ultimately to the whole.

            Hence, for Joanna Macy, grieving for what we see and hear is happening to that web of life is not something to avoid, or deny; it is something to embrace, for it is only through facing it, through “being present to and owning our own pain” that we can begin to comprehend how much all our “selves” are intertwined and at risk with all others and, therefore, begin to find ways to change the way the world, in its ‘normal’ operating procedure, does them violence. Whether it will be in time to prevent the global catastrophe that appears to be bearing down upon us is not the point. Or not the only point. The point is to be alive to what is happening, to break open, and from that feeling of being part of that “great net from which one cannot fall,” to derive the courage to stand up to the deadly forces now in charge. 

            This is the healing message that Joanna Macy voices for us. And it is a courageous and healing message that, in the present state of things—with the ever-more-ignorant Sen. James Inhofe throwing snowballs in the Senate chamber to ‘prove’ that global warming is a hoax—is more necessary than ever. Take a look at her book. Give it to those who are young enough to get aroused. And take heart that there are indeed masses of people all around the globe who feel as you do and will, if we are very lucky, wake up before it’s too late and take the selfless (which is just another word for ‘heroic’) actions that are so necessary.

            In this regard, I would also recommend the most recent work of renowned Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo (his Stanford Prison Experiment has become the gold standard for investigating what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”), who has embarked on a new path—not investigating what makes ordinary people evil, but rather what it is that makes ordinary people heroic. Though it is not a simple idea or a simple effort, Zimbardo has stated its basic premise quite simply, and it accords with what has been outlined above:

Simply put, then, the key to heroism is a concern for other people in need—a concern to defend a moral cause, knowing there is a personal risk, done without expectation of reward. http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_makes_a_hero/

That’s it precisely, and is precisely what is needed now to counter the dominant delusion of selfishness, of ‘looking out for number one’ regardless of the consequences to others be they animal, vegetable or mineral. One can only hope that Zimbardo and his colleagues are successful in promoting this paradigm shift among the young. For it is the young, after all, who are going to have the bear the real burden of the failure of the rest of us—our failure to realize what we truly are, our collective failure to act swiftly and courageously enough to rescue what’s left of the only home we have.

Lawrence DiStasi