"I hate humans, I love trees", and other problematic statements...

What I'm feeling an urge to write about at the moment is the tendency for environmental agendas to slide into misanthropy. Misanthropy: a hatred for humanity! Woah! There's a danger when we're talking about respecting the natural world to fall into a construct of humans as harmful and insane at an essential level, and to start either insinuating or saying straight out that the world would be better off without us. I want to unpack this idea...

Firstly, I've been there. I've been that person. Environmental concerns first engaged my interest in a pretty sudden way, reading David Suzuki's 'The Sacred Balance'. It's scientific, it's passionate, it's heartfelt. I lay on my bed and read this book with tears rolling nonstop down my face as I realised the extent and depth of human abuse of the natural world. This, and other books and websites, profoundly changed my orientation to life. I wanted to be involved in this cause. But what I didn't realise at the time is that I was taking my grief and using it to blame other humans. I was using it to feel a profound dislike for my own race! This can only arise from being not only everyone else's enemy, but also your own. Disliking humans means disliking yourself. It's a desire to take the habits of others and say 'look, look what these people have done. They have done evil things. I would not do those things, oh no, for I am one of The Good Guys, and I know not to do those things'. It's using caring for the environment as a way of feeling superior to others, to bolster up our own constantly-terrified ego. The book that moved me had a subtle message that told me that 'the masses' were harming the earth while 'the enlightened ones' fought against them. What bullshit. We are all complicit in the harm we are causing. Our culture is constructed and maintained with the assistance of every single one of us, just as a future is something that we can all construct together, rather than something inevitably descending like the blade of the guillotine.

You meet people like the person I was then all the time. We say things like 'the best cure for humanity is a giant plague', or 'the earth will be better off once all the people have killed each other'. We need to stop and recognise that this is a horrifying, nihilistic vision! David Attenborough has described us as a "plague on the earth". David Suzuki, that early hero of mine, said in 2009 that "humanity is humanity...I just wish they'd stop being so human". What's wrong with these visions?

For a start, they assume that humans are inherently and unavoidably harmful in their presence on Earth. They share this view with fans of population control as the ideal method to minimise environmental damage. Advocating population control in the way Malthus did, and demographer Paul Ehrlich does, is inherently misanthropic. It's the force behind statements like the Japanese finance minister stating in January that the elderly should "hurry up and die"(1). It's saying that humans are intrinsically a negative force, that takes away from natural systems in a linear, non cyclical way. I'm not arguing that we don't currently act in such ways. But it's not inherent to our nature. It's not a built in feature, it's an app. Time for an upgrade! Malthusian enthusiasts love bandying around figures as to the 'ideal number' of humans that can live on spaceship earth. But surely this is wholly dependent on how those humans choose to live? There's a popular 'did you know' that says ants have a greater biomass than humans. As in, all the species of ant, weighed, would have greater mass than all the humans. (Looking into this, it seems unlikely that each ant has been weighed individually, but we'll roll with it.) There's a lot of ants, put it that way. And there's even more termites (little cuties), and potentially an even greater mass of krill — estimates range between 117-379 billion kilograms. Woah. That's a lot of krill. Why aren't we advocating mass culling of krill? Compulsory krill abortions! (Let's ignore for a moment the fact that we kind of are, by selling them en masse to omega-3 enthusiasts in gelatine capsules). Because their way of existing in the world isn't harmful. Every time a new krill comes along, it's not going to burn more fossil fuels and buy more clothes from Supré (although they do have some sizes suitable for krill). It's not the number of humans existing in the world, it's our habits. Population, like technology, just magnifies the impact of what we do. And since when are our habits our intrinsic character? Over the course of history we have changed and adapted our way of living countless times. Mass environmental destruction is just a loud and obvious message that it's time to do so again, in a really exciting way. This goes beyond better technologies – we require a different set of priorities wielding those technologies. Time to evolve!

We are aware of how badly adjusted our practices are to the rhythms and rules of the natural world. We are just that archetypal lonely kid in the corner of the classroom, burning with painful awareness that he or she doesn't fit in. We don't feel like we belong in the world. That's a tragedy. What that kid needs to know is how beautiful and awesome they are. We need some more faith in just how gorgeous human beings are, some belief in how special a part of the world we are, and can be. I do believe that climate change and environmentally shitty practices are, without major action, going to create conditions in which it will be very difficult for humans to flourish, if not survive.  But what's the point in survival for survival's sake? These days, the only environmental movement I'm interested in being involved in is one that whole-heartedly celebrates humans as a divine part of nature, and a beautiful expression of the same life that makes the natural world so ravishing, and worth respecting.

ref:
(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/22/elderly-hurry-up-die-japanese

What is this...? An outlet? A cry for attention? A ranting-platform? An exhibitionist form of narcissistic journal dependence? I'm not really sure. I hope it's none of those. I just feel like there are lots of ideas floating in my brain that I would like to write about, and like to start conversations about, and my facebook page is a bit impossibly verbose. What are my interests through this blog? Issues surrounding radical change-making, imagination and creativity, social justice and inequality, human relationships with each other, ourselves, and the natural world, and the intersection between words and action. Woah, how exciting!