During the last year of my sabbatical, out of habit and a vague sense of duty, I check in with the SF Chronicle on-line every couple days. Scanning the headlines, browsing through some opinion pieces, getting caught up on the Giants, A’s, and Warriors, I pull and fuss and check the tension of the umbilical cord still wrapped around my sense of ‘home’. And on June 27, I found a revelatory article on the front page. About ice cream and honeybees. Haagen-Dazs, and the ominous disappearance of 1/3 of the world’s honeybees to be more specific.
It went something like this: corporate executives at Haagen Dazs headquarters are in a minor panic over a potentially disastrous development in the ice cream market. It seems that a potentially catastrophic plunge in the population of the world’s honeybees is threatening the strawberry and almond crop (as in there might not be one). And this foreboding disappearance of the bees whose pollinating work keeps the ecosystem alive and reproductive for those of us on the planet who need to eat to survive means, of course, that there might not be any Haagen Dazs ‘Strawberries and Cream’ and/or ‘Swiss Almond Vanilla’ available in our local grocery stores. At least not at a reasonable price.
Understand that this was a well-crafted ‘hook’. An actual meeting took place with an editor and a writer down at Chronicle headquarters to discuss the direction of this article. Both must have implicitly understood that the human readers of their newspaper would have no interest in a tedious, tiresome article straightforwardly discussing the potential unraveling of the intricate food chain and plant world. Upon whose health and integrity the entire human race and animal kingdom is dependent. Instead, they had to find an ‘angle’. And what better way, apparently, to pique the reader’s interest over their morning cup of coffee than to dramatically expose the threat to the world’s ice cream supply.
What odd, funny creatures we are. And how little interest we apparently have in discussing critical issues of life in a direct, honest way. Especially if they explicitly involve us. Because, you know, that might imply some kind of responsibility. Or imperative to change our behavior. And none of us really wants to change. We all say we want to change. But we don’t really want to change to change. We want to drink our coffee with milk and sugar and read cute little stories about Haagen-Dazs and honeybees. We don’t want to know about the peasants who pick our coffee, the lives of the industrial dairy cows who provide our milk, the impact of the cane fields and factories that give us our sugar. We just want to be left alone in our little kitchen with that pot of geraniums sitting in the pretty morning light we have paid so much money to enjoy.
And yet somehow, we as a species continue to pride ourselves on our logic and powers of reason. We consider ourselves the unique species on the planet. In fact, many of us forget that we are even a part of a greater planet since, I suppose, we are the ones giving out all these names. Meanwhile, the oceans go on filling up with our chemicals and garbage. The forests are stripped to make room for more cattle and Big Macs, and to collect more wood for more decks and fence posts. Our increasingly mono-cropped landscape demands more and more petro-chemicals and toxic fertilizers. Our rivers are infused with refuse and waste. Urban landfills have reached their brim. The air is choked with diesel fumes and industrial smog. Everywhere the planet is defiled and shat upon.
And we choose to frame this current state of affairs in strawberries and vanilla. Unable to see the gathering storm unless it is translated into commodities and market implications. To what profoundly absurd depths have we sunk as a species? What is it that we suppose is going to happen as a result of our behavior?
The truth is, we don’t want to know about it. We hire ‘scientists’ to rationalize our behavior and tell us that changes are part of the natural order of things. We invoke 19th century social biologists to remind us that if we didn’t do it, somebody else would. We invent abstract notions of ‘free-markets’ and hide behind the fact that the world is ‘complicated’ – as if we didn’t create the markets and its complications. We make up fairytales about ‘God’ selecting us as the chosen people to do with the earth and all its beasts whatever we please. Grave environmental issues facing all of humanity are not tackled head on, but framed in easily digested partisan, political terms. Making it convenient for us to either reject and/or champion the theoretical ‘cause’ – while wholly ignoring our daily participation in and responsibility for the manifest deepening of the crisis.
Look at how our once bubbling, innocent curiosity that led to the invention of hand tools, the wheel and the harnessing of fire has metastasized into plastic bags carrying plastic widgets wrapped in plastic casing printed with plastic graphics diddled with for a few days, then flippantly discarded onto a plastic heap down at the local dump. Or how our once humble need for security and safety that led to the gathering of communities and tribes has morphed into mammoth nation states rabid for more power, more land, and more resources. Our once deep connection to the land that led to the symbolic representation and honoring of the sun, moon, earth, and sky through art and ritual thanksgiving transformed into systematized dogmas of institutional, necessary belief. Religions whose basic function is no longer to connect, but to separate, file, and control through various, flailing attempts at making knowable that which is, by its very nature, unknowable and mysterious.
It is odd, we (especially in the U.S.) hold the idea of ‘personal responsibility’ as perhaps the highest of all moral tenets. We expect our children to do piles and piles of homework each night. We hold the Iraqi people responsible for the atrocities and legacy of a tyrant who they were the victims of. Never mentioning, of course, that we trained, armed, and supported the man for 25 years. We expect people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, no matter the extenuating circumstances making their access to said bootstraps even possible. And yet when it comes to laying waste to planet Earth, when it comes to the comprehensive defiling of our shared water, air, and land resources, we apparently cannot even discuss this topic without relating it to ice cream and money. Pleasure and currency being, apparently, the two necessary commodity values needed to understand and illicit interest in the situation.
But this won’t do. Surely our consciousness, our self-awareness demands a higher ‘moral’ responsibility than simply pandering to market implications. When we are invited into someone’s home, given a meal, and clean water to drink, do we not give thanks? Do we not offer to help with the dishes, wipe down the table, shake out the tablecloth? Or do we steal the silverware, piss on the rug, rip out the plumbing, and raid the fridge of the rest of its contents? Rationalizing our behavior by saying if we didn’t do it, someone else would.
Why is the earth any different? Does the earth not feed us, house us, surround us with beauty, and give clean drinking water to us every day of our gifted lives? Why do we shit on it, fill it with poisons, stick its beasts in cages, strip it of its trees, suck out its oil, foul its air? Who do we think we are?
If any individual invited as a guest into a private home behaved the way we do collectively toward the earth, they would be thrown out into the street and arrested. Yet when it comes to us, and our behavior, we don’t want to hear about it. Unless someone can show us, in commodity and/or pleasure value terms, how our behavior is adversely and concretely diminishing our future sense of market security. Notice, for example, that while we all seem to reluctantly agree that the consumption of gas and petro-fuel is threatening our ecosystem, we are only now responding en masse to the crisis, we are only now considering the wisdom of buses and trains and clean public transportation, because oil has rocketed to $145 per barrel. Threatening the size of our bank accounts. Similarly, the SF Chronicle seems to think that the only reason we would care about the potentially catastrophic disappearance of the honeybee population is to tell us how our favorite ice cream flavor might double in price. Or, gasp, all-together disappear.
But this market-based concern, angle, and hook that we seem to now want to frame the environmental crisis in is the very root of the problem in the first place. The environmental crisis is not only about us, and our precious financial prospects. Some things in life cannot be encased, nor referenced with this kind of language and mentality. But our moral frequency as a species has been lowered to an alarmingly pedestrian level. Look how our technological capacity and empirical knowledge has soared to almost incomprehensible heights. But our sense of duty and personal responsibility to each other, our fellow plants and animals, and the very earth who gave, sustains, and makes possible our lives has remained at a dismal, subterranean level.
To reshape the impending environmental crisis, we do not need to make better machines. We do not need to use sexy financial language, nor create impressive market incentive packages. We need to remember who the hell we are. Where we came from. Who sustains our lives. What kind of responsibilities – so easily bestowed onto the backs of others - actually lie squarely on our own shoulders. Because proper, clear, independent action can never be harvested from transitory references to shifting market concerns. This is more shit that we made up. Proper action can only come with a shift in awareness regarding who we actually are. As beings, as individuals, and as caretakers of the earth. This clearer vision of our embodiment, and our state of being is what will shift and drive appropriate action.
If the honeybees die, and the almond trees die, and the strawberries die, and the crops shrivel and die, and the fields lie fallow, and the ecosystem collapses, and the air fills with CO2, and the rains don’t come, and the tides shift and stop, and the sun bakes the entire surface of the earth into a single flat desert, the last thing we will be thinking about is ice cream and business executives down at Haagen-Dazs headquarters. So why are we discussing them now? Surely we are capable of more than this.
