The World is Your Oyster
The only home that humanity has ever known stands on the brink of a catastrophic calamity. The repeated calls to action from scientists, activists, and concerned parties alike have been met with little enthusiasm. I will not go into the gory details of the looming climate crisis, partly because many books and Hollywood blockbusters have already been dedicated to that, but mostly because people cannot be frightened into caring. My belief, which I will explore and attempt to give a proto-solution to here, is that we are at a point where most people just do not care.
The piece I wrote earlier this year on the climate crisis was motivated by the belief that what we have is an awareness problem. For so long I have been convinced that all that was needed was for people to understand the gravity of the situation, then they might be persuaded to act. ‘Give people the facts, and they’ll act ‘rationally’,’ I thought. I have since realized that most people are well-informed. Not only about climate change, but about every societal ill that ails our world. In this age of ‘hashtag’ activism and apocalypse porn, it’s very difficult for someone to claim not to know that there’s something very wrong with the world as we’ve created it. Understandably, there are optimists amidst us who see this as the best time to be alive, but for most people, the gap between seeing problems in the world and wanting to do something about them is presently insurmountable.
There is no shortage of crises from which to pick to illustrate my point, but one notable example is the global food crisis. According to UNICEF, 2018a, approximately 3.1 million children die daily from famine and disease. Most of us have seen the YouTube ads asking for donations. Most people reading this won’t know any of the people affected directly by this — at least, not personally. Whether our countries border those that are ravaged by war and famine or we are halfway across the world, the very fact of us not experiencing that alongside them makes it very difficult to relate and, by extension, care. It’s one thing seeing and reading about suffering through a tiny glass screen while sitting locked away in our comfortable homes and another thing getting in touch with it. The reality is that many of us are seriously out of touch — with nature, with ourselves, with the rest of humanity.
We can probably trace this alienation back to the start of the Industrial Revolution. As we built these massive, concrete structures, we found ourselves in new homes that isolated us from nature. We hid behind sky-high walls, further reinforcing the myth that we stand apart from nature. It became man vs. nature never with nature. And, in those less than 300 years, we have come, on many occasions, dangerously close to complete self-annihilation. I won’t claim that this correlation means causation, but it says a lot that, for all our achievements in prolonging human life, we have also become experts at ending it prematurely — not only for ourselves but for all life as we know it. But, how can we care about life when we have become so disconnected from it?
My view is that most of us live with the notion that existence is a given, not something that we are lucky to have. Richard Dawkins, for me, said it best when he said ‘we are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.’. It’s mostly agreed upon in the scientific community that the odds of the proverbial stars aligning perfectly for us to end up where we are today were astronomical, and yet here we are, alive and kicking. Most people explain this away through religion, even though a growing number are becoming dissatisfied with this papering over of the cracks in our understanding of reality. The majesty of the incomprehensible world that we’re born into, its true beauty and wonder have been lost to us as we have locked ourselves away in our cities. This process of separating ourselves from nature has also succeeded in stripping us of the recognition of our shared humanity. It is hard to say if we still recognize the shared battle for survival between ourselves and other living creatures on this planet, but, at the moment, it does not seem like we do.
And every day on the evening news, they feed you fear for free
And you so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me
Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, “I can’t breathe”
And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV
The most you give’s a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy- Killer Mike, walking in the snow — Run The Jewels
Indeed, it is not just the damage to nature or the suffering of people very far away from us that we have become out of touch with. There is a sense in which we have become desensitized, somehow stripped of the ability to empathize with the plight of innocents. It is that desensitization that leads someone to watch a video of an innocent man being choked to death and think that an appropriate response to that is an attempt at justification. Part of this can be blamed on the medium — the way television and social media are structured — there is always the next thing to skip to, with no time to sit and contemplate whatever atrocities we have just witnessed. The other thing may just be that most of us receive such a constant barrage of horrible news with so little background and context that they have lost all significance. In the end, everything just seems so disconnected that we can make very little sense of it and it all seems far too confusing for us to imagine that we can come up with solutions.
For most of us, this alienation is the norm. Most of you were born and raised in the city just as I was, and never had the chance to commune with nature. In this regard, we have a lot to learn from the few remaining untouched, pre-industrial tribes of the world. While we have grown to see technology and all our little gizmos as indispensable, there is a (constantly shrinking) world out there filled with people who live long, fulfilling lives without them. In these people, we see an oneness with nature that we could never aspire to. It should go without saying that no one loves the Congo or Amazon rainforests as much as the indigenous tribes that call them their homes. We laugh off their love of the environment, but in the same way that we would rather not see our cities crushed to rubble and dust, they, too, would prefer not to see their homes destroyed.
It took me 11 years to bring myself to watch James Cameron’s Avatar, and while many moments stood out for me, there was none more telling than the fact that humans had already set up schools on Pandora. We are always quick to want to teach; we assume that we have so much wisdom to share, and maybe by our definition of knowledge we do, but that is in no way universal. Our science and technology bias has us convinced that knowledge in those two areas is the height of all knowledge, but that seems, to me, to be a baseless assumption. Once in a while we should stop and ask ourselves if we should not be the ones learning from others. From our lofty perch, we look down upon indigenous tribes and think their lives must be so terrible that we have to share what we know with them to improve their lives — to make them more like us. But one quick look around reveals a different reality. After all, are we not the ones whose societies have been ravaged by depression, anxiety, and alcohol and drug abuse? Are we not the ones whose societies are experiencing ever-rising suicide rates? If our version of civilization is so great then why are so many people in a rush to clock out?
It may not be obvious but we traded in a lot to put ourselves in the position that we find ourselves in today; most importantly our relationship with the environment. We exist, today, apart from it, not as part of it. Was it all worth it? One has to wonder how different our lives were when we were not constantly obsessing about looking good, healthy, and successful for people on the internet (whom we probably don’t even know), or being incessantly judgmental and opinionated about the lives of so-called celebrities who don’t even know that we exist. Was it better than this? Would things be better if our lives did not revolve around this constant pressure to measure up and ‘be something’ as opposed to just being? That is more or less the life I imagine that our indigenous counterparts live in the most remote places on our planet. Their time and energy are spent on caring about their homes and families, then we disrupt that serenity by trying to ‘civilize’ them.
As I mentioned earlier, the advancement of technology has gifted us with increasingly elaborate ways to harm both our planet and ourselves on a grander scale than ever before. The problems that we face today as a civilization will not be solved by tiny, isolated groups of people no matter how hard they try. Such a massive undertaking will require us to come together. Global problems need global solutions, but it is hard to put that into practice when we are so far removed from those very problems. The best that we can do is to find our little pockets of joy where we can reconnect with our world and learn to love it again. Most of us can find a place, whether in our hometowns, or close to home, or just any place that we have strong ties to. We can focus on it and find that place in our hearts that does not want to see it destroyed. Loving our homes is the first step, then we can radiate this love outwards, using it to support those who are in desperate fights to preserve their homes, too. No one can save the world alone, but we all call tiny pieces of this planet home, and if we can do right by our homes, then we might just stand a chance.
In writing this, I found myself fixating on the significance of the 1960s and 70s. Something happened back then, something powerful. A decision was made, consciously or otherwise, by the young generation back then to exert themselves on the world. They sought to break chains and upset the order that had dominated their lives, declaring then that the world was theirs to mold as they saw fit. The forcefulness with which they fought birthed movements whose battles are still being fought today. That period represents a triumph over apathy and passivity that we need now more than ever. We need to collectively decide that just accepting the world as it is will not suffice.
For most people, however, none of this is important as long as it is not feeding or entertaining them. That is a fact that we must contend with. In the process of ‘civilizing’ society, we have built a world in which caring about such issues is a luxury that most people either cannot afford or will not spare time for. Unfortunate as it is, this issue forces us to confront the truly fundamental questions: why are we here? Why are we (as far as we know) both the only species capable of this much destruction as well as the only one capable of comprehending the consequences of the damage we cause? Should that not make a difference in how we evaluate our actions? Are we just here to consume and destroy then die? The solution to our problems, some have proposed, is to simply remove ourselves from nature, but I do not think that is a feasible solution. We are a part of nature, a product of it, and what we must seek is to reclaim our place alongside the other living creatures of this planet. That is how we save our world.
Beyond that, there is no real recipe for our salvation, but there are things that we can do. We can start by falling back in love with life, with nature, with the environment, with ourselves. We can be less passive, instead of just accepting the cards as they have been dealt. Certain things are inescapable parts of existence; death, illness, loneliness, to name a few, but others are not. Some suffering is unnecessary, too easily stopped for us to claim that ‘that is just the way the world is’. Most things are the way they are because someone decided that they should be that way and subsequent generations reinforced them. Shakespeare once said something akin to ‘the world is your oyster,’ — I have no idea what he meant, but what I do know is that the world can be, to you, whatever you want it to be as long as you care about that thing enough to want to save it.
