Living in the Anthropocene

by W. John Kress

  I was raised, on the coast of British Columbia, to believe that the rain forests exist to be cut. This was the essence of the ideology of scientific forestry that I studied in school and practiced in the woods as a logger. My cultural perspective was profoundly different from that of the First Nations, including those living on Vancouver Island at the time of European contact and their descendants who are still there. If I was sent into the forest to cut it down, a Kwakwaka’wakw youth of similar age was traditionally dispatched during his Hamatsa initiation into that same forest to confront Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven—cannibal spirits who live at the north end of the world—with the goal of returning triumphant to the potlatch as a fully socialized human being infused with spiritual discipline and fortitude. The point is not to ask or suggest which perspective is right or wrong. Is the forest mere cellulose and board feet? Was it truly the domain of spirits? Is a mountain a sacred place? Does a river really follow the ancestral path of an anaconda? Who is to say? Ultimately, these are not the important questions.

  What matters is the potency of a belief, the manner in which a conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people, for in a very real sense this determines the ecological footprint of a culture, the impact that any society has on its environment. A child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will be a profoundly different human being than a youth brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined. A Kwakwaka’wakw boy raised to revere the coastal forests as a realm of the divine will be a different person than a Canadian child taught that such forests are destined to be logged. The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of its people and the quality of their aspirations, which are revealed by the nature of the metaphors that propel them onward.

  Herein, perhaps, lies the essence of the relationship between many indigenous peoples and the natural world. Life amid the malarial swamps of New Guinea, the chilly winds of Tibet, or the white heat of the Sahara leaves little room for sentiment. Nostalgia is not a trait commonly associated with the Inuit. Before the arrival of industrial logging, nomadic hunters and gatherers in Borneo had little overt sense of stewardship of mountain forests that they lacked the technical capacity to destroy. What these cultures have done, however, is to forge through time and ritual a relationship to Earth that is based not only on deep attachment to the land but also on a far more subtle intuition—the idea that the land itself is breathed into being by human consciousness. Mountains, rivers, and forests are not perceived as inanimate, as mere props on a stage upon which the human drama unfolds. For these societies, the land is alive, a dynamic force to be embraced and transformed by the human imagination.

  As we move forward, it behooves us to listen to the voices of the many hundreds of cultures struggling to be part of the global dialogue that will define the future of life on Earth. There are currently fifteen hundred languages gathered around the campfire of the Internet, and the number is increasing by the week. These indigenous voices matter because they can still remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual, and ecological space. The point is not to naïvely suggest that we attempt to mimic the ways of nonindustrial societies, or to ask any culture to forfeit its right to benefit from the genius of technology. It is, rather, to draw inspiration and comfort from the facts that the path we have taken is not the only one available and that our destiny is therefore not indelibly written in a set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proved not to be fully wise. By their very existence, the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say that we cannot change, as we all know we must change the fundamental way that we inhabit the planet.

  LOCATING OURSELVES IN RELATION TO THE NATURAL WORLD

  LINDSAY L. CLARKSON

  A certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.

  —POPE FRANCIS, LAUDATO SI’: ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME (2015)

  In his Laudato si’, Pope Francis reviews the current state of human impact on Earth, linking our treatment of the environment to the uneasy state of our internal worlds. He highlights the spiritual alienation and the pervasive sense of emotional impoverishment in our acquisitive society. He calls on us to pay attention to and take responsibility for our interaction with the natural world: “to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus discover what each of us can do about it.”

  The pope’s proposition is familiar territory to the discipline of psychoanalysis, which is uniquely concerned with how our internal worlds affect our recognition of and interaction with external reality. A central premise of psychoanalysis is that unconscious fantasies about the nature of the relationships we carry within us serve to organize our engagements with other people and with the natural world. Although we would prefer to think that we interact logically and rationally, in reality we are pressured and influenced by emotionally charged fantasies of “the way things are.”

  All awareness and aliveness is accompanied not only by well-being and satisfaction but also by pain, envy of others, and frustrations caused by limitations inherent in the perception of dependence, separateness, and mortality. We all must encounter and try to cope with such facts of life. There are two fundamentally different ways to react to the problems intrinsic to human awareness: toleration and evasion. We can bear with the frustrations and losses that are a part of being alive, or we can make every effort to destroy our knowledge of the situation that leads to pain.

  Psychoanalysts locate the primitive origins of the divergence in means of psychological coping with disappointment in the complexity of mother-and-infant interactions. From the infant’s point of view, one would think that being held, fed, and nurtured would be ideal and sustaining. But to be dependent on another person means acknowledging that one is not omnipotent and not in charge of limitless resources. Someone else has a bounty not possessed by oneself. Envy and a feeling of humiliating smallness can ensue, interfering with a good feeding relationship between the baby and the mother. The fact that the person on whom one depends has finite attention and resources, including a restricted life-span, may arouse such a terror that the awareness itself may feel unbearable.

  Human dependence on the natural environment evokes similar anxieties. We can be primarily in tune with the natural world, receiving from nature, as the pope’s encyclical advises, “what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand.” In this frame of mind, there is an acceptance of the human place in the web of life, which encompasses knowledge of biological complexity, the passage of time, and mortality. There is a comfort and a secure home in knowledge of ourselves as part of a larger natural system that we cannot control but nevertheless depend upon. However, if dependency is equated with humiliation, we reject such a place and seek dominion over the environment. We take from the natural world ruthlessly and discard as rubbish what is not immediately useful or monetarily valuable, with an omnipotent fantasy of limitless resources and no bounds to growth. Because of our projected aggression, the environmental situation can become menacing in our minds, leading to a cycle of dangerous amplification.

  We are perpetually in internal conflict: should we embrace and safeguard our interdependence with the wider natural world or turn toward illusion, disavowing our dependence on Earth’s finite resources, acting as though anything we wish were possible? In today’s world, societal forces encourage us to be distracted by acquisition rather than to find solace in living in reality, tolerating the perennial complexity of balancing restraint and satisfaction. A secure, primarily benevolent relationship to our internal objects allows tolerance of worry and frustration, and may shift the balance toward bearing a sense of responsibility for our common environment and toward taking action on its behalf.

  Two poems by W. S. Merwin
illustrate these different intrapsychic positions with respect to nature. Merwin is a poet of exquisite sensitivity to the natural environment and its vulnerability to human impact and interference. Evoking the beauty and continuing process of nature, he is able to situate human existence, with its complexity of aggressiveness, love, loss, and mourning, within the cycles of the natural world.

  To the Insects

  Elders

  we have been here so short a time

  and we pretend that we have invented memory

  we have forgotten what it is like to be you

  who do not remember us

  we remember imagining that what survived us

  would be like us

  and would remember the world as it appears to us

  but it will be your eyes that fill with light

  we kill you again and again

  we turn into you

  eating the forests

  eating the earth and water

  and dying of them

  departing from ourselves

  leaving you the morning

  in its antiquity

  Here Merwin is speaking to the insects, to us fellow human sojourners, and to himself in a thought experiment that probes the mind-set of someone who finds our links to animal life unbearable. The narrator—a first-person plural human voice that addresses the insects as “elders”—describes a state of mind in which humans have set themselves apart from nature and, by doing so, depart from themselves. He alludes to the losses inherent in alienating ourselves from the community of life in order to create beliefs to protect ourselves from the awareness of the natural limits of our existence. Knowledge of reality is evaded through distortion of memory, dislocation from the natural world, and the fantasy that ravenous consumption and destruction can continue without consequences. The narrator intimates that he is aware of his evasion of knowledge but cannot face up to truth in a sustained way: “departing from ourselves // leaving you the morning / in its antiquity.”

  Merwin describes a bleak end to human existence. No comfort prevails in the mechanical, persecutory take-over by insects. The view is paranoid: insects in this poem are not objects of love or objects of appreciation for the intricacies of their lives and the important and complex roles they play in interrelationships between growth and decay. The light in their eyes is devoid of warmth. We imagine the narrator: lonely, disconnected, hunkered down in fear or aggressively denying that limits to his desires exist. Such a state of mind would not lead to environmental concern.

  Twenty years later, Merwin draws us into a different position:

  The Laughing Thrush

  O nameless joy of the morning

  tumbling upward note by note out of the night

  and the hush of the dark valley

  and out of whatever has not been there

  song unquestioning and unbounded

  yes this is the place and the one time

  in the whole of before and after

  with all of memory waking into it

  and the lost visages that hover

  around the edge of sleep

  constant and clear

  and the words that lately have fallen silent

  to surface among the phrases of some future

  if there is a future

  here is where they all sing the first daylight

  whether or not there is anyone listening

  Immediately the reader is struck by the warmer, fuller emotional tone of this poem. The poet is a listener, appreciative at a musical level. He is describing a moment in time, the song “tumbling upward” from the darkness. The darkness is not unfriendly; it is the source of richness. The bird’s song reflects a way of being that is unlike that of a person, who is always questioning and bounded by individual self-consciousness. The narrator expresses tolerance for the unknown, the hush, the dark valley. Instead of antagonism or irritability, we are situated in a deep sense of time ongoing: “in the whole of before and after / with all of memory waking into it.” The listener is awakened to all of the reverberations in his or her own memories, moved by conscious and unconscious stirrings. In a reverie, the narrator is aware of “the lost visages.” He is receptive, letting them come. The visages are not at all vague. The strength of the images in the narrator’s mind’s eye implies a sturdy relationship to a good internal object. In this state of mind, primitive anxieties are diminished. With an appreciation of the fullness of life, a tolerance for mortality, and a relaxation into the continuity of nonhuman life, one can imagine such a person roused to action to preserve the natural world.

  These two poems by Merwin clearly illustrate the opposing states of mind that coexist within each of us in an ongoing equilibrium. How we interact with the natural world depends on the inner emotional climate we inhabit most of the time. The preponderance of human effects on Earth at the present time reflect the ruthless, dominating, and omnipotent aspects of our nature. But with encouragement and a sense of belonging, we can face up to the anxieties stirred by our ancient dependence on Earth’s resources and by our part in the damage already inflicted on the environment in which we live. From this position, we can discover what each of us might contribute to a more benign and reparative engagement with the natural world.

  TEMPERATE FORESTS

  A TALE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

  SEAN M. McMAHON

  A fascinating feature of folk stories is the emergence of similar narrative themes in diverse cultures, independent of language or location. These commonalities flow from the universal ability of stories to impart lessons, offering morality tales, cautions about dangers, and guides for life’s transitions. The Anthropocene has defined a new era of Earth’s story, as humans have ceased to be simply characters in and instead have become formidable writers of this planet’s tale. Forests, for example, feature in many folktales and yet can be seen as their own tale. Spanning millennia and cultures—from medieval Europe through imperial China to the development of a global timber trade—humans have consistently told a similar story through their relationship to forests, from timber removal to forest management and from fear through conquest to concern. The tale of temperate forests exemplifies the way in which humans have confronted and been forced to understand and reconsider the biological world that they have so aggressively disrupted and yet into which they have always been integrated.

  For thousands of years, humans have drastically altered the terrestrial world between the tropics and the polar circles. Despite a limited growing season, sufficient rainfall and summer temperatures across these regions permit the growth of highly productive forests that contain some of the largest organisms on Earth. The remaining colossal redwood and sequoia groves in California, the stems of Eucalypus regnans in Australia that rise to more than three hundred feet, and photographs from the 1920s of giant American chestnut trees in the preblight years are clear examples of the incredible potential for exuberant life in these systems. Yet the same rich soils that support these forests are also part of the arable land that allowed the development of human civilization.

  Because good land for trees is often good land for crops and domesticated animals, forests around the world compete with crops and animal husbandry, two fundamental requirements of subsistence living everywhere. A third requirement is shelter, and the trees felled to make way for food can be used as materials for habitation or for fire. It takes little imagination to envision how forested regions of the temperate world were repeatedly and persistently invaded over the past several millennia by human settlements, small scars within intact forested landscapes, appearing and expanding along rivers and trails. From the perspective of these small colonies, however, forests were more than just an obstacle to subsistence. They also invoked a sense of menace. They were dark and forbidding and served as a refuge for very real threats. These woods, which were everywhere between towns, were considered wilderness, and not in the contemporary sense of “pure” or “natural” but in King Henry IV’s meaning when he says
, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, “O my poor kingdom…! O thou wilt be a wilderness again, Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!” Wilderness is the antithesis of settled civilized life, and to some, forests exemplified this opposite. The benefits, then, of clearing forests are land for pasture or crops, wood for structures and fires, and the security and almost moral virtue of “taming” a threatening wild.

  As economies developed, however, new patterns emerged in the story of humans and forests. Whether in China in the fourth century, Western Europe after the Renaissance, or New England in the seventeenth century, forests shifted from an obstacle to settlement to a resource for civilization. Naval dominance by Britain required ships, and ships required wood—up to six thousand mature oak trees for a single ship. With England largely deforested, the American colonies became a critical source of timber. The iron industry’s need for wood-derived charcoal, which began as early as the fifteenth century, stressed the remnant forests of Europe and eventually affected forests throughout the world. The loss of forest cover led the expanding industries of the nineteenth century to switch from charcoal to fossil fuels such as coal. In Asia, population increases in the premodern era matched accelerated declines in remnant forests. As in Europe, the percentage of forested land remaining at the start of the Industrial Revolution was due to variations in the landscape or the culture: forests remained in locations that were difficult to access, holy, or preserved for elites (such as for hunting) or had slopes too steep for farming, grazing, or easy timber harvest. When the good timber was gone, the remaining trees were used as pulp for paper or charcoal for stoves. Regardless of the different times when these geographically distant societies changed their use of the forests they controlled, the reduction of those forests to their lowest extents converged around the middle of the nineteenth century. Gradually, these societies began to understand that the resource they had taken for granted was being exhausted. Attention to the regrowth and management of forests was needed.