Silent Spring: The Sequel

A few years back I was finally able to purchase a small piece of property in New Hampshire with the intention of devoting it to my favorite group of wild animals: the arthropods. I don’t mow or rake, removed most of the outdoor lighting, built a pond habitat and planted native flowers. It took a few years to get it going, but this summer it is in full bloom, and it is a beautiful mess: my very own nature sanctuary, alive with buzzing, flying, ticking and stridulating, an organic orgy of offensiveness to the human desire to control and contain.  But hold on. Wait a minute. Where the heck is everybody? I stare at the bewildered blossoms in anguish. There is simply nobody there.

Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m exaggerating.  A few bugs, bumblebees, or thread-waisted wasps stumble by occasionally and a handful of frantic moths flitter up my kitchen window at night. However, the overall reaction to my humble effort to support the most maligned and misunderstood group of animals in the world? It can only be described as pathetic, and I’ve been on the planet long enough to know that it isn’t normal.

You see, I was a born arthropod enthusiast. As a child I would spend most of my swimming time, in the face of great ridicule, heroically rescuing drowning insects.  On road trips, when my father pulled over cursing to cleanse the windshield of sticky green hemolymph, I would wander off to the streetlights in search of Luna moths and Dobsonflies. They were everywhere. At night, in the suburbs, our lighted windows were just teeming with segmented critters of all shapes and sizes. They were prolific, incredibly diverse and seemingly invincible.

Later, I went to school for entomology. Even then, in the 1990s, insects were so easy to find that I was able to assemble a passable collection a week before it was due. Now? I would probably earn a D-.

But don’t take my word for it. This is not just local, temporary or anecdotal. Insects are in dire straits all over the world and the consensus is in: three major culprits are climate change, habitat destruction and pesticides. As our population inevitably expands, we take more land for ourselves and leave less of it for the rest of the species that share our planet.

This is not something that is going to happen, it is happening now. It is happening everywhere. People, this is the sixth major extinction event, and it is human caused: Silent Spring, the sequel.

Climate change is a crisis and biodiversity loss is a connected, but essentially separate one. We cannot, in our important efforts to transition to a green economy, ignore our impact on biodiversity. We cannot continue to rip apart forests and pave everything over while erecting solar and wind farms or destroy habitat mining metals for electric cars.

There are many selfish and practical reasons to be concerned about this problem, but I’m only going to present one: as go the arthropods, so goes the rest of nature. I imagine there are people out there who would say: “So what? Humans will survive. Who needs nature? We’ll live in a barren, desolate landscape and eat cockroaches for lunch. They’ll still be around.”

However, if you’ve ever been struck by a bird, dragonfly, frog or snake; If you’ve ever watched the itsy-bitsy spider climb up the waterspout; if you’ve ever caught a glimpse of a tiger beetle and just been dumbfounded by its beauty. Even if you’ve ever gotten a butterfly tattoo: you have some connection to nature, and you have some reason to care.  

The good news is that nature is resilient. Together, we may be able to pull it back from the brink, but it is going to first require an immediate and massive adjustment in the way most of us think. A shift from a mindset of destruction and control to one of creation and relinquishment needs to occur. We need to take radical action, but, more importantly, radical inaction.  At every level:  industry, government, and in our everyday lives, we need to find value in nature, embrace it,  and then, after that, we need to leave it alone.  

Wisdom

 Then came the toxic gas.
A few weeks after the Arby's manager
got locked in the walk-in and froze to death. 
Long since the scaffolding of the scared, zig-zag mind
had been erected and
way before the lonely languor of the last butterfly. 
The gas came defecating through the border stalls, 
A  waste product 
Of human stagnation. 

Advocate for yourself!

You must crawl around the office with staples on your knees,
Do cartwheels on the copier
Or lick my shiny shoes.
You have to pay your dues!
 
If you want a raise, you must show praise,
Some fucking gratitude.
Roll over on your back
So I can defile your bulges of fat
with sticky notes and thumbtacks.
 
I see you every day,
In your Goodwill casual,
Thinking you can get away
With just doing your job well,
Showing up on time,
And punching out at five.
 
You clueless clod.
The world belongs
To those of us who know
How to put on a show.

Open letter to the American Meat Eater

Animals feel pain and have some level of self-awareness. They have individual personalities and emotions. They experience fear. It is true that a pig can’t do math problems, but neither can your two-year-old. Intelligence has little to do with suffering. Fear and pain are not advanced cognitive states.

Look at your dog or cat. What makes a cow, pig. or bird any different? Put your beloved pet in the place of a suffering animal. For this exercise, I’ll avoid some of the most horrific things we do to animals but imagine being mutilated without anesthesia, stuck in a trap, or spending an entire life in a cold metal cage only slightly larger than the body it contains.   

Stop the blatant denial. Stop disassociating that slab of meat on your plate with a pain-feeling, self-aware organism. The reason vegans at the dinner table make you uncomfortable is not because they are self-righteous and smug. It’s because, deep down, you know they are right. You don’t want to face this eye blinding truth because you have invested so much. You’d have to admit that you’ve been living a lie and enabling savagery. Fess up so society can move forward.  

Now that we’ve covered that, let’s go a little further. Wild animals also have nervous systems. They can feel pain and have some level of consciousness.  A fox, a skunk, a mouse, even a snake.  Too far? I would go to the lobster level, but I don’t think you’re ready. You might start accusing me of being absurd. For now, let’s stick to animals with feathers and fur.

By the way, plants do not have nervous systems. I’m not sure what is happening with plants, but they do not have pain receptors and they do not have brains. Stop making false equivalencies between cows and cabbages and declaring that that takes care of it. A cabbage does not play. A cabbage doesn’t have a personality. It doesn’t feel pain and it is not self-aware.

Animals need to have their basic needs met and that is more than just food and water. One of those basic needs is space. Another is to be free from torture. A third is social interaction. These are not outrageous demands. No reasonable person is claiming that chickens should have access to the internet. Chickens don’t care about the internet. They just want to scratch around in the dirt, stretch their wings and make funny noises.

Animal rights and human rights are not an either-or proposition. In fact, they are the same. All animals have a right to a full life, and this includes humans. A full life for a cow is not the same as a full life for a human, but we have some needs in common. Examples would include food, water, space, social interaction, and freedom from torture.

I know that nature is cruel, but this is not an excuse. Unlike mother nature, humans have agency and empathy. We can do better. Being more intellectually advanced does not give us permission to be cruel. In fact, I’d argue, it gives us a mandate to be kind.

Animals feel pain and have some level of self-awareness. They have individual personalities and emotions. They experience fear. I’m not telling you what to do about it, I’m just asking you to accept it. The collective cognitive dissonance must be broken, or we cannot have any meaningful action on animal rights.

 

The Artist on the Side of the Road

Untouchable artists, tossed aside.

That silver taxi won't take us for a ride. 

But we do art just to survive. 

You can throw that out, too, when we die. 

Puny Statues

 The gods are glaring at me. 
They boast, "Ha! Look at us:
Frozen in space and  carved so fine. 
You are clumsy, wet, impermanent!
You wish, wash, slush around. 
We know and are on solid ground."

I take the puny statues
Crush them with my hammer. 
"Ha," I say, 
"Seems you have forgotten 
who is constructed of clay." 

You Have Nothing to Lose but Your 401K

 

A coworker of mine is turning sixty-five and is going to retire right away. She and her husband have worked all their lives and are ready to enjoy some free time.

“I’d like to travel,” she says. I nod my head supportively until she tosses in a grim caveat. “But we have to do it soon.” She sweeps her hand across her obese body, as if submitting it into evidence, “We don’t have much time left.”

I utter some encouraging phrases before heading to my own health wrecking office considering the pervasiveness of this story. It could be dubbed “the retirement fallacy”: buying into the notion that a life spent working in exchange for a few blissful decades at the end is a good bet. Not so, if one arrives at retirement age sick and broken, the money saved for that trip around the world vanishing into medical bills.

Of course, there is a “choice” component to a healthy lifestyle, but working full time clearly discourages it. First, deliberate exercise and healthful meal preparation require time. Once all the average working person’s hours are truly accounted for, there is very little of that left. Meanwhile, the chronic stress associated with the often-grueling activities of working-class jobs leaves a person exhausted at the end of the day. The activities often used for recovery, like smoking, drinking, or watching television, further erode the working persons’ health. Many a treadmill bought and abandoned in the living room, sufficing as an expensive coat rack.

My more conspiratorial self is tempted to call the retirement fallacy a deliberate arrangement: a scheme that has been inflicted on the working class since its advent. The concept of retirement is dangled like a swinging chocolate carrot, enticing the worker to sacrifice her peak years making other people rich, spoil her health in the process, only to get shipped off to the packer when she is no longer useful: an entire class of Orwellian Boxers.

It is for this reason that I am not waiting for some enlightened rich person to normalize the twenty-hour work week; as of several months ago, I adopted it anyway.  I’ll put it into words the investor class can understand: I am choosing to spread my retirement out over the remainder of my life instead of taking it as one lump sum.

The benefits of working part time have been well documented. It is not just for physical health; it improves mental health, lowers stress, and increases happiness.  I’ve noticed that there is more time for self-improvement: more time for creative endeavors and DIY projects. There is less of an impact on the environment. I am driving less, consuming less, and attempting to raise some of my own food. I am still “working”, but I can see the direct results.    

I realize that most people are not able to do this.  A combination of luck, choice, preferences, and privileges make this plan viable for me. For example, if my mind remains sharp, I have the type of job I can do well into my old age.  I earn enough of an hourly wage so I can still afford the basics while working fewer hours. The most glaring advantage of all? I have no kids. Because of these factors and more, I have the option to be poor.

Naturally, there are risks. The most striking is ageism: just because I’m able to work doesn’t mean the job market will have me.  Also, an unfortunate life event, like a chronic illness, would indeed spoil my plans. However, even if I unleashed my full-time earning potential now, a catastrophe would exhaust my meager savings very quickly. Besides, by investing in my health, I am mitigating much of that risk.

I’ll admit that for some, mostly the wealthy, the retirement life-structure works beautifully. For others, retirement may not be the anticipated reward, but simply icing on the cake.  Because of a full-time commitment, a working person can reap all the benefits of modern society and live comfortably. That may be enough for some people, but I’m sure there are many who feel shafted, as I do.   

Thwarting my indoctrination is not easy, and I worry about the barriers that a society hellbent on destroying me will accomplish just that. However, I refuse to continuously subsidize the rich with my time and labor at the expense of my health and happiness. I am choosing time over money. I’m investing in my health instead of my 401K.