The Nihilists Among and Within Us

I am aghast at my own interior question as I read a comment on a post about Wendell Berry.

I’m a fan, so I bring my own prejudices and presuppositions as I read.

But I’m also a fan not just of Mr. Berry, but of my species.  Turns out I’m not alone in that, but also turns out that not all of we humans feel the same way.

So I read a comment from (I am guessing) a young man with only some identifying initials as his tag, a comment that suggests the earth will only be safe from humans when (a) there are less of us and (b) a tyrant with the vision and will to impose it emerges who will force us to submit to the author’s vision of what it will take to save planet earth from us (including, apparently, making plans for the lessening of us).

Why am I so aghast with myself?

Because the hubris attacked is the hubris displayed and my internal reaction is to invite the author into his own logic, which is a form of invitation to his own suicide.

For if one really believes (or so I am thinking) that there need be less of us, should not the proponent of the lessening go first, lead the way, annihilate self to save earth?  Does not the one who suggests tyranny as a form of problem solving inevitably see himself either as the tyrant or on the tyrant’s side?  When does the proponent of tyranny ever volunteer to be on the losing side of the tyrant’s rage?  When someone suggests destruction as the solution, when do they ever imagine it as their destruction or their destruction alone?

I have no patience for the illogic of the one who would claim to solve any problem by killing simply because they never seem to simply go quietly into their own good night without wanting to take a whole host of the rest of us along for the ride.

All of that gets wrapped in a nanosecond of a kernel of a thought in my own head, none the kinder for its locus – the thought that he who would wish for the end of his species is more than welcome to go first.

And I am aghast.

For I am not the young man I presume to be writing.

His view is not my own.

Yet how easy to succumb to the death view of things even in my own thinking.

One cannot taunt someone into suicide and think one’s self civilized, let alone godly and loving.

How easy it is to allow the anger of the other to infect my own thinking.

I am aghast.

And the enemy – well, she is me.

No More Sweeping Under the Rug

This isn’t science.  It’s probably not even logic.  It’s simply feeling.

I am hugely in favor of environmental protection.  I am a product of a successful education campaign when I was young, which imprinted on my young brain the importance of preserving the earth and all that dwells within it.

So I am a logical suspect to peg as being against wind mills on mountaintops . . . against mountaintop removal . . . against off-shore oil exploration . . . against pipelines running through a primary aquifer . . .

And it’s true to a certain extent: my impulse is to be against all of these things.

But, and it is a significant but . . . I have spent time in Iraq (with CPT, a faith-based violence reduction organization) and that time changed something about me that I didn’t expect.

My time in Iraq changed how I see environmental issues.

On top of war and the ruinous devastations of war, I have also witnessed in Iraq the disastrous impact of unchecked exploitation of resources such as oil and unregulated industries such as cement factories on the people of Iraq.

I actually asked a physician once if Palestinians were more prone to asthma than other groups since the Iraqi Palestinian children we accompanied to the Syrian and Jordanian borders all suffered from acute asthma.  The doctor was a kind soul, so he didn’t make fun of me for the stupid question.  Instead, he reminded me of what I had already seen and experienced: the pervasive pollution in Iraq, which is killing its population.

Many days, the skies in the south are black from oil burning and the massive use of gasoline generators to provide in-home electricity.  Many days, when I blew my nose, the tissue would be black.

It wasn’t the childrens’ Palestinian ancestry that attacked their lungs; it was the Iraqi air.

In the north, the pollution from the cement factories covers the land with white smog clouds.

I understand the complexities of a war fought in large measure about our import of oil.  I did not understand that we are exporting our pollution as much as we are importing their oil.

And that is what has changed my mind.

Creative Commons Image by Ferdi Rizkiyanto

If I am going to drive my car; if I am going to use electricity; if I am going to be a disproportionate consumer of the resources of the world (which, as a United States citizen, I am), it only seems fair to me that the results of that consumption be something I must look at up and close and personal, in my own back yard.

We in these United States have proven thus far that our consumption will not be reduced by attempts to price us out of the market.  We have proven that we will go to any lengths, economically, diplomatically, militarily, to preserve our perceived ‘right’ to consume at an unchecked pace.

And I am as guilty as the next person, perhaps even more so.

But maybe, just maybe, if the windmills sit atop my mountains . . . if the tops of my mountains are removed . . . if the oil derricks sit where I must look upon them every day . . . if I can no longer sweep the real harm my consuming ways does to this planet under the rug of my feigned ignorance . . . maybe then I’ll change my ways.

Maybe.