Thoughts on Earth Day: Addressing the Epidemic of Alienation
...why it is so difficult to get people to do right by the earth, other people, and even the well-being of their own children in the immediate future?
By Jim Miller
If you are awake and aware, life in the Anthropocene means being a witness to the death of nature on so many fronts it’s sometimes hard to bear. As catastrophic climate change marches on, we are deluged with stories of mass extinction and loss. There are animals, habitats, and a whole range of nature’s wonders that are already gone, and there is the weight of anticipatory grief for what we will surely lose soon.
Sometimes this makes it tough to keep up the fight to stop the worst outcomes as we see politicians and other interested parties operate in ways which will speed us down the suicide path in the service of short-term profits. It’s easy to give in to despair, get cynical, or shut down.
Of course, it is still important to fight on the political front and push back against the forces that would doom us to ecocide as I have written about in this space on many occasions. But, this Earth Day, after having engaged in a good number of failed efforts and futile conflicts with erstwhile allies, I’m inclined to ponder why it is so difficult to get people to do right by the earth, other people, and even the well-being of their own children in the immediate future.
What strikes me most about this phenomenon is not so much climate denialism or rightwing ideology but a variety of deep-seated sickness. As the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn has written:
Many of us are lost. We work too hard, our lives are too busy; we lose ourselves in consumption and distraction of all kinds and have become increasingly lost, lonely, or sick. Many of us live very isolated lives. We are no longer in touch with ourselves, our family, our ancestors, the Earth, or the wonders of life all around us. We have become alienated and feel lonely. This alienation is a kind of illness that has become an epidemic. So many of us feel empty inside and are searching for something to fill the vacuum. We try to fill the void by taking pills or intoxicants or by consuming things. Yet our addiction to consumerism, to buying and consuming things we don’t need, is causing so much stress, so much suffering, both to ourselves and the Earth.
And the answer to this is not a political initiative but a realization of our alienation and subsequent embrace of our true selves, our fundamental interrelationship with all that is.
It is the lesson that the American Transcendentalists, those old courage teachers, offer us, whether it is Emerson counseling us to find God in the commons, Thoreau challenging us to pursue “simplicity” in order to suck the marrow out of life and ground ourselves in the wonders of the woods, or Whitman announcing that we are all part of a greater self that includes our minds, bodies, each other, and the grandest and plainest pieces of the natural world.
Out of this soil, properly tilled, a better politics will grow.
All of this is, as Thich Nhat Hahn observes, driven by love: “Real change will happen only when we fall in love with our planet. Only love can show us how to live in harmony with nature and each other and save us from the devastating effects of environmental destruction and climate change.”
So, as we slowly begin to emerge from the ravages of a pandemic, the challenge that looms ahead of us is to address this other epidemic of fundamental alienation. Let’s celebrate this Earth Day by reconnecting with each other, some part of nature that we love, and emerge committed to heal the larger malady that has left us lost in our own home.
Lead image via Pixabay