EcoApathy: Nature in the Balance

From the porch where we sat together, I described with obvious admiration and wonder the details of the bird migration we'd seen the third week of September. But my friend was not moved by the story at all. He has never once seen eye to eye with a Broad Wing Hawk through binoculars, and does not distinguish between the call of a Red-wing Blackbird and a Raven. Birds do not stir anything within him.

What reaches one person in a deep place leaves another yawning and looking for the exits. So I don't expect many, or perhaps any of you to gape slack-jawed at these deepest-sea creatures in the short videos; or to exclaim oh's and ah's as if seeing a stunning display of fireworks against a starlit night sky.

Maybe no one here will tear up in wonder and awe at the magnificence of marvelously extravagant and alien-seeming life on Earth, even with tears of regret, grieved by the certainty that our garbage, noise and gasses are wiping out such creatures as these in a geological eye-blink. Most viewers may only see digital eye-candy in deep sea life, have no fellow-feeling and click forward to the next shiny thing.

But fireworks wows, confounded amazement, and tears: I confess I was visited by them all while watching these short bits of underwater film. The impact of this unexpected brush with beauty took me by surprise, frankly. Maybe it shouldn't have.

There is much bottled-up grief and sorrow for each of us in these house-bound days of time to consider our lot, and the so-what of our largely self-inflicted predicament. But beyond this melancholy and longing for things missed, how can I explain to myself the unexpected impact of this flash of color and motion in that moment?

I've been immersed in the science of biology for a half century, but more than that and by intention, in the aesthetics and grace of living form and function, pattern and agency. My presence in forest or meadow has more often been more like being a patron in an art gallery or cathedral than a white-coated scientist in a chemistry or biology lab. I go there to feel, perhaps more than to know, but the two are relatives. Perhaps they have been to long and too far divorced from each other for many in our times.

And in my moments in all those natural cathedrals over the decades, I've known both hope and despair on behalf of my fellow creatures in fin, feather and fur, with increasing despair as the years go by and we do nothing but salt the wounds.

So for me, time invested and immersed in a relationship with Nature has caused images of incredible complexity of nature’s color and form to aim straight for the heart. And this one hit its target. What does that mean? What can I take away from this deep longing and regret left behind by this "moving" picture?

Is it even possible to communicate that gut-level dis-ease and personal pain of creature-empathy to another who has not felt it before?

To think we barely know a living world we are condemning, are sentencing to a slow (or almost-instant) death--the mortality rate depending on how badly we humans of the "developed world" need the methane hydrates, sea-bed oil, beach sand or seafood for our tables, bank accounts or gadgets--how does this avoidable fate not move every sentient human to anguish and dismay?

Is western humankind's eco-apathy and general indifference to the plight of Earth-life a failure of head or heart?

The world of nature in our times for most people has become an Other, distinct from and apart from the Human Enterprise, save for its usefulness as fodder for the engines or our economy. Nature is a thing moving briefly past us, consumed through a screen. The things alive in ocean or jungle or forest are never where we can touch or smell them.

The living world has become a thing we know at a distance. Scenes of real deep-sea beings in real Earth places might just as well be an animated cartoon or computer-graphic unreality. We are more impressed by far with the fantasies of Avatar than the ordinaries in the forest nearest us.

Will more cold facts from land or sea make us care more? Where does CARING come from, anyway? Does it come from the Spockian logic centers of the brain? And what, after all, is the heart? Perhaps heart in this sense is nothing more than an old-fashioned out-dated myth from the Romantics that Science has put to rest.

But if heart and soul are real "places" that can be reached, are centers of self-and-other knowledge and compassion that might lead us to care and to act, how do we gain access to our own or that of others?

These centers of conviction and action for many have become inert, abandoned and numbed, siloed away from the touch of the nearest literal tree or even a blade of grass in our nature-illiterate and self-important lives.

For an adult, it is difficult to change the center of importance and turn "back to the garden." It will be much easier to prevent eco-apathy by instilling eco-empathy in our very young, so that they are raised to know and respect the powerful beauty and amazing intricacy and utterly essential presence of non-human life on Earth. This is an Earth ethic I have often spoken about as our "personal ecology."

Our tightly-held but fleeting power over nature has made us proud. Our failure to honor and sustain it should make us weep.

We seek praise and profit for our dominion. We should seek forgiveness for our trespasses against those that live and move and have their be-ing in the world, no less than we.

If the biosphere can recover from this decade's pandemic and willful science illiteracy, it is faintly possible that enough of our species will come to see that, along with the non-human living world, we are, as Pope Francis says, Brothers, All.

And on that day, we may stand at Nature's threshold, asking forgiveness for our arrogance, to walk the Earth humbly and do good work.

Or we may shake off the epiphany, rub our eyes, and get back to Business as Usual. We have reached the crossroads. Which way will we turn? Our children want to know.