First the honey bee population crashed. Then it was the bats, dying by the millions in their caves during the winter hibernation, of a strange white fungal infection.
Now marine mammals, including walruses and ringed seals, are turning up dying on the beaches of Alaska and the far north. Unidentified skin lesions and sores are the visible evidence of an unknown disease that is ravaging them.
Meanwhile, climate change is causing unprecedented surges in the populations of destructive insects like pine borers, which are killing off millions of acres of forests around the world.
I could go on, and on, and on.
Truly, Derrick Jensen is not exaggerating when he says that human civilization is killing our planet.
Last weekend I watched the new film “End:Civ,” by Franklin Lopez, based on Jensen’s book Endgame. I had put off watching it for several weeks, because I knew it how upsetting it would be, and sure enough, it was disturbing, to say the least.
For me the hardest-hitting part of the film was about human beings’ casual tolerance of cruelty; our willingness to stand by, indifferent, as our fellow travelers on this planet are systematically hunted or poisoned or displaced to extinction.
Part of this detachment of ours may be rooted in the way we tell the stories of how these deaths occur. We talk about “colony collapse disorder,” for example, rather than narrating the way that entire hives of bees–which are highly evolved, communicative insects–fail to return to the hive one day.
They get lost out there–maybe due to cell phone waves or other forms of chemical interference, we don’t really know–and never come home. Imagine this happening on a global scale, a whole species of productive, social insects lost, one by one, by the million.
In the same way, it’s far easier to talk about “cancer victims” en masse than to live through the suffering death of your own loved one. How many vibrant, creative, hardworking people have we lost to cancer the last ten years? In the last year? In the last month? Wangari Maathai and Steve Jobs, to name two famous, very recent cancer victims. The list goes on and on and on.
But still we remain passive. We may mourn the disappearance of the honeybees or the songbirds, but we don’t make the effort to connect the dots and come to a true understanding of the extent to which our way of life has been poisoning our planet since the advent of industrialization, and especially since the beginning of the 20th century, which is when synthetic chemical production really took off.
Before she died of cancer, Rachel Carson managed to break through the wall of indifference and make the case against DDT. Thanks to her efforts, the bald eagle and many other birds have rallied and come back from the brink of extinction.
It’s amazing how resilient life is. If human civilization would just back off and give our natural systems on the planet a chance, they would heal themselves, and go back to providing the healthy ecological web that made our success as a species possible.
Our planet, ourselves. We need to understand, in the deepest and most urgent possible terms, that we cannot dissociate ourselves from the poisoning and destruction that is being visited on the forests, oceans, swamps and grasslands of this planet.
The “Wall Street Awakening” cannot be only about jobs, about fixing a broken economy and continuing on our merry path of global domination and “resource extraction.” The analysis has to go deeper than that, and the change has to be much more dramatic.
All the jobs in the world won’t bring back the walruses or the ringed seals or the polar bears. What use will jobs be when the ocean is a giant dead zone, and industrial agriculture collapses? Will we be worrying about jobs when the forests that provide our oxygen are all gone?
We need to focus on what’s important and go all the way this time. As I keep saying, our future depends on it. And I am not exaggerating.
Transition Times 
