February
1995
A
Fast for a Humane Planet
By Michael Perlman
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The recent killings at two Brookline reproductive health clinics, the
disastrous war in Chechnya, and the depletion of stocks of fish off
the New England coast: such events show us the unnecessary future for
which we are headed. This future is marked by ideologically-driven violence,
communal self-immolation, and the decimation of Earth’s capacity
to nourish life.
On January 11th, I began a ten-day fast in the hope of provoking conversations
about ways to stop our steady progress toward this desolate future and
to make the world more humane. Further, I invited those who were so
inclined to join the fast on its final day — Saturday, January
21st — and take time, individually and in informal discussion
groups, to contemplate a better future and how it might be realized.
This would be in accordance with the tradition of the Sabbath —
a day for contemplation and renewal, a vital, sacred time: time for
the future, for a humane planet.
As my contribution to the conversation, I want to say something about
the opportunities to realize a more humane future we have so far neglected
and about the consequences of that neglect, and then to offer some concrete
proposals on ways to begin repairing, as far as possible, the damage
we have done.
I acted because we’re so exhausted spiritually that we’ve
been unable to take to heart the extraordinary possibilities occasioned
by the end of the Cold War and of apartheid: two of our century’s
exemplary confirmations that the persistence of citizens working for
betterment under the most adverse conditions can bear fruit. When the
attempted Soviet coup of August 1991 collapsed and euphoric citizens
gathered in Moscow, we did not demonstrate in solidarity with them.
We did not celebrate when Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa,
we failed to dance in the streets.
The consequence is evident in the needless violence and danger that
marked the close of 1994. Had we celebrated in a way befitting the achievements
I’ve mentioned, we would surely have been inspired to reflect
on and push for innovative policies aimed at constructing a lasting
partnership with the peoples of the post-Soviet lands, and to study
and apply to our own society the lessons of the South African struggle
for freedom. We would surely have sought radical nuclear disarmament,
invested in imaginative interventions to forestall ethnic violence and
genocide, and turned our energies away from the cultivation of ideological
divisiveness in this country and toward protecting the natural world.
Instead, the divisions in American society harden, grow wider, and erupt
in violence; we neglect the future of the natural world; we do not meaningfully
respond to slaughter in Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Sudan; and we ignore
the persistence of nuclear danger now exemplified by upheaval in Russia,
which could culminate in the proliferation of thousands of nuclear warheads.
Here and abroad, we suffer from a pandemic of cynicism. That cynicism,
and its ill nature, are revealed by a list of the top ten news stories
of 1994 derived from an annual survey of American news executives that
has the O.J. Simpson case in first place and has no place for the transition
to democracy in South Africa. This is cynicism that has no place for
Nelson Mandela. We are on a road that leads us from the suppression
and denial of hope into the embrace of inhumane, authoritarian, violent
attempts to solve our problems.
Let us be clear: the gunman who opened fire in the reproductive health
clinics was not, psychologically speaking, alone. His action bespeaks
the social sickness of ideological fanaticism, of an atmosphere that
fosters righteous hatred of those with whom we differ, of a culture
that encourages the violent acting-out of our despair.
Les
I know we can do better. I want to share the story of one Russian man
who did do better. I met him in the summer of 1993 at a conference on
the possibilities for spiritual, cultural, and ecological renewal in
the post-Soviet era, which took place during a two-week cruise on the
Volga River. I’ll call him Les.
A slightly-built, middle-aged man, Les didn’t show much interest
in talking with the American conference participants, though he did
make a critical remark about American habits to one of them. He espoused
rather narrowly traditional views that struck others as chauvinistic.
I made no attempts to speak with him during the conference because I
thought he wouldn’t listen. Two minutes before I had to leave
to catch my plane home, I realized my mistake.
The evening before, I’d given a talk on the importance of trees
in the cultural, artistic, and spiritual creativity of individuals and
communities in different parts of the world. My examples were drawn
from sources that ranged from the literature of Toni Morrison to the
letters of Fyodor Dostoevski — and the photography of a fellow
participant from the city of Pskov in northwest Russia, I exhibited
and discussed one photo of an old orthodox church framed by a wizened
tree leaning at a forty-five degree angle over a field of snow, which
seemed to embody the photographer’s perception of the damage done
to Russian spiritual life in the Soviet era and his hopes that it would
somehow muddle through, like the tree.
At six o’clock the following morning I stood on the dock at which
the ship had berthed, the after-effects of a vodka-inspirited farewell
gathering hanging over me. We found ourselves waving good-bye to each
other, though we had never met. And then, to my astonishment, Les, whom
I had not seen in the audience during my talk, told me that what had
been said was important and invited me up for a drink.
When I explained that I had to leave, Les struggled for words. “My
English is very poor,” he said, "but me and my friends like
trees.” He seemed, by his invitation and the words he struggled
for, to suggest that he and I, too, might be friends — for friends
like trees. As I began to walk toward a commuter ferry I had to catch,
Les stood on the deck, his hand raised, calling out his good-bye: Da
svidania! Da svidania! Da svidania!
Still I hear his words, and think of the possibilities of a friendship
inspirited by trees. I am inspired by Les’s capacity for change
and for hospitality, and chastened when I think about how I had erroneously
assumed the possibility for such change did not exist. In human communities,
there is always the danger of developing exclusionary, stereotypical,
hostile attitudes toward those defined as outsiders. The psychology
of human community also includes, fortunately, the capacity to develop
traditions of friendship and hospitality toward others. The end of the
Cold War provided unusual opportunities to cultivate new forms of hospitality
and to restructure human community to make it truly humane — toward
members of communities defined as other. Communities not limited to
the human domain.
Yet, Les’s hospitality suggests a possible way — a
way of transcending traditions of exclusion through celebrating the
natural world. I’ve called him Les because it echoes the Russian
word for “forest,” liess. For the way Les was moved by trees
suggests that human community can only become truly humane if it is
centered not on itself, or even the human species, but on the importance
of our nonhuman surroundings and our relationship to them.
Watch Us Grow
From South Africa comes a clue that a concrete relationship with the
natural world can inspire social healing: A black South African man,
after moving with his wife from the township of Soweto to a Johannesburg
suburb, “planted a tiny sapling, which he named Watch Us Grow.
(NYT)” In its own way, this young tree inspires the struggle to
persist and find renewal.
In that spirit I wish to sketch out a few specific proposals for contemplation,
for Sabbath dialogue. I know they need to be honed and fleshed out —
that is why I offer them — and I hope to encourage others to bring
their own ideas to the conversation.
An overarching theme guides each proposal: environmental restoration
at the community level. The history of communal efforts to restore or
protect the environment — whether it be opposition to industrial
pollution, the siting of toxic waste dumps, or the protection of trees,
forests and waterways — makes abundantly clear that folks
who are ordinarily at odds can work together.
With that in mind, let me suggest the following:
• Radical nuclear disarmament and eventual abolition of nuclear
and other weapons of mass destruction, which is a crucial form of environmental
restoration. International environmental preservation and restoration
efforts could include, along with nuclear and conventional disarmament
and innovative peacemaking programs, the concerted Russian-American
effort to clean up the environmental damage caused by Cold-War military
activities which Mikhail Gorbachev has called for. A model for such
collective endeavors is the largely-unremarked effort by Russian and
American forest ecologists to preserve the Siberian forest or taiga.
A multinational environmental restoration program, perhaps under the
umbrella of the United Nations, should include intensive community reforestation
efforts and a focus on helping people in war-ravaged or neglected areas
to rebuild. The resources for international environmental restoration
could be garnered by stemming the global arms trade. Rather than endlessly
manufacturing and promoting weapons, let us help South Africans who
want to plant trees and restore the overall environment in Soweto.
• A massive effort to bring beauty and vitality into inner-city
environments: large-scale environmental education and urban forestry
programs, renovation and redesign of housing, community landscapes and
facilities, and workplaces. In the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn,
we have a vibrant illustration of the possibilities of such an endeavor
in the Magnolia Tree Earth Center, which was formed after a successful
community campaign to save a transplanted magnolia tree from a poorly-conceived
urban renewal project. The Magnolia Tree Earth Center, although given
little public attention, sponsors valued environmental education, youth,
and community service programs. Those who have participated in its program,
including local youth, might serve as consultants in others areas — perhaps
even other countries.
• A program to radically improve the inhumane living conditions
on many Native American reservations. The environmental movement, which
has increasingly drawn on Native American spiritual and ecological insights,
could be instrumental in helping people on reservations obtain the funds
and other tools they need to realize those insights in their own communities.
This would help redress the wrongs done to the first citizens of our
country, and allow their descendants to develop talents that all of
us will value. Native American reservations would then commemorate — in
addition to historical injustice and the persistence of people in the
face of that injustice — the human capacity for reverent engagement
with the nonhuman physical world. This capacity is at the core of all
forms of environmental protection and restoration; without it no humane
future is possible.
My ten-day fast was carried out in the spirit of “hope for a tree”
— in the words of the suffering Job — that may yet
branch out into a better future. Let us make time to contemplate the
world’s own hunger for preservation and betterment, and to converse
about how we might give our planet the nourishment it needs. For the
future itself is starving for our attention, our love.
Michael Perlman, author of The Power of Trees:
The Reforesting of the Soul, teaches psychology and environmental
philosophy at Vermont College.
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