Humans

Mother Earth has made us and makes us still, beautiful, as she does all her creation. But we have struggled to flee from her wildness, refashioning ourselves into monsters, attacking her with our machines, devouring our sanity with our greed for the false comfort of powerful tools and the illusive security of long, long lives, having buried the truth that in her we are already immortal. And because of our greed, she tells me, we have multiplied into intolerable billions. We have come to the precipice. See how it is.

With our machines we have torn her skin, digging, ripping, slashing, seeking the makings of iron, gold, silver, copper, nickel, aluminum, titanium, cobalt, chromium and other metals, none of which exist separate in her wild creation. With our machines we have burrowed and blasted for coal, and drilled holes, many small pricks for her, even though it is sometimes as deep as our drill bits and pipe can go, sucking out carbon-rich oil and natural gas, craving energy, and tearing great wilderness-destroying paths for pipelines and electrical transmission grids to deliver this energy to the machines and humans which consume it. With our machines, we raise great barriers to her wild rivers, seeking to imprison and enslave her waters, using great pipes and pumps and cleansing facilities to deliver this precious liquid to ourselves, our plants, our animals, our machines, and stealing energy from the water, denying it to her wild creation. With our machines, we have torn great trails across her surface, so that we inside our machines, and machines and other tools inside our machines, can move quickly from place to place. We call these trails railways, streets, roads, highways, and airports, which chew through and segment and ban the wilderness, and we think this is good. With concrete, steel, fashioned wood and clay, and many other materials given birth by our machines, we have raised terrible structures to house ourselves, our machines, and our synthetic substances, calling them homes, factories, warehouses and refineries, office buildings, skyscrapers, shopping malls, and other names, destroying great swathes of wilderness in the making of these materials and these structures, and the sum of this we call our communities, our cities and towns, and we think this is good. In a determined frenzy over many generations, we have with our machines and simpler tools of metal and shaped wood, chopped, burned and plowed wild forests, woodlands and prairies, bringing genocide in these places and with true ferocity, standing we believe forever against the return of wilderness, so that we can make food and fiber and even wood for our growing number, and that of our plants and animals, whom we then eat, calling it agriculture, and thinking it good. We have hunted down and sought to wipe out wild predators who out of hunger might eat us or our animals upon which we feed, and plant-eaters who might eat our tame plants upon which we feed, sometimes saddened by their deaths but never at the expense of our own mouths, whose numbers have become legion. We have built great machines which allow us to feed our teeming billions from Earth's oceans, taking both animals and plants and even the water thereof, devouring tasty species to near extinction, while carelessly slaughtering millions of others caught incidentally in our wet webs, shooting great spears into pacific animals who understand more and remember more than we, denying them so that we can enjoy their flesh seemingly without limit. Too late, some of us express regret, while our fellow humans still think it is good. With similar machines we have made the oceans our liquid roads and freeways, thinking we do no harm, while we have poisoned the air with the machines' gaseous exhaust and the water with wasted fuel and garbage. Other, land-based, machines have dumped their wastes and ours into our Mother's rivers, damaging the rivers and delivering these pollutants to the oceans on a scale almost unimaginable and certainly disregarded, although many of us are now appalled. Yet it has not stopped.

The harm we have done and continue to do is much greater than all this. I did not for instance refer to the wars we make with our machines, which we sometimes regret yet continue to pursue, killing not only ourselves but also her wild creatures, though these we do not count. This and other crimes against Earth which we have committed and continue to commit are rooted in a twin madness (please see Energy for a complementary perspective on our excess).

Children

The first madness is all the more terrible because it is also our greatest joy, and a delight to Mother Earth. It has become lunacy because of our bonds with our machines. And it is called children. This madness does not arise from a single child, or from several, or even from millions of children, scattered over the skin of Earth. And it does not arise from seven, eight or even ten children in a single family. I have had occasion to say before that a favorite professor of mine in graduate school used to teach the following: the single most important measure of progress is a reduction in the rate of infant mortality. For a long time, I thought this was a brilliant observation, and in some sense I still do. What I didn't understand until much later was that he was speaking, in praise, of a human progress against the deadly enemy which is nature, more specifically nature as expressed in this planet. He was taught by his culture, and mine, that progress comes from our unique genetic advantages as humans, especially in our unmatched ability to foster the development of machines and other tools which serve us and our children and protect us from the wild. Neither he nor I understood the awful consequences of engaging in such a struggle against our Mother. While the opposition to the skin of Earth has been injurious to her, we are now confronted with the monstrous injury our ancestors and we have done to ourselves. Our machines have turned our children into her enemy, and the enemy of our survival as a species. For our Mother, it is not the giving birth which is the problem. It is the determination to use every relevant tool which we can fashion to prevent our beloved children's death. We are the only species created by Mother Earth who have arrived at a place in which we can normally expect to succeed in this task. We do not recognize, or care, that for all others the death of infants and children is as much a part of being as is the death of the old. We have even come to believe recently that the death of anyone under 60 years – or 70? – is untimely. And the most untimely and horrible, we hold, is the death of our youngest. This madness has brought us to a global population of over six billion, most of whom, at whatever age, seek to avoid death. Access to clinics and hospitals, and their wonderful tools, seems to make this a reasonable goal, first for our children, and then for us. Earth wishes us to understand this: every death is timely. When considering the one who dies, every death is done well. This is because for our Mother, every death, as every birth, is a wondrous transformation, worked by her. Birth is the beginning of a transformation, continuing throughout life, of many into one. Death is the beginning of a transformation from one into many. Both of these are vital to her existence and the existence of every aspect of her creation. They are what make us whone, and they are soon or late a blessing, allowing eventually every aspect of this planet to share in, to be, every other. This is considered in greater depth by the essay Whone, which I invite you to read. If you know these things already, I rejoice. Too few do.

This does not mean that death should be embraced at the earliest opportunity. Mother Earth expects humans, century plants, and rocks to endure and perform the unique tasks which only each can. Just as she rejects killing unless it is necessary for survival, in our case for food, clothing, shelter, and freedom of movement. But when death comes, whatever the circumstances, she welcomes it as the first step in rebirth. So should we. Our current dominant preference for machines, from hypodermic needles to MRI devices and many others, which most of us believe raise powerful wards against infant and child death, are unacceptable to her, but not because she craves young deaths. She does not. The problem with these machines is that they cannot be produced, used or maintained without the support of the whole culture of destructive machine dependence. They are housed typically in large structures that stand upon her soil and prevent the presence of wilderness. They are made of metal, plastics, and other synthetics, yet they make none of these materials. They are shaped by many other machines, in other structures sometimes continents away, and they arrive only because of vast transportation systems which distort, misshape, and consume her skin. And then there are the pharmaceuticals, developed and synthesized by means of a large variety of tools and machines, all of these made elsewhere by manufacturers who themselves use machines and the same transportations systems which deliver to the drug companies, clinics and hospitals. But the nearly certain survival of our children doesn't depend only upon these machines and their skillful operators. Even more important are the machines which husband our food supply, and which allow in Los Angeles all but the monetarily poor to eat well, both in quantity and quality, yielding them a strong immune system and vigorous internal organs which resist both disease and the shock of injury. These are also the machines which banish wilderness from the vast agricultural lands of California, other parts of the U.S., and in other more or less prosperous countries. And, again, there is the essential, swollen, transportation system to deliver this food to their mouths. Our children's food, and ours, comes at a huge cost to the skin of Earth. Much the same truth applies to the clothes and the homes we obtain for them. What's worse, these are just the essentials. In Los Angeles, there are also the machines and tools of day care, school, travel, toys, entertainment parks such as Disney Land, children's books and DVDs, and some of these and other products directed at children are found over Earth's whole surface.

Elders

The second madness is called elders, or senior citizens, or the aged, retirees, and other references to those of us who are old. That elders should have become a social expression of our insanity is almost as sad as our madness about children. Until recently, in most cultures other than European, elders have been held in great regard by those who are younger than they. They have been respected and valued for their wisdom, or at least their durability, and especially for their reproduction of children, and through their children, of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and as ancestors, for the generations thereafter. Yet our elders and our ancestors, once machines became available to them, have made the miserable mistake of using these machines, at least before they became elders, to protect their children from death without considering the consequences for Earth, her creation, and the prospects for humans, their children included. I am among those who made this mistake. This does not look like wisdom. We elders, and indeed our own now transformed ancestors, again once the appropriate machines became available, went even further. We embraced those machines and tools which lengthen our lives as well, even as we continued aging and exhibiting the natural and unavoidable degeneration which our Mother uses to prepare us for death. Much of the medical research and health care apparatus is devoted now to this task of longevity. The destructive effort this requires is much like, perhaps even greater than, that required to fend off death among our children. Certainly elders over much of the planet consume more synthetic drugs, and are beneficiaries of more operations using elaborate machines and other medical tools, than those of us who are younger. These machines, produced by other machines in other places, delivered by the global transportation net, powered by other machines both near and distant, and whose metal and plastic substance is supplied by yet other machines, harm Earth and her wilderness much the same as those, often the same devices, which are used to shield children. Add to this that we do eat, though perhaps little more than children, and thus require the complex net of mechanized agriculture. We also require clothes and housing – sometimes quite expensive housing if it includes chronic care – and, when we are not especially unwell, mechanized travel is a common activity for those with the means to finance it. We may not think of this as greed, but Earth does.

Solutions

Children Before considering solutions, let me say that the great majority of Angelinos, and perhaps the global majority, do not want solutions to this greed. Some of us may want what has come to be called a smaller footprint on Mother Earth, but not at the expense of long lives which are prosperous, a prosperity which is measured by our access to machines and the products of machines. Even the many millions among us elders, spread over her skin, who are not prosperous by this measure, typically wish to be, and would not want the possibility of such well-being to end. Despite its unpopularity, Earth tells me that the alternative to effective human-instituted solutions is the near or complete extinction of our species. I therefore urge you to consider survival. The most straightforward truth is that, for several generations, we need a great many fewer children, and a great many fewer elders. As I have written many times, our Mother does not want us to accomplish this by the slaughter of one another. This, too, would be madness. Nor does she prefer that it be done by us through deadly epidemics (though she may act by this means, if we fail to act). I hear from her that she will permit us to achieve these goals over several generations, first by reducing radically the number of births. The Chinese government, recognizing decades ago that the population within its borders was too large and growing rapidly, adopted a practice of allowing only one surviving birth per immediate family living in urban areas. The result for them has been a steep decline in the rate of growth of their population, but growth does continue. This will clearly not do. What we need instead is a policy based upon the idea that it takes a village to raise a child, though with a rather different meaning than that usually associated with this phrase. For example, one surviving birth for every ten adult couples or single women, if applied in all the regions of Mother Earth's skin, would result in a decrease in total global surviving births from the current 134 million per year to only 5.1 million. The difficulty, of course, is that this would require a fundamental change in every existing human culture, towards communal sharing and responsibility among the ten couples for the child's nurture, a "village" which includes the child's actual mother and, where possible, father, but does not give them sole guardianship for the child.

Elders As for elders, the obvious cultural shift would be to replace the madness of the pursuit of longer lives with a commitment instead to quality of life. Most elders today over the age of 65 experience a decline in their health and in the daily pleasures which they experienced when they were younger. We also become less productive, not simply as measured by others, but by ourselves as well. If our lives then continue, almost every elder reaches the point sooner or later at which they judge themselves to be stripped of any significant pleasure from their lives as humans, and become, in their judgment, completely unproductive or uncreative. Unfortunately, today they are typically expected by local law in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and often by family and close friends, to nevertheless continue their lives until something utterly irresistible kills them, despite the use of every medical tool available. This can take years, even decades. It is unacceptable to Mother Earth, and should be rejected by every elder. We have better things to do in Earth, transformed after death into functioning whones in other, more able and joyful creatures, as once we were in our human form, and before that, as others in her. The solution for elders, then, is euthanasia. There are several different types of euthanasia. First, it may be voluntary or involuntary. Voluntary means with the patient's consent; involuntary means without the patient's consent, because the patient is considered to be unable to decide for themselves. Both of these types include passive and active forms. Passive means that either life-sustaining medication is withheld or a pain-killer (especially morphine) is administered in amounts which are also likely to cause death, or the patient chooses not to eat or drink. Active euthanasia requires the administering of a drug for the purpose of causing death. It may be given by a physician or self-administered by the patient using a device, such as an intravenous drip, that administers the drug. Active euthanasia is now illegal in Los Angeles and in most other jurisdictions around the globe. Among the exceptions, but only on a restricted basis, are the Netherlands and two states in the U.S., Oregon and Washington. In each of these, the patient, who is not always an elder, must be terminally ill. Passive euthanasia, which is usually unreported, is commonplace in hospitals in the U.S., Europe, and other regions of Mother Earth's skin, and in homes of terminally ill persons. Again, it may be applied to persons of any age. All of this together makes only a very small contribution to the present annual global human death total of 57 million. It is irrelevant to the challenge to reduce willingly the total human population from 6.8 billion today to something close to 10 million in three generations, by the year 2070. But this challenge, although the numbers can be somewhat different, is what the Earth insists that we meet, if we are to survive as a species. Using the numbers I have suggested, especially that the birth rate falls to 5.1 million from the current 134 million/yr. – an enormous sacrifice for women in particular and adult partners in general - the annual death rate must rise to 118.3 million. Of the deaths which occur now, somewhere around 80% globally are the deaths of those over 65, or 45.6 million (in the U.S., the percentage is 72.5%). It seems to me that in this context, it is reasonable to ask of elders that they contribute by means of euthanasia the additional 61.3 million deaths/year. This yields a total yearly global death rate for elders of 106.9 million, or 2.3 times as many as today. Death of elders by euthanasia, in the early years of this reduction, would be 51.8 % of the globe's annual human deaths. Put another way, the current death rate of elders globally is 89 deaths per 1,000 elders yearly. The rate would rise to 208 per 1,000 yearly, or roughly one death in five among elders each year. However, the gross annual increase today in elder numbers globally is 55.9 million. Initially, then, the net reduction in elders numbers, in order to achieve the kind of reduction in global population which we need, would be 51 million annually, or 9.9%, that is, one in ten elders fewer. I believe that if elders and their loved ones were to accept that life as a human should end when the qualities of pleasure and creativity have irrevocably ended, this goal can be willingly and reasonably met. Indeed, the same criteria could apply to any human, rather than the present standard of terminal illness, as judged whenever possible by the person directly affected, with the advice of others they trust.

All forms of euthanasia would become available, and the decision by the elder or younger person for or against would be final. It would not be subject to the review of others. Where the one for whom death is being considered is in a coma, in the last stages of Alzheimer's disease, or is otherwise unable to take decisions, the law could determine who would then decide.

Machines and Human Population

While our machines and other tools sustain the existing human population and its further growth, the machines do not yet sustain themselves. They require humans for their production, maintenance, and further development. This bond will be broken as our numbers decline. If we are able to plan and implement this decline, and I have suggested that we can, rather than leave it to Mother Earth to kill us in the billions, relatively swiftly, through what we would consider horrific catastrophes, then we can also plan the graduated end to our machines. I will not attempt to identify the details of such plans, which do not yet exist. What I can say is that in the many regions on the surface of Earth, at a pace which would vary depending upon the degree of industrialization and machine use, a time will come when insufficient numbers of humans will be available to work in the factories, or to drive the vehicles in the transportation net. The machines will be abandoned, and they will stop. As this happens, those products which the stilled machines once produced, or the service they once supplied, will end. As this proceeds, those who survive, at first still in the billions, will turn to other sources to meet their needs. All production will become much simpler. Agriculture will for perhaps a generation be based on tools which move only at the application of energy from domestic animals – horses, oxen, mules - or humans, with tools such as hoes, axes, shovels, and plows. But even these tools will become less common and, in the form which includes iron or steel, disappear entirely as the metals themselves cease to be produced. All of this will mean the yield of far less food than at present. It might be imagined that blacksmiths will produce these metals locally, wherever iron ore and coal can be found. However, remember what Mother Earth expects of us, and invites us to become. We will no longer dig large holes in the earth, or strip hillsides, in order to obtain metals. We will step more lightly, as part of, and not enemies, of wilderness. Agriculture may continue in some unfavored places where the wilderness is prairie or desert, near rivers which periodically flood, as in early Egypt and Mesopotamia. But it will be practiced with natural tools, without metals. Elsewhere, as in Los Angeles where embracing mountains will once again gather the high country rains and snow and deliver an abundance of year-round streams and small rivers to the valleys and basins, and thus an abundance of wild plants and animals, agriculture will eventually become unnecessary. This lightest of human footprints is what, typically, she intends. It may be that agriculture will not be practiced anywhere. A similar transition in other industries will take place, leading our greatly reduced numbers to make simpler, natural shelter and clothes, and to become hunters and gatherers again, but this time with burdensome and yet more informed cultures than our ancestors possessed 10,000 years ago. Those who are again actively whone with wilderness will need to use that knowledge carefully, not against wilderness, but rather in order to make ourselves more truly human in our rejoining with our Mother. As we approach this goal, euthanasia for elders and severe birth control for women of child-bearing age will no longer be possible or needed. If a transition requires euthanasia without the machine-made tools that enable it today, the extract of white poppy capsules, which is the source of natural morphine, could be used wherever the plant is able to flourish. This would be enough. (Though I speak of death here, the use of the poppy's juice from its capsules has in smaller doses many healthy benefits for humans, and its suppression today is one deplorable part of our rejection in numerous countries, the U.S. among them, of the wild, in this instance her gift of the wild poppy plant.) Of course, the changes which all humans will face will not be in our material lives only, but in the way in which we will organize ourselves, politically and socially. Even to make a considered and consensual decision to begin will require a dramatic shift in our cultures. As we proceed in reducing our numbers, the nation states which now govern us will become increasingly untenable, and we will need to function increasingly at the regional and local, rather than supra-regional level. Our social institutions, including those which organize education, the arts, sports, health care, and many others, will either be radically altered into simpler and local forms, or disappear entirely. We will become new communities, in the thousands, different from one another and more and more separate from most. We will become not only far fewer, but also newly related to one another. And we will develop far stronger, supportive and cooperative relationships with the vast wildness to which Earth invites our return, whose ability to thrive and unfold healthy changes will be ours as well.

2012

My wife and I have recently seen the film 2012. Neither of us thought the acting or the script were particularly well done, with some exceptions, and the last twenty minutes or so is poorly conceived and executed. Neither of us could say that we liked the film. Its premise - that the ancient Mayan calendar is an accurate predictor of destruction of the Earth's surface, in 2012, as the result of an extremely rare alignment of this solar system's planets, and a consequent, deadly, increase in solar activity - is not what Mother Earth tells me confronts us. I hear from her that it is she, and not the sun, which will soon terminate our species, if we do not act quickly to rejoin her wilderness, in numbers which it can support on a local and regional basis. She also does not give me a year or a date by which our destruction will be completed, or precisely how it will be accomplished. She does impress upon me that we do not have decades to ignore her, or to make a committed beginning to rejoin the wild without the necessity of her intervention. Despite these serious reservations, 2012 is a film which I am persuaded every adult alive today should see, and discuss with others. The subject of this discussion should be the prospect, I am told the certainty, that the computer-generated images presented graphically in the film, of her skin being broken and reformed in a manner that today's civilization, and today's human population, cannot survive, do not exaggerate the calamity which we actually face. We should see those images with fear and trembling, because something, or some combination, available to our Mother, equally horrific, killing our billions and ending our machines, is coming. And unlike the film's conclusion, there will remain too few of us to rebuild, and perhaps even to reproduce our kind. There will be no Noah's Ark. She will be more subtle, since, she tells me, she has no desire to demolish her skin or destroy its wilderness which she has created and which she intends will recover fully from our assaults upon it. But she will certainly bring, swiftly, an awful and complete solution to the plague which we, collectively, have become.

Which Will It Be?

The challenge which Mother Earth insists we face with regard to human population, machines, and our return to her wilderness – to her global Eden – is not among the many issues which the political leaders of Los Angeles, the U.S., and, as I understand it, the rest of world are urging us to confront. At the international level, the focus is on the global recession/depression, and within that, global financial power and relations, trade, and, for the wealthy, an unimpeded march toward even greater wealth and the social/political global power which great wealth brings. Led by U.S. imperialism, there is also great interest in sustaining, and eventually winning, wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Congo, and elsewhere, as the most extreme and some would say the most certain means to that great wealth which nations, global corporations, and their rulers seek. This is limited by a quasi-sincere and fitful desire to prevent the ultimate global nuclear war which the pursuit of power could now give birth. And then there is global warming, caused, most scientists tell us, by human production of greenhouse gases. If this production is not constrained, it promises to result in large changes in global and regional weather patterns, a rise in the oceans' level sufficient to permanently flood coastal areas, wipe out the world's coastal cities, disrupt and even stop the production and transportation of food and other material necessities from region to region, and kill hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of us. Many scientists believe that it is already too late, and that these changes have become unavoidable. It is clear, however, that there is no willingness, yet, to bring a halt to this warming if it requires substantial material sacrifice on the part of folks of ordinary income or the wealthy, in any country. In fact, the newly emerged economic successes of India and China, and the hopes for strong material gains by other less mechanized countries, lead them to argue that further economic gains are compatible with confronting and overcoming global warming. Even more mature industrialized countries are driven, less openly, by the same view, overriding the growing concerns about material disaster from the scientists who report on global warming. In the U.S., other concerns rank just as high, including national health care reform, unemployment, and retaining or keeping political power in the upcoming 2010 Congressional elections. In Los Angeles, the focus our leaders urge is upon improving the roads, freeways and railways, maintaining education, police, and fire services in the face of cutbacks in city and county revenue, and coping with a growing water shortage imposed by a regional multi-year drought and competing demands for water in the western U.S. Individuals and families are most concerned about keeping their jobs and homes, or finding new ones, getting their children educated, and avoiding becoming ill. Where in this is Mother Earth, except as something we want to protect against our worst behavior? Global warming is as a subject for public discussion and policy formation, the closest we come, and even here we believe that it is we, not her, who control the outcome. We also believe that while some of our machines may need replacing, or modifying, in order to cut the production of greenhouse gases, we do not generally consider that this must mean a reduction in the flow to us of the machines' products which we so value. Wilderness, except as something to protect and preserve, means no more to us now than it did a hundred or two hundred years ago. And human population, as something which must become radically smaller, is rarely considered. James Lovelock, the scientific popularizer of the Earth's skin as Gaia, a single self-sustaining organism, holds in his most recent book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, that the globe's human population could be reduced by what he prefers to call global heating to only 100 million or so, all of these living under still-civilized, that is machine-driven, conditions in northern regions such as England (he is English), Canada, and Russia. He argues as well that the changes which this heating will cause can be expected to happen soon, in a matter of years rather than decades, and that the most damaging changes will descend upon us suddenly and dramatically. However, even Lovelock clings tenaciously to the notion that today's material conditions should and can be fought for and maintained, with fairly modest sacrifices, in the favored northern regions. A fundamentally new Paleolithic relationship with our Mother and her wilderness is, for him, neither necessary nor desirable. Despite a certain degree of acceptance by his fellow scientists, his views are nevertheless not widely accepted, held by most scientists and politicians to exaggerate the threat and propose unreasonable and unnecessary solutions. The truth, as I hear it from Mother Earth, is far more demanding, and liberating, than anything envisioned by Lovelock. Civilization, or mechanized societies, will not survive. We will either return, in tolerable numbers, to her wilderness, or we will perish altogether. The only agreement between Lovelock and this planet of which all humans are but a small portion, is that these changes will come soon. If our leaders, and the position of the great majority of their followers, reject Lovelock, then the perspective I have outlined in this essay/message would seem to have no chance of consideration, never mind implementation. We are still a very foolish creature, and it seems that we will prefer to remain foolish until all of us, or nearly all of us, are killed and become other, nonhuman, participants in her history. Perhaps I am wrong. It may be that Earth will give us harsh though not broadly fatal warning, that will stir us to act. I have written this with some such hope. For those of us who wish the best chance of survival for ourselves, loved ones, and friends, and come to believe what our Mother is telling us, it may be much more hopeful that we will decide to learn as much as we are able about how to live in our regional wilderness, and acquire the natural yet sophisticated tools which will help make this possible. Clinging to our machines will be terminal. Turning to the forest, chaparral, savannah, natural prairie, or desert may seem like nonsense to most, but it is where we are all going, alive or dead, in the years ahead. If we learn well, and provide ourselves with the appropriate tools, we or our direct human descendants may be among the few who become again practicing parts of Mother Earth's whone, and who dwell in her wild garden for many generations to come. But please – don't take too much time thinking about it. Do it. Now.

Bill Luttrell, One Voice of Mother Earth