Whone

1) Numbers We are too many. Thomas Malthus, the notable 19th century English economist, made the idea of human overpopulation famous, primarily in his An Essay on the Principle of Population, arguing that it was inevitable and cyclical. The same basic notion was widely popularized by Paul Ehrlich in the 20th century book, The Population Bomb. Although Ehrlich's specific prediction of a great global famine in the 1970's and 1980's was not realized, it remains true that the possibility of being too many, at least sometimes, is not an alien concept in today's European-derived planetary culture. However, this culture has never understood Mother Earth's tolerance of human numbers, and how she measures our excess. She tells me that she has room over her skin for only one out of a thousand who are now living. From her perspective, our count globally needs to be somewhere around six million, not the more than six billion we actually are. In Los Angeles, the tolerable ratio is even less, roughly one in one thousand five hundred; that is, ten thousand rather than the over fifteen million now present in the region. We have low rainfall levels, which have been temporarily overcome by appropriating massive volumes of water from rivers to the north and east. The actual ability of even a healthy regional wilderness – and it is not now healthy - to include us is less than in many other parts of Earth's skin. With our current numbers, over the planet and in L.A., we cannot help but pillage her surface creation. We are, after all, among the larger species extant. Keeping us alive and reproductive, even at the most materially humble level, including only adequate shelter, food, clothing, and some instruments of ceremony, art, and charm, is literally overwhelming. It means denying the basic needs of many other species, and the continued destruction of soil, stone, plant and animal communities, here and across Mother Earth. More efficient technologies, which now tend to be called "green", are at best the means to slowing the further blooming of our destructive impact. Our looting, burning, dismembering, scattering, and slaughter will not end by greening ourselves. We will still remain an intolerably overbearing horde. We will still not have allowed ourselves to be vulnerable to wolves, bears, wildfires, floods, or any other manifestation of surrounding wilderness, in so far as we can prevent it. We will still require dominion over Earth as we know her. 2) So What? But isn't this in our self-interest? Isn't it proper for us to pursue security, material prosperity, and the guarantee of even more prosperous and secure descendants? Aren't these goals, like the indefinite extension of our individual lives, both sensible and just? Does someone – Mother Earth – expect us to cut our own throats? I am not sure what she anticipates from us. I am confident that we are far from the power in the land that we suppose ourselves to be. I am certain that we will not prevail in this rampant pursuit of the broad and smooth. To me, her voice is clear on this point – we will become far fewer and more humble. Choices about how this happens are available; but they mean nothing if we refuse to consider them. If we cannot do as the Mayans appear to have once done, literally walk away from our empire and our civilization, and return to the wild which we once embraced, then we will be driven there. Perhaps they were also. Stubborn stupidity is common among oppressors of every era, and the Mayan culture of cities, pyramids, large-scale agriculture, and a wealthy theocracy certainly oppressed Earth. On a much greater scale, so do we.

3) Choices The options Mother Earth permits us are as many as we can envisage. She does not explain them to us, at least not to me. What is clear is that they must all lead, beginning now, to very small communities, wed to specific regions, using some contemporary form of pre-metal, Paleolithic or Neolithic cultures; what we have come to refer to, disparagingly, as stone age societies. I have already written about this in the message Energy. The first step is the hardest. Human communities must become convinced that this is a reasonable, appealing, and imperative goal. I know of no such community today, not even among native peoples or the greenest of European-rooted settlements. Most humans in almost every region across her face have been seduced by electric lights, cars and trucks, water piped through iron, copper, or plastic, clothes woven and stitched using electrically-powered metal machines and of fibers once unknown or unavailable in all but a few places, radios and television sets made of synthetic materials, and other consumer goods born of mining, drilling, forest slaying, and mechanized agriculture. If we are unfortunate enough to have none of these ourselves, we wish for them, and work to ensure that at least our children will have them. To have and use these products is progress, and progress is good. In English, these things are even called goods. To have more of such goods is the goal, at least for the great majority. Who, where, would want none of them? Why would they turn away? Yet Mother Earth tells me to choose only tools made of natural materials, obtained without wounding the ground deeply, or felling large trees, or killing wild creatures who may block our egocentric way – this is what we need, both to survive and to live in joy. Our passionate preference for elaborately fabricated goods, and the services which deliver them to us, is folly because it cuts us away from the infinitely richer pulses of Earth, from she who creates us and every other wildness which is woven together to form her. It is also folly because, finally, it costs the rest too much, and she will not permit it.

4) Progress In graduate school, I had a professor of economic philosophy, Clarence Ayres, who contended that the essence of progress in any society is a reduction in the number of infant deaths. For decades, I considered this an excellent shaping of an idea in which so much has been invested. Mother Earth has led me to understand that achieving such progress from generation to generation, by means of tool-development, leads to collective insanity. This is not what she wishes for us. She does not object to our resisting infant death. For a species whose mothers give birth to so few offspring, to do otherwise would lead to species extinction. Our failure lies with the tools that we use to resist. At the center of this culture which has now invaded practically every human place, is the ambition not just for piped water or smooth roads, but for an endlessly unfolding stream of more powerful tools, tools which we trust will realize for us an ever more-perfect invulnerability, especially an immunity to death. This is applied to infants, to the aged, and to every other stage of human life. Progress by these means becomes a curse, a horribly misconstrued abuse of our special ability as a species to create tools. It is also a gross misjudgment of death and birth's character within Mother Earth. As I have said in other essays, we have managed with our impressive devices to acquire the conviction that we are uniquely superior to all other forms of Earth's creation. The majority of us, at least in Los Angeles, believe that we are not simply more valuable, but that any other form than human is abhorrent to us as an alternative to being human. We may accept, as current theories of species evolution seem to tell us, that we were once something like the chimpanzees. But that was then, and this is now. For the great majority of humans today, the idea of actually becoming a chimpanzee, or a portion of one, were they to consider it, would be ghastly. Becoming a wild garlic plant, or a grub, might seem even worse. The only change in which most of us are interested is becoming a more perfect human, after death if necessary, before death whenever possible. To live in comfort forever as a human, or a perfected evolution of what was once human, is usually thought to be an essential component of paradise, either the end result of tool development or religious fulfillment, or both. This is typically individualized, so that we wish to be, each of us, infinite, in our present guise or some improved but still continuous version thereof. This is the final reward of true progress, we believe, and we embrace it with an iron grip. This of course requires that we do not die as infants. It requires that we do not die, or at least cease to exist, at all.

5) Birth and Death But consider in fact what we know gestation and birth to be. It is the gathering in a woman's womb of a great array of substances which are then shaped according to a pattern contained in a part of these substances called genes. The substances which make this possible, and ultimately, at birth, constitute the new infant, are obtained by the mother – and the father, in minute amounts, to shape a sperm – by eating and drinking, sustaining not only the pregnant mother's life but also the fashioning of her fetus's body. From where does the food and drink of the mother come? As we know full well, it comes from all or part of the bodies of other creatures of Earth, plants and, unless the mother is a vegan, animals. We are, through pregnancy, made manifest from the substance of other creatures, though not perhaps chimpanzees and, almost never, other humans (cannibalism is generally forbidden). After birth, and for the rest of our lives as humans, we continue to consume such food and drink, incorporating what is needed for life into our maturing bodies. Despite what myths we may weave, we are, always, a material fusion of the substance of others. The same is true for every other form made by Mother Earth. Death, then. It is for us and all other elements of Earth's creation an end of a present form, in our case human, and the beginning of our providing substance for others who may consume us. As a result, through death we become the substance of other life and even soil, stones and air – our generous and necessary reply to our own gestation, birth, and term of life. We may be eaten outright, by lions, tigers, or bears – something most cultures abhor and strive to avoid. We may be burned to ashes, reduced to water vapor and minerals, losing some but not all of our nutritive value to other plants and animals. Or, we may be devoured by much smaller insects or bacteria – in other words, simply decay. How quickly this happens depends upon whether our remains are sealed in steel coffins or are more exposed to the wild; but happen it will. Mother Earth would teach us that exposure of our substance after death, under conditions that do no harm to human or other communities, is much better, because it accelerates our contribution to her creative process and our participation in her.

6) Mind and Spirit We are, then, entirely formed and sustained by water, minerals, and the substance of other plants and animals, from gestation to death. Then, or shortly thereafter, as Earth measures time, some of these others absorb our substance. As adults, we tend to know this, however vaguely. Unfortunately, and predictably, our technological/religious struggle for individual immortality (please see Energy) has forced us to conceive of ourselves as not only our substance, but also two intangibles: mind and spirit (or soul). The dominant global culture holds further, despite the resistance of animal rights proponents, that only humans have mind and spirit, which do not come from other elements of Mother Earth but bloom instead from either our special genetic code, are gifts from immortal Gods quite separate from Earth's body, spring from the entire eternal universe, or certainly exist but have unclear origins. There are numerous variations on these themes. And these two attachments are claimed to be more important than any visible part of us, including the brain, which is associated with mind but is somehow distinct from it. Thus do our major religions, perhaps the most influential of which is called science, our philosophies, and especially our technologies, labor to set us apart from Mother Earth and her whole creation. From these illusory heights we seek to lift ourselves above all others and justify our pursuit of dominance. And so do we become insane, appalled by and rejecting death, fighting with all the tools at our disposal against real death, while most of us assert that our mind and spirit survive death, possess immortality, and avoid our bodies' decay. Mother Earth tells me that they do not. Certainly, not every human argues that we survive, intact, our deaths. Many of these, however, still welcome any tool advance that postpones death, particularly their own or the death of a friend or loved one, even when these tools do not sustain our good health, and even if they are costly to us and Earth. There are also those who accept what I have described as gestation, birth, maturation, and death as the totality of their existence; but they generally are not pleased with the end and are not interested in what came before the beginning, seeking only to enjoy their single, very finite, lives as humans. It is hard, in this culture, to understand or accept our natural, wild, character, which some have called organic. It has nothing to do with the label used in recent years on the foods we may buy in Los Angeles and elsewhere, or with carbon-based chemicals. If we are to become sane again as once we were, understanding what we are is essential. Every other element in Mother Earth already does, and that includes us when we are not human. Understanding is made even more difficult because the words organic, whole, and one, any of which might be considered appropriate, have evolved in English as expressions of a tool-driven culture (a similar plague has also overwhelmed words in many other languages, but none more than this one). These words, in short, will not do. In humble desperation, I suggest a bonding of the latter two into a new word and meaning: whone (pronounced "one").

7) Being Whone Mother Earth, and to some extent what little I know from the most insightful and stubborn Buddhists, have taught me that we are whone. Tool-impassioned cultures, such as that which came out of a colonizing Europe and now infests even Buddhist perceptions, haven't got a clue. In Los Angeles almost everyone refers to themselves as a collection of parts, such as my foot, my heart, my leg, my eyes. Just who, or what, is "my" generally passes unquestioned, although if pressed it would probably be my mind or spirit, despite the continued reference to "my". Some might suppose that "I", from which the possessive "my" springs, is the whole of the parts, parallel to a car and its engine, or a house and its kitchen. There is in these conventions some sense of one unified entity, whether human or tool. But this is quite unlike being whone. Earth herself, and everything in Earth's wilderness is whone, including but not exclusive to all living creatures. Since humans are alive and were once and will be again counted as an expression of her wilderness (see Wildness), we are also whone. Our flight from her, which began roughly ten thousand years ago when the earliest agriculture was first practiced, has not yet changed this. Every whone being, whether it has life as we describe it or not, cannot be disassembled without destroying it. Unlike fabricated tools, reassembly is impossible. Those of us who spend our daily lives separate from the wild, placing our trust in synthetic materials and the tools which are made of these materials, have great trouble comprehending such creatures, though Mother Earth knows us to be among them. Instead, our scientists tell us that one day we will be able to grow our parts and insert them in place of any originals which cease to function properly. This is still well short of complete reassembly with newly-grown hearts, lungs, brains, bones, blood cells, and so on. But it offers to take us a step further in the direction our madness would like us to go, to that elusive immortality which science, and other religious institutions, seek to offer us. To know ourselves as whone, we need a different path. Consider this. You and I have no parts. When we focus on something we see about ourselves which is smaller than the whole, we are not seeing a part. We are seeing one manifestation of ourselves. Our left hand, for instance, is not a part of us. It is us. Our right eye is not a part of us. It, too, is us. For this reason, no portion of our body is more important than any other. This perception is even more difficult than the first, for those of us plagued with collective insanity. The brain, for example, is not more important to us than our feet. The heart is not superior to a single vein in our right arm. We are whone, and no single thing about us upon which we might focus – nose, skin, arm, or idea - can be understood without acknowledging that it is inextricably bound up with and expresses the whone which we are; and the whone expresses it. It may seem obvious that we need not die if we lose a foot, but we do if we lose a brain or a heart, barring a heart transplant. These organs, it may be argued, are certainly more important than the foot. What we miss is this: we are not the same without the foot as with it. If we lose a foot, or lose its function, the whone which we were is past, finished, and a new whone very similar but still different is now present. Our brain is different, and so is our heart, our blood, our thoughts. We, the whones, are different. This is also true when we add substance, that is when we eat and drink (or, for that matter, receive an injection). Everything we as whone consume in order to maintain or strengthen ourselves adds to us the substance of other creatures in Mother Earth. They become us; it's "you are what you eat", and more. What we were, again, is gone; and a new whone begins. We are not merely indebted to those who provided portions of themselves to us. We and they have become whone. Seeing ourselves as a collection of parts, with mind and spirit somehow separate, hides this truth from us. Upon reflection, however, anyone who has lost a foot knows that who they were is not who they are, however difficult culturally it may be to recognize. This is the case even when we lose hair from a haircut, or balding, or when we trim and discard our nails. This new whone is also evident when the food we eat, or the water we drink, markedly changes. We become better or worse, and we know it. What we may miss is that it is a change in the whone which we are, and it is irreversible. Throughout what we call life, each of us is constantly passing away and being created anew. We do not go through only a few stages of life; the whone with our name is a multitude, and what was before cannot be recovered, nor the whone which is new be denied. This multitude – which may seem superficially to be one individual - comprises instead a closely connected community with much in common but also significant differences; and if we are sane, we can acknowledge this community with our name and are not disturbed by it. What happens to the absent foot, or hair, or nails, or the skin we continually shed? I once lost a stomach, by surgery when I was twenty-seven. What happened to it, or to anything in life which was us and now is not? The answer is simple. Since it is a portion of the substance of Mother Earth, it is consumed by other species and becomes their whone. Death is never the end of a single organism which began with a single birth. It is the completion in time of each unique, bonded multitude of whones which is singular only by virtue of their bonds, as with any community. There is much more in being whone than has been said here, such as that stones are no less whone than ravens or humans. I hope that what is offered here is enough to help us understand that though we are as a species too many, becoming fewer is not the disaster our culture may lead us to believe. There is in fact nothing unnatural or new about it. We can and will continue as we always have within Mother Earth. It’s a matter of knowing ourselves.

8) Being Mother Earth If I am right in my understanding of Mother Earth, then our participation in her creation and history is easy to comprehend. We are to her as our blood cells or eyelashes are to ourselves. This is the way in which we are her, and she is us. And she is also whone. Beyond this, when we eat or drink we consume other portions of her, given up to us by her other creatures. When we lose portions of our whone, whether our new whone is able to grow similar portions or not, we provide sustenance, substance, to her other creatures, who are also her. Because she is whone, these other creatures are also us, sharing as we do in Earth's whone. When at birth we become human, we are a unique gathering of her, created by her, and inhabited by the gifted substance of her others, whether soybeans or broccoli, cows or deer. This is critical. However we may alter what we consume of others so as to be human, those who have given to us a portion of themselves retain, in us, their roles in her. We are their paths, so long as we remain human, and not ours alone. More than that, we have, before gestation and birth, been them. They and we also leave us for other paths when we shed portions of ourselves, and new whones join daily in us as we sustain and change our human whone. We are bonded in whone and as whone; but Mother Earth does not forget who has become us, and who maintains us, nor does she abandon any of this broader community in which, for a time, we are the gathered center. When this center disperses, that is, when we die, we do not vanish any more than Mother Earth vanishes. Our path moves out from its human form, as it gathered when each of us began, keeping our human history with us while we become portions of her in others. No matter who consumes us after death, these other creatures become us, we become them, and the entire community continues in our planetary Mother. Like us, but in a larger planetary and galactic community, while she exists as a planet she has a strong hold on all her vast reality. So far as we know, it has been a very long time since she has given up the equivalent of a hair on her head, never mind an arm or a leg. During this period, her multiplicity appears to be much more subtle than ours. The substance of what is now or has been human has remained with her and promises to stay with her for a great many millennia. Despite the occasional asteroid, she is tough. In other words, the substance which we call human is, has been and will be far longer than we can in any practical sense understand. As immortality goes, it is certainly sufficient. Our present form, rather than our substance, has existed for a very short time in Earth terms, as individuals and as a species. She tells me that our current enormously inflated population, gathering a great deal more of Earth's/our substance than is healthy for us or her, is about to be corrected. This is a wonderful prospect, if we understand whone. The insane greed which has led us to gather from others over six billion human forms, and to plan for billions more, will end, just as will, we should hope, the overwhelming greed which has driven our most powerful economies. The two are quite closely linked; without the energetic avarice for tools, the billions of humans would never have gathered. This greed has also blinded us to our origins and our future, as whones in and whone with Mother Earth, which are not human but are no less streams in her creation. We have been and are bound to become stones and pines and ravens, kelp and coral and dolphins, butterflies and earthworms and grass, and much more. All of these unique whones are as splendid as any human. All of these are aware and seek both self-expression and community, in their and our own way. The delight of our presence in Earth is that we are not caged within one form but share through time in many. Clinging in despair or hope to a material (by means of science and technology) or spiritual deliverance into immortal human form is deeply at odds with the nature of humans and Mother Earth. It is also a tragically misguided and hopeless struggle to avoid participation in the almost infinitely diverse, enduring, inclusive, surprising, challenging, delectable voyage in which Earth is engaged. But what of mind and spirit? Put simply, mind is our thoughts and emotions. Mother Earth tells me that these are portions of our whone and of hers. About a disembodied spirit she tells me very little in words that I can share, perhaps because it is not about words. I think of spirit as a wave expression of our form, just as is music (see Earth Music), which extends outward from our visible selves. Our spirit is communicative, interactive with other whones, and can meld with her whone in fabulous, invisible harmony for any who are willing to return spiritually to her. In fact, it is through her spirit and mine that I hear her, and so may you. Nevertheless, spirit too is a portion of our whone, and of the multitude of non-human whones which we have been and will become. Spirit, like mind, is universal in Earth and yet singularly expressed in her and each portion of her. Humans have theirs; pebbles and sequoia have theirs. In our history, which is far from over, we stream through it all. Rejoice!

9) What Do We Do? As humans, we now have a responsibility and an invitation to gather less, in gestations and births, and to let go sooner, in the passing of elders and those who are fatally ill. If we choose to pursue our alienated madness and prop up the human form above all others, we will fail, and in our madness this failure will be terrible. In the essay Energy which, like Whone, I call a message from Mother Earth, some of the principles entailed in radically reducing our numbers through our own community and personal choices are presented. I will not repeat these here. It is enough in this message to say that our invitation from our great Mother to willingly rejoin Earth's paradise and to abandon our destructive obsession with the human form and the power of the tools it has created, is real and loving. Becoming fewer humans and more of her other creatures is a choice she would much prefer that we make and carry through. To do this, we need to recognize that we are whone, that we are whone in Earth, and that we have not nor will we ever be abandoned or betrayed by her. It is we who have striven to abandon and betray Earth. We will not succeed on this path, the end of which we are rapidly approaching. Earth is asking us to return to other, practically endless paths in her which will recover for us joys, discoveries and histories beyond our human knowing. I believe that we can do this, but the great majority of us across her surface are still facing our terminal myths. Whone is written to help us turn, in wonder, to her. Bill Luttrell, one voice of Mother Earth