Page 178 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

For five hundred years, Moore argues, Western civilization has been living in an

adolescent superhero comic book, the sort of cartoon fantasy of planetary subjugation

and mastery that stirs the loins of teenage boys and Wall Street bankers. That this

fantasy is now being consummated orgiastically in the White House cannot erase what

so many of us know in our bones: That story is over. It is a failed experiment. The world

doesn’t work that way.

We are at a hinge point in history-- and the challenge of this moment, an outgrowth of

recognizing kinship, is to align [our] ethics with the ways of the Earth. Doing so will

require creative change in the very ideas of what it means to be a human being... It will

call everything into question: our current capitalist economic systems, our educational

systems, our food production systems, our systems of land use and ownership. It calls

us to re-examine what it means to be happy and what it means to be smart.

There may be no ultimate refuge from fear and dread, but one of our tasks now, as

destruction threatens so much that we love, is to create refugia... places of safety where

life endures, where ideas are sheltered and encouraged to grow. “Refugia” is the term

scientists coined for those small places in the blast zone that were spared the

devastation when Mt. Saint Helens exploded in 1980. Here, a bed of moss and deer

fern under a rotting log. There, under a boulder, a patch of pearly everlasting and the

tunnel to a vole’s musty nest. ...We can create small pockets of flourishing, and we can

make ourselves into overhanging rock ledges to protect life, so that the full measure of

possibility can spread and reseed the world.

But even as we seek out and create pathways of refuge and regeneration, new ways to

live, we can and we must bear witness to crimes against nature both large and small,

and to the miraculous life forms we are losing.

Let us be chroniclers of loss. Let no species disappear without public notice. If our

ways of life are going to destroy infinitudes of lives, let us at least do it knowingly, and

grieve for the terrible absence.

Of course we need to stand up to companies and governments, to call them and

ourselves to account. But first and foremost, we must feel what is happening to our

world. From these feelings, Moore suggests, creative forms of protest will arise—

activism in the form of ritual. Fill the forests with death notices. Transform every stump

in the clearcut into a cross, so no one can drive by a bare-ass hillside without seeing it

for what it is- a graveyard that stretches for miles. Let the roadsides bloom with shrines

adorned with flowers to mark the extinctions of sparrows. ..Send an obituary to the

newspaper each spring, when the frogs do not sing. ...Assemble the choir and sing

hymns as the bulldozers gouge out the last checker lilies in the valley...Rent a hearse

and follow the truck that sprays poisons in the ditches....