Are We Starting A War on Nature? Is This the Real Struggle?
THIS being, not what will a virus coming out of nature do to us, but what will we, with all of the possibilities of our own nature, do to ourselves?
We have needed something to focus our attention, the attention of the whole world, no less, on the hopeless situation into which our approach to living on this planet has brought us. Our attention—the whole world’s attention—is now focused as never before; as absolutely never before. and what are we doing with this attention?
Are we starting another war, a war on nature this time, like we started the endless wars after 9/11 on Them and The Other: Muslims, Eastern nations, Enemies all of them?
Another war as mindless and endless as the wars since 9/11? Did we learn anything from THAT?
When was the last time you felt a kind of immobilizing fear, as if history was being divided into before and after, as if everything was now changed? 9/11 perhaps? Think about that now.
By any reasonable standard of all that is just and humane, our response to the test of 9/11 was an abject failure.
We turned an opportunity for honest self-evaluation into a miserable obsession with endless war. That is a fair and balanced evaluation of America’s response to 9/11. By any standard of all that is just and humane, you judge our response to 9/11.
Are we about to do something just as stupid with the coronavirus challenge of 2020?
Are We Starting A War on Nature? Is This the Real Struggle?
THIS being, not what will a virus coming out of nature do to us, but what will we, with all of the possibilities of our own nature, do to ourselves and to nature?
Like a deer in the headlights, we stand immobilized by what might be coming rather than mobilized in response to what is present. Let’s look at all, or something closer to all, that is present.
What if, due to immobilizing fear of what the virus might do to us, we close our eyes, then agree to economic, political and military measures which are certifiably more deadly than any virus which has ever erupted from the earth? Those economic, political and military measure present every possibility of doing to us what nothing from the earth itself has ever done to humanity
What the economics of predatory capitalism, the politics of homeland fascism and the militarism of nuclear insanity have done with their war on nature, and are doing to the human part of nature, dwarf the worst that millions of years of the biology of creation has ever done to humanity. Those years of struggle have produced life—all the life that we know. In starkest contrast, these above named human—these inhumane—projects have been for years already threatening the destruction of the planet as a livable place. CORVID-19 has not lessened or removed those suicidal human behaviors, it has focused our attention in such a way that we could now choose to adopt an economics of democratic social caring, a politics of civil liberty and a global security system of nonviolent compassion toward the goal of our survival. That could be our response to this illness that comes from the earth, or from bioweapons laboratories, we really don’t know.
There is an indigenous wisdom of humanity which for tens of thousands of years sought the wisdom of how to live in harmony with the earth and its creatures. For several hundred years another paradigm of human “wisdom” has prevailed, one which has viewed creation as an enemy to be conquered, an opponent over which to gain dominion. The earth has taken all of that that it’s going to take, and it is now time for us to choose a new path. The indigenous and dominionist approaches might not be polar opposites, but they are distinct choices which take us in different directions. We are choosing. This is the real issue we face.
Let’s have a conversation about it.
John K. Stoner
April 6, 2020
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