Once I was wild. Once countless creatures crept, crawled, wriggled and ran
over me. Flowers and trees shot up wherever they pleased. Sometimes they
competed for space, but just as often they co-operated to live together in
harmony. The same was true of the animals: they preyed upon one another only
as they hungered. They knew nothing of murder or genocide. The law of the
jungle was take what you need, and no more.
In those golden days, the thin-haired apes who call themselves people were
just another tribe among my laughing, playful children. They foraged and
hunted as their hungers dictated. They fornicated and procreated as their
passions moved them. They built simple, efficient structures to protect
themselves from the elements, and spent most of their time in play.
Some might say that they did nothing but play. They had no time clocks,
bosses or rigid work ethic. Maybe you could argue that these early people
were really engaged in productive work only when they weaved, sculpted,
cooked or hunted, while their dancing or story-telling were unproductive
leisure and play. But this distinction would come as a surprise to the happy,
hairless apes themselves. All their activities were voluntary, and all
fulfilled essential human needs -- to these uncivilized humans, gaiety and
camaraderie seemed just as essential as food and shelter.
Unfortunately, somewhere, at some time, some of these hairless apes
decided that they constituted the center of the universe. They decided that
the lives of those in their tribe were more important than the lives of all
the other creatures around them in the community of life. They decided that
they possessed the knowledge of who should live and who should die, and the
sole power to save or destroy the world. Misled by these delusions, some
human tribes decided that they could remake the entire world to fit their
purposes. To this end they began to tamper with the intricate systems of life
that had spread across my body during billions of years of chaotic
interactions.
Because of the egotism of a few hairless apes, these infinitely complex
systems, in which every organism's independent actions served the interests
of the community of life as a whole, were rapidly replaced. The apes
constructed simplified systems meant to serve only the interests of a few
human masters. Wetlands, forests and prairies filled with diverse life gave
way to geometrical rows of plants and subdued herds of animals, completely
dependent upon human care for survival, and bred only to service humans'
material needs and designs.
Maintaining fields and herds required much more time and effort than
living off what naturally grew up from my body. The domesticating humans
fought a constant battle to defend their ordered gardens from the vital,
natural chaos around them. One threat came from other human tribes, who still
lived wild and free off my plenty. This way of life, without respect for
property or boundaries, was incompatible with that of the domesticated tribes.
In fact, everything wild seemed incompatible with human-made systems: one
of the biggest threats to life came from the dangerously unpredictable
behavior of birds, deer, insects and even other plants. All seemed set on
consuming the crops that these tribes had sowed, or upon taking advantage of
the growing conditions in their fields. These relatives of the hairless ape
did not understand that the new domesticated lands were not meant to exist as
free space in a wild garden, where every thing was provided for your
consumption through the larger design of a chaotic system.
To stop the wilderness threatening their controlled design, the civilized
apes took up arms against their wild relations, conquering and enslaving all
that they could. Free plants and animals were domesticated. Free humans
became servants or slaves -- or were simply assimilated as fellow farmers
enslaved to a plot of land that they must constantly maintain and guard.
Those humans, animals and plants who would not be pacified, and therefore
threatened the new human-designed world order, were exterminated. In this way
murder and genocide came to be.
As these brutal apes imposed a hierarchy on the community of life, where
they decided what people and other organisms outside of their own tribe would
be allowed to live or die, the internal organization of their tribes also
came to reflect this unequal power dynamic. The new, domesticated human
societies were invariably formed in a hierarchy. A few bullying tyrants or
self-important individuals would go about making decisions for other people
based upon their own needs and whims, just as they made decisions for the
entire living world based upon the interests of their tribe.
Despite many successful crusades to kill off all that was wild and free,
these early human leaders were constantly thwarted in their attempts to rule
the world. Slaves rebelled, free tribes continued to raid their herds and
gardens, and pestilences continued to destroy their crops. The community of
life, in all its glorious chaos, was constantly showing how impossible it was
for any humans to rule over me.
Yet these early rulers did not step back to question the source of their
constant insecurity. Or, if they did, they were too blinded with self-
importance to assess what was really happening. Perhaps a few thoughtful
storytellers were getting at this when they created tales about a lost Garden
of Eden, where life had been all easy play. But these stories explained
humanity's fall from paradise in terms of punishment from an all-powerful
supreme being. This explanation obscured the voluntary choice humans had made
to accept authority and domestication, and made obedience to powerful
authorities seem inescapable.
Neither the human leaders nor their bullied followers comprehended their
mistakes early on, when they had just begun to betray my trust and love by
killing and enslaving my other children. Instead of abandoning their brutal
ways, they began a full-scale attack against my body itself. They tried to
make my soil barren through their wasteful, ill-conceived agricultural
enterprises. They pitted my body with mines and quarries in order to build
huge structures, temples to their self-importance, or in order to burn the
prizes they had dug up and send up clouds of smoke to blight my breath.
Human societies began to move faster and faster, working to gobble up all
that was wild and turn it into factory farmland, or piles of slag and debris,
or massive stone and metal monuments to the brutal apes' self obsession and
complete estrangement from the community of life. Even in those few spots,
those few nature preserves set aside for creatures not of immediate use in
the human-made system, constant efforts were made to police, regulate and
control my other children, so that they could never become strong and
plentiful enough to leave the sanctuary and reclaim the blighted human world.
I grow old, I grow old... this refrain comes from a poem by T.S. Eliot,
one particularly adroit wordsmith among the most privileged classes of the
brutal apes. Eliot also wrote a poem characterizing the modern human society
in which he lived as a barren wasteland. These observations are important.
They tell me that, through their constant insistence that slave-master
relations are the only interactions possible, humanity's leaders have not
just deprived other creatures of their joy, play and freedom. Even those at
the top of the human-designed social system can sense that, without the
ability to interact with all living things as brothers, they have lost all
chance for beautiful, full lives. They have lost the chance to live in a
world that is beautiful because it is out of their control.
But even though they know that they are empty, only a handful of these
humans have ever tried to let go, and restore the world to its previous,
chaotic order. Most take the easy way out, trying to fill up their emptiness
through redoubled efforts to impose human-made order at every level of life.
T.S. Eliot joined the Anglican Church in order to find meaning in its
rituals, and he was not alone in this. Over their brief history, the vast
majority of humans seeking escape from the brutality of their social order
have become trapped in ritual, religion, superstition, philosophy or science.
In fact, the efforts of some humans to return to wild freedom and the
community of life have even been used to create new religions or
philosophies, and thereby increase the weight of their chains and the
severity of my injuries.
With each passing moment, I lose hope that the thin-haired apes will make
any kind of peaceful, voluntary return to a state of free play, mutual
respect, and wild nature. Once I wished for this possibility in every moment,
and looked constantly for signs that it was coming. Now it is only a very
misty deep dream. Instead of wishing for the best, I find myself hoping that
the absolute worst does not come to be.
Perhaps these misguided ape children of mine, guided by their egotistic
leaders, will destroy me completely in one final blast of egotism. Or perhaps
they will only annihilate themselves and the majority of life, and I will be
able to enter a long, deep sleep of healing and rejuvenation. But what I most
fear is that they will find a way, using their technology, to prolong my life
and their own, keeping us alive indefinitely in a tame, debilitated state--
just as they string out the mutilated lives of their own elderly with
painkillers and hospital respirators. I would rather that they kill me in a
bright blaze than that they keep me alive as the single flickering flame of
vital life in a cold world of stone temples and sickly slave farms. But the
choice is not mine...

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