The Capacity for Hope
The following was delivered, by invitation, to a symposium of conservation biologists from around the world who were assembling for one week at UC Berkeley in order to come up with a practical plan to conserve species and the ecosystems that support them.
The fact that a writer and an artist is here says as much about where we are on the planetary timeline as does the reason for my presence – to say what is hard to say because it cannot be measured, or droppered into a petri dish, or analyzed and graphed, or legislated into and out of existence, or even detected with our five senses. Except that we know it when it’s not present and in that way we do what is sometimes said to be impossible: we prove a negative. I am speaking about the essentiality of the natural environment and of the community of living things to our spiritual, emotional, and psychological health. But our health is dependent upon its health. And its health is failing – we all know it. Time to pull stops, raise flags and send up a cry for help. Time to pitch in.
There is no doubt that it was this time a long time ago, and we can only hope that it’s not too late even for hope. That sounds pretty gloomy, but as a colleague of yours remarked to me recently, Conservation is a game for those with the capacity for hope. I have come to think of hope as the stone of stone soup, the first ingredient in the pot that, while it has no value in and of itself, attracts all the other elements and agents that together, make something worthy and lasting and healthful. It represents what we can, or what we want to imagine, and so it contains wholesome ideas about the future, about the maturity and knowledge that is still possible. Of course that stone, a conjuring of need, falsity and vision, is nothing without cooperation. Everyone must contribute something to the pot. Conservation may have begun as an idea, but now it’s a job for all of us.
I might have reasonably said rescue mission instead of job, except that it is almost impossibly more difficult to reconstitute lost habitat, or bring back species that teeter on the brink of extinction, or that have already been exterminated, than it is to save them in the first place. Once you’ve turned the last page you can’t unread the book. Conservation as a job includes more than protecting what still lives and addressing depletions; it includes of course stopping pollution and then remediation or re-wilding of habitats that have been compromised. It means reshuffling values and rewiring human impulses to take, to abuse, to multiply without check, to desire without questioning the damage that unwitting desire can do. It means that even though we can, we must choose not to plunder, not to waste, not to exploit, not to poison; we must stay our hands. That is the strongest indicator of maturity, one way to keep humanity humane. It means that the economic argument of highest and best use is just plain wrong – outdated, unaffordable in terms of a healthy planet, shortsighted, and suicidal. One of the four defining principals of HBU, as it is acronymically known, is physical possibility, which may now serve us well. So much is no longer physically possible, not without irretrievable loss of health, diversity, and numbers. The economic or lunch-bucket argument, as it is sometimes referred to, is monumentally beside the point. Economic insecurity simply cannot ever again be trump.
Understanding how we got here will tell us a lot about what not to do; how to give shape to our vision of the future; how to get out of this mess. As John Barth once wrote, quantitative differences eventually lead to qualitative differences. The subtractions from our paradise have been adding up. We are losing species and ecosystems by legions, and looking away does not stop these ends from arriving. We have to look not only at what still is, but at what once was in order to better understand the limits of tolerance, the breaking down points, the unexpected survivals. Living things have to be considered across the warp and weft of time—a lot of time, because a handful of human generations is no measure against which to perceive whole patterns of life and loss.
Every year something new. Of course, there’s nothing new about newness, about change. What is new is the rate of change. Even human evolution has been speeding up over the last ten thousand years. Industrialization and exponential population growth can’t be ignored and, beat for beat, can’t be adapted to fast enough, ecologically or spiritually. We’re like a man running uncontrollably downhill, trying to catch up with his own momentum, trying not to fall. But falling is likely; even surviving is in question. Because while we are subject to the forces of nature, we have also become one of its phenomena, like volcanic activity or climate disruption, which is actively, measurably, changing the planet.
It’s also not news that as a species, we have been recklessly fertile, each one more of us consuming that many more resources, each one of us born with the gene of greed, each one of us lacking if not intelligence, then certainly information. Sometimes we had bad information, or even worse, disinformation. This then is part of your job description—assembling information, getting it right, and getting it into the right hands. But all of us have the job of getting it into the right hearts and minds, of creating a collective environmental consciousness. Some of you may have seen the article that appeared in the New York Times this year (based on a study done here at UC Berkeley) about the human experience of awe as unique among living creatures. Awe, or the sense of wonder, is found to inspire a “collective” emotion, and to be most often stimulated by “sublime scenes of nature.” It arouses altruism because it tells us that while we may be small, we are a part of something vast – the web of life. We are bound to it, quietly but surely, like a secret everyone knows and needn’t say. Anyone who has spent time in human solitude in the company of other living things, and in wild places, knows what it means to be alone but not lonely. True loneliness can be found in cities, in brick canyons and lamp-lit rooms, but hardly at all beside a running brook or beneath the whisper of pines or in proximate harmony with the trampling of hooves and the flash of wings. Here is the cadence of dignity and the murmuring quietude of identity. Here we are mysteriously restored. We recognize ourselves in these places, and they in turn complete us through that inarticulate recognition, confirming our rightful membership. Our part in all of this, and its primal hold within us, compose a dynamic of identity more soundly expressive and defining of who we are than any passport or medical record might provide.
Melville once said, “Ourselves are Fate.” Unfortunately, who we have been as a species is a species mostly unconscious of its behavior, ruinously ignorant of consequences, and arrogantly indifferent to our fellow creatures. We have subjected the planet to our behavior, and behavior is not conduct. Behavior is ill-considered, or not-at-all considered, action uninformed by a mutuality of need and benefit, and untethered to the principals of preservation. But conduct is careful, respectful action undertaken along an axis of ethics and knowledge. Behavior, then, is primitive; conduct, evolved. Now that we have had our applied education, and provided it’s not too late, we may begin (some may continue) conducting ourselves as an evolved species. By all accounts we are one of the great forces of nature now, but wouldn’t it be marvelous if we could remember that we are part of the life force too? Because whether we are ready or not, we have landed in the steward’s chair.
Steward should not be confused with master, as it has been in the past. Too many places, too many species have not recovered from the sins of previous stewards. We have never been omnipotent, but we have clearly been more powerful than we could have imagined, busily cutting into fat, and as our numbers and needs increased, and as we became more needlessly acquisitive, cutting into muscle. Our earth is terribly more vulnerable that we inferred. How could we have supposed otherwise? It was so big and abundant, and often, frightening. Now we know that it is fragile, it is finite, and it is the only home we have. Our living on this planet must be moderate, characterized by restraint, consonant with the living community and its dynamic life systems, with what it needs in order to survive healthfully. Moderation might be not so moderate, not for a while, not until we can pull matters back into balance and sustainability. At base, what we want is continuity; lastingness. We want our planet and the life that makes its home here to survive, and if necessary, to survive us. Sure, I’d like to think that I’ll have genetic legatees a millennium from now, but I would be almost as satisfied to know that the chorus of life itself struggles and thrives and howls into the future, even without the human voice.
Declarations of independence have become as obsolete and maladaptive as the behavior they once encouraged, where the pursuits of happiness, or wealth, or turf seemed to codify avarice, and to embolden choices that in the end were damaging of both heart and habitat. What we need now is a declaration of our inter-dependence. If we acknowledge this interdependence, if we embrace it, we can begin to heal a wounded wilderness and to revere the live things with whom we share this world. Far too many of our species have allowed themselves to be domesticated—in thought and action—though such a state of affairs withers our basic creaturely dignity and shrinks our capacity for hope. That is one of the saddest of ironies: that what we have been avidly destroying are the very things that give us the capacity for hope, and that can lead to true conservation. We are learning how to appreciate, how to care for, and how to love this world. What we have also learned is that we simply need to love it.
—Lynn Stegner
September 14, 2015
Berkeley, California
Global Change Biology Symposium
