Daring to Dream: Facing Extinction
I recently read Catherine Ingram’s piece Facing Extinction. I was not familiar with her work before I read it.
It inspired me greatly, and as things that inspire me often do, it irked me.
When I read something I barely agree with it all, I tend to have a neutral reaction to it.
When I read something that i find myself agreeing with 90% of the time, that 10% lights a fire in my ass.
All that just to say it is an amazing piece of writing and does a good job of working through the social and psychological factors that come into play when we actually allow ourselves to be present with the degree of life destruction that is happening on our planet right now.
This earth, this place that once teemed with life is now being swarmed by death. The killers? Humanity. As Wikipedia explains: “Ecologically, humanity has been noted as an unprecedented “global superpredator” that consistently preys on the adults of other apex predators, and has worldwide effects on food webs. There have been extinctions of species on every land mass and in every ocean: there are many famous examples within Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, North and South America, and on smaller islands. Overall, the Holocene extinction can be linked to the human impact on the environment. The Holocene extinction continues into the 21st century, with meat consumption, overfishing, ocean acidification and the decline in amphibian populations being a few broader examples of an almost universal, cosmopolitan decline in biodiversity. Human overpopulation (and continued population growth) along with profligate consumption are considered to be the primary drivers of this rapid decline.”
It’s hard for me to fathom that each individual person does not experience this centripetal pull towards death that we seem to orbit around like a black hole. Hard to fathom, and yet I see evidence of this complete and utter disregard for the suffering and destruction of life on earth all around me.
I witness this turning away daily–when people’s eyes glaze over, and I can tell that I’ve lost them, this woman standing in front of you with tears in her eyes because of the floods in Nebraska that no one is paying any attention to, she must be a little out of her mind.
I get these kinds of rejections all the time when I remind people in social groups that we are experiencing the collapse of life on earth and then I witness them in myself. I turn away as well.
Things aren’t that bad. This isn’t part of a bigger pattern. We’ll figure a way out of it.
It’s just by chance that in the 92 years since the Bonnet Carre spillway existed it’s only been opened 13 times–3 in the last 4 years.
I think the 90% of what I agree with in Catherine Ingram’s piece is that to reckon with “climate change”–perhaps the most euphemistic word of all time–is to ultimately face human extinction.
The 10% I just can’t stomach is her insistence that to accomplish that reckoning with integrity, we must abandon hope.
“True, there are times and places for hope when it is possible to change a course that can be changed. But clinging to hope when there is no longer anything to be done, when the course cannot be changed, makes hope itself a burden. One is forced into internal pretense, deeper denial. For people who have limited capacity for denial, and I suspect that if you have read this far you are one of those, maintaining hope becomes impossible. It is a surprising relief to let go of it.”
To dream and to hope are not so different. They both require for us to exercise our muscle of imagination, our capacity to conceive that things could be other than what they are. This creativity is humanity’s calling card.
I would never deny there is a spiritual love and light brigade that is often too quick to gloss over the details of suffering, that accuses people of dwelling instead allowing the proper reverence towards the death we are all experiencing as members of the web of life. We need so desperately to give ourselves time and space to grieve, and grieve fully. The pain, when given its proper due, is how we eventually, in grieving’s abundantly wise and non-linear way, realign with our passion, our values, and our sense of purpose.
But to understand how close we are to the possibility that our grandchildren, our children, we ourselves may live through the extinction of life on earth if we continue to collectively walk the path that we are on, from my perspective, does not mean we should then “realistically” abandon hope. Hope is what is left when being realistic leads to death.
I believe releasing hope is an assumption that follows only if the central marker you are using to conceive of and understand “climate change” is through scientific research. Or perhaps more precisely, that the underpinning of your understanding of how the world operates is scientific materialism.
Scientific materialism, in a nutshell, is the POV that the physical world operates according to the physical laws as determined by scientific research and discovery. Basically what Catherine Ingram is saying is that according to scientific research in combination with the political climate, we are already doomed. There’s nothing more that can be done.
I believe without hesitation that the scientific method is the absolute best way humans have to come to collective truth. And I do not believe in scientific materialism. Truly, scientific materialists often disregard the rather revolutionary metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. They are probably best named Newtonian Physicalists, i.e. they contend the material world functions according to the laws of Newtonian physics.
And so yes, if you believe that the material world is all there is to life, that there are no spiritual realms or dimensions–that material effects can only have material causes, and that they only exist if they are measurable by our five senses or scientific instruments, then I can understand why you would see no reason to hope, and perhaps feel overwhelmed and hopeless.
And once again I feel so humbled and blessed to have been a student of the dream for ten years now. Because by being present with my dreams I have remembered that waking life is more of a dream than we might realize, just as our dreams have much more reality than we care to admit. Science has its rightful place but it can not make the final claim on what is possible or truly real. I believe that is something that we can only know for sure in the pulsing den of our heart.
Because if dreams have taught me nothing else they have taught me that when we dream from a place of an open, trusting heart, when we dream from a place of knowing that we are loved and that we are love, when we dream from a place of clear-eyed vision, a willingness to grow, transform, and change, and a deep surrender and utter humility to the path of our lives and our capacities of experience as human beings, a path over which we have such little domain except to allow ourselves to put one foot in front of the other, we have nothing to lose.
I am not saying we should hope because there is a reason to do so. To me, that is the purpose of hope, it is how we make the leap into reasons, plans, the next thing that “makes sense” or “feels right”. Daring to dream that things could be other than what they are is the reason, life itself an expression of that dream.
When we give up hope on life we hitch our wagons to the corridor of death. When we hold back from offering our love for fear that it will not be returned we choose death. When we ignore the calls of the earth to do our part in repairing our relationship to the resources that give us life we choose death. When choose comfort over growth we choose death. When we choose blame, guilt, shame, and abandonment we choose death.
Life in all of its form has always been a dream, a fantasy of the grandest proportions–to be born on a planet abundant with life, to breathe, to eat, to drink. To have our hearts beat. To grow in ways we can not predict. Our bodies fear death and guard against it, and in this it is our companion. When we dream, when we hope, we stick our faces into that black abyss and we stick our thumbs in our ears and we say na-na-na-knee-boo-boo! Not this time! I’m gonna LIVE my ass off today and in that I am going to feed life and in feeding life I dare to dream and in daring to dream I have courage.
This weekend Jordan and I are hosting a big group of folks up to the land project we are stewarding, 111 acres of highly unique habitat, home to the endangered Gopher Tortoise. We’re creating a place for folks in the deep and gulf south to come back into deeper relationship with the earth and nature through practical action and inspired community. What drives us night and day is to nurture the ecosystem that thrives there with all the attention and respect it deserves.
I am kind of in a state of mind blown as we pull up some of our roots in New Orleans and make our way out to rural Mississippi. We’re both born and bred New Orleanians. It’s a big move. If I wasn’t making this move or trying to nurture this project and this land, life would be about 100X easier right now. I have a whole bunch of other projects and desires and things I want to do besides this.
But I can tell you without a doubt that it is the balm to my heart and allows it to keep opening more and more to the grief and the destruction, the work of tending and being in relationship with vulnerable lands. It’s like that Cass McCombs song Dream Come True Girl. It is beyond hope, and it doesn’t feel like reality either. It is my dream come true reality life. And it’s happening because I dared to dream it.
And so if you find yourself overwhelmed and wondering where to put your hope or whether you even deserve to have it I just want to say to you go ahead. Dare to dream. Truly, dream harder and crazier than ever before. If we are this close to death, what’s the point of holding back? What do we have to lose?
With all my love dear dreamers
Kezia Vida
