I always was a flower child at heart. I was a good kid for the most part. I would only get in trouble for talking too much and one of our friends mother’s, Judy, a proper English woman, would be scandalized that I would pick flowers. I always remember being fascinated and drawn to nature. More and more I feel that humanity is not all that humane and many of the ways modern life is structured it can almost seem like the end goal of society is to destroy, mow down and monetize every possible inch of the planet. Every animal, creature, plant and scenic vista should exist for our consumption, cultivation and commercialization. Why else would anything exist?
An old native american quote comes to mind “the most affluent of countries, operate on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.” This quote is attributed to Alanis Obomsawin who was described as “an Abenaki from the Odanak reserve, seventy odd miles northeast of Montreal.” Who among us who have been around for a good part of the last and present centuries cannot recall some of the environment changing slowly or not so slowly before our eyes. I have witnessed huge wildfires around California. The fires have raged ever closer until in 2018 the unspeakable happened. A town ironically named Paradise was nearly eradicated and burned to the ground. One year a large fire burned right in the middle of LA along the 405. The billowing flames threatened to hop onto the freeway and burn people in their cars. Smoke and ash enveloped everything. When I was much younger I remember going on road trips and having to clean off the bugs that would meet an unfortunate demise getting squashed on the windshield during our drives. That seems to be gone, no more pesky insects to clean up.
All of this is but a portion of the semi-hidden cruelties built into modern life. There is so much irony to be found. The most elementary concepts we try to instill in children do not seem to be the way the world really runs. We say to the children “be nice, treat people fairly, treat others as you would like to be treated, do the right thing, ask permission” and so on. But once out in the “real world” it seems everyone for themselves and don’t dare to think of the welfare of animals, plants, nature and those that can’t even speak up for themselves. The idyllic scenes we might see in a chicken or other food ad are light years away from the horrific inhumane scenes inside the factory farms which treat their human employees not all that much better than the unfortunate animals that are fodder for the assembly lines. Pharmaceutical companies and other corporations do cost benefit analysis of the costs of protecting employees from harm and the occasional death versus the cost of ameliorating a projected number of wrongful death lawsuits. As one of my “old school” neighbors callously said when I mentioned warehouse or factory workers literally dropping dead in the here and now, he said “just a cost of doing business”?! They glorify Jeff Bezos and other billionaires like him. Many of us may have seen the quote or meme that says “If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to see what is wrong with it. When humans exhibit this same behavior, we put them on the cover of Forbes magazine.” Some might explain the human excesses of wealth accumulation as an extreme extension of the biological survival instinct to store food for the winter’s survival. It is never enough, no matter how much a billionaire has they seem to always want more. I would ask other Americans or any modern people “would you like to go back in time to have nobility, lords, ladies, kings and queens?” The modern wealth royalty is wealthier and much more powerful over the whole globe than anything those old lords and kings could ever have imagined. I would ask everyone to take a moment out of our hectic lives spent building the nest egg to finally arrive at “the good life” and ask ourselves what is the point of existence? Should we all labor to be a piece of the machine amassing wealth for the tiny group of people at the top or might we rework societies to other more holistic ends?
That radical activist Dr. Seuss in his seminal 1971 work, The Lorax, succinctly tells the story of consumerism brought to its logical end point. The Once-ler builds factories and chopping down all of the Truffala trees to produce the vitally necessary thneeds until the land is completely devoid of nature and all is gone. The Lorax had tried to warn the Once-ler, the Lorax said “I speak for trees which you seem to be chopping down as fast as you please.” Soon enough there is nothing left, nothing left to do but sit in your decaying once gleaming factory looking out over the desolate bleak landscape. Greed and self-interest don’t really seem like the ideal methods for humanity to reach it’s zenith. Where did endless growth economic systems naturally occur as the only way to run the world? It is all contrived and self-imposed, things were not always this way and I hold out hope that one day it will all change. Our very lives may depend on it.
May 2024
Ben Bregman | May 2024