Our Silent Spring
Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
― Anonymous Greek Proverb
Unprecedented, strange, surreal, unsettling, terrifying; a small selection of adjectives that have been used in the past weeks to describe our collective global human experience in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most Americans have been under stay-at-home orders for three weeks now, and while that has felt like a very long time for many of us, much of the rest of the world has been more restricted for much longer. Unless we get some very unexpected good news soon, we’ll be in this for a while. At least we’ll be in this together despite our physical distance.
I have been lucky so far in that the work I do is in food cultivation, which means I’m still employed and get to go to work outdoors each day. Additionally, I feel lucky to be doing work that seems truly helpful to others and necessary right now as our need to grow and eat food has not waned even as so many other aspects of our lives have. I can share pictures of that work but in this case, I don’t think those pictures are worth a thousand words. For three very strange weeks I have been searching for the words to write to make some sense of these times, and with any luck, be a little bit helpful to someone else who might read them.
Before I begin, however, I’d like to acknowledge the risk that writing carries with it, in good times, but most especially in times like these. As with any act of creation, I have a responsibility to use my voice honestly and tell only the story that is mine to tell, knowing that there still may be consequences in doing so. While that is my intention here, I understand that words may not be helpful to anyone who has suffered a loss of loved one or of income. At the very least, this is an act of paying it forward, as I have read some helpful words by others (some of this and most especially this), amidst all of the more grim truths we must now face.
As someone who has for much of my adult life struggled with anxiety and depression, it has been puzzling to find unexpected relief in the wake of this global pandemic. My experience in this world has been somewhat one of frustrated observer more than participant. The hustle of the game we’re taught to play from a very young age has never sat well with me and consequently, I’ve never been all that good at playing it. I went to multiple universities and pursued multiple degrees without ever graduating with one. I’ve held many jobs, but the idea of a career has eluded my path. It all has left me feeling rudderless, in an ocean devoid of purpose. The money game, the relentless pursuit and competition we are thrown into whose only goal is utter normalcy, has gutted me multiple times in the past decade or so. It’s been a hell of an unpleasant way to live at times but I’m still here. Many aren’t so lucky.
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We’ve inherited a society so shallow, so narrowly-focused on superficial comfort, that we won’t even consider the possibility of discomfort lurking somewhere in the future. When it rears, as it always does, we are always unprepared. Even in the face of dire warnings, we pathologically maintain our course. Two years ago, our human-game clock ticked down to the equivalent of a societal two-minute warning. At the species level, we’d known the extent to which our global culture was destroying the planet for at least thirty years, though few more-than superficial changes had been made to business as usual. When the UN released its climate report in 2018, our society was given a 12-year deadline, past which there could be no turning back the tide of a raging hot, inhospitable planet. I recall the dread I felt upon reading that (and some interesting words it inspired). All our feeds were filled with nothing but existential crisis for weeks and months. As our collective anxiety about our future rose, so did our paralysis. I gloomily retreated into a thick fog of nihilism as I observed our cultural headwinds too strong for us to stem. This came directly on the heels of a tense few months of protest in St. Louis after yet another officer-involved shooting. One could argue that civil rights gains had been made since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson four years earlier, but those were marginal. Indeed, the necessity of a resistance movement betrays a societal regression more than any real progress made. It all began to feel like a dance, a two-step between us and them. I didn’t want to keep waking up and reliving the same day. Living in blissful ignorance is surely a form of hell, but eternal resistance is purgatory at best. I wanted off the hamster wheel. I want there to be another way.
Societal dependence is one succinct reduction of our myriad problems and a great insult to our humanity, which evolved to be self-reliant and interdependent. Robbing ourselves of our greatest strengths keeps us in this game with little agency over our participation. It’s no surprise then that nothing really changes, that even in the face of global climate disaster, we just keep going to work. What choice do we actually have? It’s been many generations since most humans had any kind of relationship with land or the hard skills needed for self-reliance. Even those of us who want to live more sustainably have to compromise within urban and suburban settings not designed for any kind of resilience. It is from that compromise that some of us grow small garden plots, drive hybrid or electric vehicles, and recycle. Those things are all fine but none of them amount to a change of culture that is needed. The best one can do is use the opportunities and resources provided by industrial culture to begin to relearn the skills needed for self-reliance and resilience, without which there can be no actionable imagination of a reformed society. As long as most of us are stunted by the bargain of progress, how could we possibly believe in another way?
Without realizing it at the time, it was this thought that rallied me out of my stupor of apocalyptic nihilism. If my starting point is compromise, because the world I want to live in cannot possibly emerge under this present cultural circumstance, then the very least I can do (and quite possibly the very most) is begin to accumulate and then share the useful skills necessary to bring it about at some other time under some other circumstance. And so began the past year of skill-sharpening and relearning some of what the entire human consciousness used to know. Rapid skill development is possible, but there’s always more to learn when our ties to the generational trust of land-based wisdom have been so severed. I half-joked that I had given up in favor of planting fruit trees, which was just an easy way to explain my attempt at getting out of the game. Within this minor pivot of worldview, lies my current relief and the beginning of my release from the anger that has gripped me for so long. Granted, I’m not much closer in real terms to self-reliance or resilience (given the present cultural circumstance I still find myself within) but having prepared myself, at least mentally for all sorts of bad outcomes, a global economic shut down due to pandemic actually feels like more of an opportunity than an end.
I do not speak optimistically of this moment lightly, I know it’s a painful moment for many. Optimism, to me, doesn’t equal joy or happiness and isn’t some blind faith in a better future. True optimism goes through a painful reckoning. It’s an honest assessment of the present and past that sets a mindful course correction into the future. Optimism is vigilant, it is not carefree. I have rarely been accused of optimism. On the contrary, my gloominess about our predicament is often felt negatively and while I can’t fault anyone for their feelings, I offer that my intent is honest reflection and nothing more. After all, my own painful reckoning has delivered me precisely to this moment with the clarity to speak optimistically and with more confidence than ever before.
Unprecedented: a global economic shut down and pause felt by seven billion humans at once; a temporary release from an economic system that doesn’t value life; a (relatively) peaceful societal collapse.
These aren’t rosy assessments that ignore reality. Our situation will likely get worse before it improves but we didn’t exactly start from a good place. Billions of people live their lives without meaningful work, income, or adequate housing in all parts of the world. Even in the wealthiest nations, millions of people die of malnutrition and associated chronic disease. We didn’t need a pandemic to remind us that our condition is fragile but it seems we did need one to remind us that we need each other. Fragility isn’t a liability within community. Assets aren’t all economic either. Our very human strengths and weaknesses, and the skills for survival we are all capable of achieving and through which are empowered, together form a system much more robust and resilient than any economic regime imposed by civilization. We have been gifted a chance to consider this while the lights are still on and there is no perceived human enemy on which to declare war. It’s difficult not to imagine the possibility of those things changing before all of this is over but for now the only truth is that there is another choice to make and we have been given a chance to choose.
It could be that in my dealings with trees I have come to consider a longer timeline than just my own. We may likely be in for more cultural turbulence in our lifetimes, but I believe it quite possible that generations from now people will recall the history of this time as when human civilization stood at a crossroads and together decided to upgrade itself into something better, to finally leave the old trodden roads and walk new ones. Our lives have temporarily been made quiet; the skies above us and the cities around us stilled but for the birds and our own grounded contemplation. What might we fill that space with, other than the noise that previously occupied it? What might we gain if we are willing to give up the race and finally be still?
What trees might we plant today to grow a truly great human society tomorrow?
