A group of Lab School Educators gathered as part of the SSHRC funded Climate Action Network project. We spent the better part of the day thinking on how we can live well with the more-than-human world, how we can honour the lives lost when something like a flower or tree is cut down and killed, etc. When getting ready to leave, after a day of thinking with our collective, I arrived in the room to this scene…
I couldn’t help but think what other trees may feel seeing their fellow trees bark/skin thrown haphazardly into a garbage can; destined for a landfill where it cannot share its gift of decomposing and returning to the earth to feed other beings (bugs, fungi, other plants as compost etc).
I began to take pieces out of the garbage to at least put in the large compost bin and on this log in the red garbage can I saw this…..
Slug. Cousin of Snail. In the garbage, fully alive resting on this log.
In the name of what would this snail lose their life? Efficiency? Cleanliness? Aesthetics of the space/playground?
It makes me wonder, how many more lives are trapped in this garbage can awaiting being crushed to death in a compactor or incinerated? How many are in the compost too? How many have we killed before by just throwing out the limbs of these killed trees because they don’t look beautiful to us anymore or serve our purpose anymore? What about the purpose they serve for others? For Slug? Do we have the right to just dispose of them like this without thought?
I couldn’t leave them there, so I moved it back outside and proceeded to go through all the garbage cans in our room and separate what I could put in compost, in recycling and back outside; what had more gifts to give.
In the end, the actual garbage (ie. Plastic gloves) that couldn’t be diverted from the landfill was very small.
Can we find a way to think with these beings we are discarding and honour the life they had and gave?
Are there ways they can live on, live a life as a decomposing log offering to the bugs and plants in a garden, live on as small twigs that could become part of the nest of a bird, as bark that shelters the slugs from the sun?
It often feels daunting, like the tiny things we do in the moments we have throughout the day can’t possibly have a larger impact on the issues facing our planet, us, all the more-than-human beings….Will it really matter if we throw out this one bag of logs/leaves/slugs/bark in the grand scheme of things?
Something I just stumbled across, a short read:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/quotationcelebration.wordpress.com/2017/10/09/it-is-the-greatest-of-all-mistakes-to-do-nothing-because-you-can-only-do-little-sydney-smith/amp/
The blog post is talking in different terms but I think it still applies. Simply put, it’s based around a quote from Sydney Smith:
‘It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.’
What we do in each of these small moments, these choices to or not to simply put something in the garbage without thought/care/concern/question, are the ways we DO create bigger change, simply because we are choosing to do SOMETHING, even if that something ends up being thinking about it after the choice has been made.
It is often in that doing of nothing because you can only do a little which we feed into keeping us in the current anthropocene state. It recalls apocalyptic imagery re: Natasha Meyers article. That there is no point making the effort because we are doomed anyway. That reinforces and more likely conjures that apocalypse into being, and also keeps the human centered nature of our current ways of thinking, that it only matters what we can do for US. What about what we can do for that particular slug on the log? For that particular tree? For the particular plants that these pieces of tree bark and branch can nourish as it decomposes naturally? For the fungi it could support which in turn can support the plants?
I am reminded of a quote from J.K. Rowling’s Harvard commencement speech in 2008: “What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.”
In these moments of apathy, acting without thought, without care, without question, without pause, we collude with those who wish to keep us in the anthropocene, to keep us trapped by the binds of our neoliberal, capitalist, settler-colonial based culture.
