Paul Kingsnorth - Empire Of The Ape (Dark Mountain)
This morning, I turned on the radio to be greeted with the news that 60% of the species in my country are in decline. A number of the UK’s nature conservation organisations have joined forces to conduct a major study of the state of the health of the natural world in Britain. I would encourage you to read the whole report, if you can stand it: it is fiendishly depressing stuff, but necessary to come to terms with.
There was a five-minute discussion about this on the news programme before the agenda moved on to more important topics. The next 10 minutes or so was taken up with an interview with the Prime Minister which obsessed in some detail over his recent disagreements with some of his backbenchers. This seemed to me to be pretty symbolic of the priorities of the culture we live in. Mass death of nonhuman life: 5 minutes. Arguments within the ranks of the governing party of the day about something or other: 10 minutes. It’s a nice little metaphor, and it makes me unspeakably angry.
In fact, I’ve been pretty angry all morning. Angry and despairing: I’ve been stomping around the house like a bear with a sore head. I feel a kind of rising inner rage which makes me want to tear something down, and I don’t know what to do with it. For me, and I’m sure for many other people, the bald and miserable facts in this report simply confirm what I’ve been seeing with my own eyes for years. I know from my own experience that there are far fewer butterflies and birds around than when I was a child, or even a younger man. I know there are fewer flowers growing by the streams and fewer fish in those streams. When I walk in the hills I hear fewer skylarks. This great dying is unfolding all around me: all around all of us.
This inner rage comes at least partly from knowing that most other people simply don’t seem bothered. It comes also from a strong sense of frustration: that I don’t quite know what to do with it. Sure, there are lots of things I can and do do: I can try and reduce my lifestyle impact, I can visit nature reserves and join nature charities, I can teach my children about it, I can join campaigns, I can rage and write, I can even chain myself to bulldozers to try and protect some of the last wild places in this country. I’ve done all of this and will continue to. But I know, we all know, that it is a drop in the ocean: that I am a drop in the ocean and that whatever I do it will never be enough.
EDIT
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-06-06/empire-of-the-ape
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