We’re All Separately in This Together
I spent a lovely June day at Highbanks Metro Park on the northern bounds of Columbus, OH. Home to 300 acres of “protected” mature mixed oak forest and also home to a large population of the Brood X Cicadas that emerges every 17 years.
I feel this label of “protected” when describing natural places is misleading. Because nothing is really protected as long as Industrial Capitalistic Civilization is in tact and churning along (except for Jeff Bezos, who managed to somehow earn tax credits for his kids. He seems pretty protected on all fronts. Huh, I didn’t even know Jeff had kids, one can only presume that he keeps them hidden because they are full on lizard people, but now that he got that tax credit maybe he can finally afford to get them those convincing high tech skin suits like the one he wears over his reptilian body. I’m sorry, that sounded terribly insulting….to Reptiles. Hey, since I got you here in this parentheses, does anyone have 28 million dollars to lend me so I can nab that ticket to ride to space with Jeff. I’d love to get him in an enclosed area where no one can hear him scream. Just kidding, I wouldn’t go myself, I’d give my ticket to a disgruntled Amazon Warehouse worker or maybe pay Jeff Gillooly [boy, they sure don’t make villain names like they used to!] to go up there and rough him up. No, just kidding again, I would NEVER hire someone to hurt Jeff Bezos……. I would want to personally do it myself).
Like, so, there hasn’t been this much CO2 in the atmosphere for millions of years, and it’s being pumped out by our industrial activities at a rate the Earth has maybe never seen before!!!! Who knows how much of life (if any) will be able to adapt and evolve fast enough to the inevitable warming and other chaotic and erratic planetary changes that are coming!? (and are underway already!!!)
There is evidence that these high levels of CO2 in the air are changing the way plants grow (food crops are taking up less nutrients) and affecting the cognitive functioning of our our our, what’s the word…oh yeah, brains (see it’s happening already!!!). The studies I’ve seen — in keeping with the incredibly human-centric mentality of our culture — only talk about human brains but it’s safe to assume that anything with a brain will be affected in some way (which means Jeff Bezos is once again protected! Zing!)
I wasn’t the only one off to ogle at the Cicadas that fine June day. We think it’s good to go “be in nature”, that it’s somehow helping in some way. But hordes of people driving to Highbanks Park to get their Cicada experience on isn’t helping or protecting anything, it’s just adding more insult to injury. Too many harmful things we do are filed under “neutral” or even beneficial. We have no culture in place that helps us mentally and emotionally connect the activities of our daily lives to the ruining of the Earth. Because most of us aren’t living in ways where we directly participate in attaining and producing the things we need — so we end up not having that many real, visceral, empirical, in-person experiences of the damage and violence being done to procure and produce these things we use. We have to understand that such an odd detached existence is a kind of insanity. I mean, what percentage of Americans could even identify a Coffee Tree if they saw one? That’s INSANE….To ingest something on a daily basis but not really know what it is or where it’s from or how it was produced and who produced it. This level of sheltered disconnection is dangerous to the umpteenth degree. Sometimes it feels as though we are being held hostage by civilization, separated from the actual real world. And of course those doing the actual physical work to maintain civilization — like migrant farm workers, and those mining raw materials by hand, and those who toil away in sweatshops — aren’t just held hostage, they are fucking enslaved. Hostages on the other hand aren’t usually forced to work, they mostly sit tied to a chair or locked in a room waiting to be released once the demands of the captors are met. But our captor’s don’t even need to tie us up, they just put out plenty of “binge worthy” content and we “voluntarily” stay inside. We’ve become our own prison guards. Here is a quote attributed to Aldous Huxley (even though there’s no proof he said it). But whoever said it, it’s spot on….
“The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.” ~Prince
While at Highbanks park that day I spotted a mama Turkey and her chicks, and stopped to watch them, because our role in Nature now has been reduced to this: Stalker. We no longer track animals to hunt them, we track them to extract an experience, to be entertained.
Countless people went by without noticing this delightful scene. Of the few that did notice, they barely seemed to care, their whimsy detector was obviously broken. I encountered 4 grown ass adults who had never seen a wild turkey before and so didn’t know what they were even looking at. One woman thought it was a goose. But this is not their fault. This is a result of being held hostage. It’s like we’re all baby animals who haven’t been allowed to leave the den yet and so know nothing of the world outside. We think the den is the real world, a world where things like food just magically appears.
Along with the Turkey fam, I also spotted a Pileated Woodpecker and a juvenile Red Tail Hawk….
I also spotted lots of signs riddled with colonizer language. The signage at the park was lacking self awareness which is typical for colonizer cultures such as ours. Completely glossing over centuries of land grabbing, genocide, “Indian Removal”, and ecological decimation brought on by the “Ohio Settlers”.
The settlers who just “found” maple trees as large as 4 feet across. This sign almost starts to hint at maybe acknowledging the horrors that happened after the Maple trees were “found” but then just starts talking about how amazing Maple hardwood floors are…with this attitude of:
Gee, Ohio sure is neat!…and totally NOT a place where unimaginable human suffering and ecocide went down. Sure there are a few “reminders of once magnificent forests” (but these reminders are not enough to bring about a culture of repentance and reparations and restoration). But let’s just focus instead on how “autumn is glorified by the sugar maple’s orange and yellow foliage!”
This Hackberry sign dripping with white supremacy throws out the possibility that Natives maybe did indeed have lots of names for this tree but didn’t feel like telling the explorers about them for some reason. It also showcases the classic obsessive behavior of colonizers to catalogue the hell out of everything, and how they become “baffled” if some “thing” doesn’t fit nicely into their prescribed categories. It also is a great example at how terrible white men are at naming things (usually after themselves). “Hackberry”? Come on. Lame.
Now this sign below is really sneaky in it’s colonizer language. You don’t even realize you are being called stupid for calling bracts petals this entire time like a complete idiot.
Guess what signs?! Listing facts isn’t a replacement for true understanding! That can only come from strong healthy interconnected relationships…..
“A Cartisian would look at the tree and conceptually take it to pieces, but then he would never really understand the nature of the tree. A systems thinker would look at the tree and see the seasonal exchange between tree and Earth, Earth and sky.” ~from the film ‘Mindwalk’
I was hesitant to go to the Park at all that day. All too often, we industrialized humans merely visit Nature for our own recreational purposes — like so much about our industrialized lives, it’s done in an extractive way, not in a way that adds any benefit to the ecosystem we’re “visiting”.
I sometimes go on this one facebook page for a group that shares photos they “captured” of Ohio wildlife. But I’m getting to the point where it just feels icky. It’s too easy to just call it “Nature Porn” because its more complex than that. I feel we do genuinely want to love “Nature” but we simply don’t know how, nor often to we have the right context to do so. And we also conflate love with possession or obsession.
Because many of us live so separately from Her now, it’s impossible for us to love Her as one would love a member of their own family. But sadly, we moderns don’t really even know what it’s like to actually love a member of our family because there is no human family anymore for the most part!!!!….the tribe is gone. And without the tribe showing us what true love is, it’s almost impossible to love Nature, or others, or even ourselves. Attempting “self love” without the context of the tribe is a fool’s game. Self love must arise out of feeling you have value in relation to the whole, to the tribe, to Nature.
And as a result of this lack of true love, we’ve inadvertently become peeping toms…….
I appreciate Mythologist Joseph Campbell’s definition of pornography, as failure to connect the object of admiration to the whole…..
{Excerpt from ‘The Power of Myth’ interview}
BILL MOYERS: What about James Joyce’s epiphanies?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Now, that’s another thing. This has to do with the esthetic experience. Joyce’s formula for the esthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object, that he calls pornography; nor does it move you to criticize and reject the object, that he calls didactics, social criticism in art and all that kind of thing. It is the holding the object, and he says you put a frame around it and see it as one thing, and then seeing it as one thing, you become aware of the relationship of part to part, the part to the whole and the whole to each of the parts. This is the essential esthetic factor rhythm, the rhythm, the rhythmic relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, there is a radiance. That’s the epiphany.
But I do think the word epiphany is a fairly new word for humans. What Campbell/Joyce described as an “epiphany” was probably just more our constant state back before our fall from Eden, where we were a PART of Eden. We were IN LOVE, we lived IN love, WITH Love, as part of Love. Now we are more like that SNL sketch from the 90’s where they re-did ‘Of Mice and Men’ with two Lennys and no George (played by Chris Farley and John Malcovich). This sketch has been wiped off the internet by NBC so they can pretend like they didn’t make a skit where two mentally handicapped characters kill puppies (and women) for 8 minutes straight. All I could find was this still shot….
But that skit was a perfect encapsulation of modern industrialized patriarchal misogynistic society, where we kill what we say we love.
We are a bunch of Lennys “petting the puppies” to death because we don’t know any better….and there is nary a George to be found that will stop our petting spree.
National and State parks around the country reported that during the pandemic, way more damage was done to park ecosystems by visitors than usual, due to the higher amount of foot traffic as people rushed to extract their nature experience. My parents were looking into going to Yellowstone for their anniversary in late June but there was nowhere to stay within a 100 mile radius because everyone (who can afford it) wants to go right now. I get that people want to get out there and “do stuff” now that the virus is lifting but I worry what this influx will do to wildlife who are not used to that much human activity — I have no doubt it will raise their stress levels to some degree and interfere with their normal behaviors such as mating or rearing young. And more humans in State and National parks means more humans who veer off paths and trample plants. I read that rare plants took a big hit during the pandemic because of this.
Even the last hold outs of humans who are still living as part of Nature (like we did for most of our existence as a species) are viewed as a spectacle to go feast our eyes on…
But (*sigh*) I just couldn’t pass up the chance to go see these wondrous creatures who have been living underground for 17 flippin’ years! So I got in my car and drove to see them like all the other schlubs.
Because no one thinks THEIR actions count…..which is the problem. We’ve been trained up real good by capitalistic industrial society to think of ourselves as way more individualistic than what is natural for our highly social tribal species. As a result, we tend to not think of ourselves as part of a whole, as a unit working together for the benefit of all.
Being forced to live such separate lonely tribe-less lives creates a mindset that says both:
“I’m just one person, how much damage could I possibly do? I mean, it’s just ONE viewing of Bo Burnham’s Netflix special.”
AND
“I’m just one person, what difference can I possibly make for the better? It’s hopeless. Guess I’ll just watch the new Bo Burnham Netflix special for the 7th time so I can be reminded of how amazing and clever white guys are.”
But the thing is, we industrialized humans ARE still all working together, but not to help one another, like in the past…..but to destroy the living daylights out of our collective Mother. We’re not consciously collectively destroying Her on purpose, but as industrialized civilization took over we lost the tribe and we lost that hands on living that required us to be mindful of how we were interacting with the natural environment and eachother. Without the tribe or the ecology we’re simply lost! And starving!….we humans need some entity that makes us feel as though we are cohesive in some way, that we are part of something bigger than us as individuals! And so this concept of the “economy” slipped in to fill that void. Now we directly interact with the economy, not the ecology. We see the economy as being more real and important than the actual Earth, for fucksake. You can’t read a mainstream article about the environment and not find it putting JOBS ahead of a livable planet.
We have been DEEPLY conditioned to perceive the economy as the main thing keeping us alive. This is pure insanity. If everyone is in agreement that something 100% made up is 100% real (when in reality that make believe thing is actually keeping us from living real lives that strive NOT to murder the Earth and exploit our fellow humans) then that means everyone is INSANE, meaning we as a whole have little to no grip on reality. We’re SICK. And if everyone is insane/sick it’s very hard to get better because any solutions of how to get better that don’t involve dismantling these fake systems not rooted in reality are just the insane leading the insane, the sick leading the sick. Even the “sanest” voices I’ve come across, like Jason Hickel’s, can’t go all the way to meet reality!
What we call “mental illness” is actually what it looks like when we can’t take living in the normalized insanity of everyday life where we are forced to live without a healthy version of a tribe or ecology. When we’re depressed or filled with anxiety, that’s the REAL you trying to come out! So much “mental health care” really is just about assimilating people BACK into this bonkers fantasy world. Much of what we label mental illness is an important (often painful) alarm, that is trying to get us to wake up from this nightmare of a society. But we are told that the alarm is the problem, that the alarm must be turned off with drugs and therapy, or maybe making more money will drown out the alarm. Or perhaps watching the new Bo Burnham comedy special for an 8th time will help.
See, no one living within these man made systems can actually ever go crazy because *TWIST!*…..we’re already crazy! What we call “going crazy” is actually what it looks like to go sane, because it’s a REAL and often appropriate reaction to the REALITY of what is happening on Earth right now. Going sane is not fun. It’s horrifying and lonely to wake up to reality, which is why we don’t want to do it and will go to great lengths to stay in Crazytown, Population: Everyone. And ironically, if you go sane as much as I have you really start to feel pretty crazy.
CUZ THIS BE CRAZY: Our industrialized lives ultimately serve nothing but a system that enriches a small group of humans at the top (*cough* men type humans, especially white ones), a system that creates a “top”, a system that necessitates there being a top and bottom and middle. This is grotesque, but it’s something we’ve all accepted as “just how things are”. There’s lots of talk about how to “level the playing field” but never any talk of how to stop playing this game altogether, of saying “fuck the field!” What about the REAL field????….the one full of wildflowers and prairie dogs and dragonflies and buffalo? Sorry, it’s gone, it got mowed down so we could have a “metaphorical” playing field. We’ve reached the point where we’ve forgotten what happens in the meadow at dusk…….
When you really think about it (sorry to make you think), almost everything we do within these man made economic and political systems mainly just helps make evermore money for this top tier of people- sure we get things in return, but far too many of us aren’t getting nearly enough in return, but it’s been set up that there simply is no other choice but to keep playing this effed up game. And there is so much reinforcing that this fake world is real and fine, even our “harmless” entertainment does this. Movies like ‘The Hunger Games’ or shows like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ or even ‘Star Wars’ are just different enough from our perceived reality for us to see them as fiction. In actuality, we’re all just storm troopers following orders, with no Jedis to be found. No kid has ever pretended to be a storm trooper but that’s exactly what they are being trained to be. In real life, Darth Vader goes unchallenged, undefeated. One real life Darth Vader is allowing the Amazon Rain forest to be burned down right now, while another Darth Vader is getting ready to go to space on a rocket they had built from our Amazon.com purchases.
Some species are more adaptive and resilient than others but every species has certain requirements needed to survive and thrive. A cicada brood population needs at least 52 hectacres of in tact forest to be healthy (the size equivalent to 97 football fields….hey, isn’t it funny how this stupid effed up culture measures Nature in sports fields, not realizing that the sport field itself used to be a forest or prairie? I’m sorry, did I say “funny”? I meant “symptomatic of Dissociative Disorder”, my bad.)
17 year cicada broods may seem plentiful but their numbers are on the decline in many places. In Northwestern Ohio, cicadas have declined in more than half of all counties and in some areas they’ve completely vanished, mostly due to deforestation for agriculture. Other Broods have gone extinct from total lack of habitat, like Brood XI, last seen in 1954 in New England. Brood VII is likely to go extinct soon, for their population has been dwindling for some time.
Many animals — from birds to raccoons to coyotes — find cicadas to be quite a delicacy but are usually deterred enough by the sheer volume of the cicadas that they are scared off, at least enough that a significant amount of cicadas can survive long enough to mate and lay eggs. But once a cicada population dips below a certain number of individuals they lose their advantage of volume and are gobbled up as soon as they emerge. They are like a school of fish in this sense.
Some researchers believe the Passenger Pigeon (once the most abundant bird in North America, possibly the world) went extinct so abruptly because as Settlers overhunted them, a tipping point was reached where their flocks became too small to maintain themselves. Many researchers believe they had evolved to require these large flocks, that was their thing. They didn’t know how to function in small groups.
It makes me wonder about our own species and what our thing is. We obviously are much better at adapting than the Passenger Pigeon. But conversely to them, we evolved to thrive in small closeknit tribal bands. Our population boom is so new for our species — losing our tribal life happened in the blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking. So we simply have no evolutionary reference point for knowing how the hell to function properly while contending with this many other people. It’s like a polar bear going to sleep in the arctic but waking up in the tropics….the polar bear could perhaps make due for awhile but they would be so confused and homesick and scared and as a result might go insane or become overly violent or grow totally apathetic and lethargic and just give up.
There are many ecological reasons why humans need to reduce our numbers but doing so would also help us get back to some semblance of tribal life.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
All these facts I have shared with you about the Cicadas were easily gleaned from the internet and regurgitated onto this page, and perhaps gives the illusion that I know what the hell I’m talking about. It’s fairly easy to sound smart, just read a handful of articles on the subject you want to sound smart about and pass it off as if it’s something you somehow instinctively knew all along. Another tip to “sound real learned” is to generously “use” air quotes whenever “possible”, this “implies” double “meanings” that only a “smart” “person” “could” “possibly” “come” “up” “with”. Plus throw in a few thusly’s and verily’s here and there and voila! Smartypants central! And if you have big eyes like I do, that also helps trick others into thinking you’re smart because it thusly looks like you’re wearing glasses all the time. I think I’m fairly good at pretending to be smart, much like how most pop stars are good at pretending to be singers. But crazily enough, I, like you, happen to be one of the dumbest human beings to ever have walked the Earth (partly because we dum dums don’t actually walk all that much compared to all of our ancestors, an activity that is incredibly central to developing the essence of our species thru the act of acquiring a direct understanding of our world by foot). The majority of us modern industrial humans literally know nothing that would be of any real use to anything other than sustaining an industrial society that needs to die immediately. Even the dimmest pre-historic human knew more about how to actually survive and thrive on this Earth than the average “expert” with a PhD.
When you read about the man who “discovered” the 17 year cycle of cicadas in the1800’s it’s framed as though no human before had observed this, before SCIENCE observed this, all hail SCIENCE. (The guy, Benjamin Banneker, was a black man so he didn’t even get credit at the time, which is another whole can of worms, I mean cicadas)
As Jon Stewart describes here, the hubris (and racist and sexist tendencies) of science very well may kill us all…
Being in the forest with the sound of the cicadas gave me the same feeling as sitting by the ocean. There was something about the sound that was incredibly soothing. You could pick out individual cicada calls that were closer to you, but mostly you just heard the collective background orchestra. It sounded like the gushing of 1000 waterfalls. I just didn’t want to leave. It was as if the sound was activating something in my DNA, reminding me of the Earth that once was, an Earth that my ancestors were intimately aware of all the time.
I felt such love for these cicadas that it hurt! Their colors. How kinda gruff and dundering they are — they’re like the Bulldog of bugs, lol. And their bodies are literal musical instruments! They have what’s called (by science) a Tymbal Organ, which allows them to create sound like no other insect can (and louder than any other insect can). Most insects make sound by rubbing two body parts together [insert sex joke here]. But Cicadas make their sound by pulling on the tymbal organ, and because the back half of their body is hollow, just like many musical instruments are, the sound reverberates.
As I was awash in their sea of sound the tears came. I cried, A LOT: For the Cicadas. For the oak saplings growing up without old growth grandparents and who may not live to become grandparents themselves. For the humans around me who didn’t cry as they crushed cicadas with their cars and feet, humans who don’t think Cicadas are “good for anything” but providing an interesting day out in “the nature”.
Well one real thing Cicadas are good for is that when they emerge from underground they bring with them a slew of nutrients. It’s called a “nutrient pulse”, which sounds like the latest blender model for smoothie making but it’s actually a mass fertilization for the forest. It’s been described as the Eastern U.S.’s version of a salmon run. After the Cicadas die, their bodies feed the soil. But this can’t happen if the corpses are frying on the blacktop after being run over or stepped on. The forest evolved to rely on these periodic nutrient feedings.
But so much is being deprived now.
Including us.
I saw an article talking about the need to get out into nature for your well being. They were pushing this ’20–5–3’ rule. Which prescribes 20 minutes a day, 3 days a week, with a minimum of 5 hours a month outside in “nature”.
Say HUH????? Only 5 hours a month!!!!! What a bargain!
Besides this rule being an incredibly anemic amount of time to obtain “optimal well being” from Nature, it’s also SUCH reductionist thinking. It’s not enough to just be “out in nature”. We have to learn how to BE A PART OF NATURE again. We act like Nature can be prescribed like a vitamin we are deficient in.
As long as we view nature as this thing to go visit, like going to the movies or an amusement park, then our Nature deprivation will never be remedied. Nature is also being deprived by our lack of participation in Her enrichment. Real humans, like cicadas, are good for something, but not in our current state. And 20 minutes/3 days a week isn’t going to cut it. It’s just false start after false start after false start. Plus we’re still spending the majority of our time within a culture that reinforces the idea that Nature should be put in its place instead of a culture that is all about finding our place IN Nature again.
But the good news is that with my trip to see the Cicadas, I MORE than filled my ‘20–5–3’ quota, so now I don’t have to go outside until late August! Yes! Cue up the Bo Burnham special!
You say the whole world’s ending, honey, it already did
You’re not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried
Got it? Good, now get inside.”
Don’t worry, I’m not going to let Bo Burnham have the last word. I’ll let the Cicadas have that. But what will the Cicadas find when they emerge in 17 years from now? At the rate things are going, the climate might become so erratic that it royally fucks up their clocks and they come up here before they’re ready (which is already happening some). A new report from NASA says the Earth is warming twice as fast as it was in 2005. And as always, this information is delivered with the same broken record tone of an abusive husband who got caught doing [fill in shitty action here] again, saying “Baby, it will be different this time, I swear”. Science’s version of this is: Hey, you know that [fill in scary apocalyptic thing here] we told you about. Well guess the fuck what, it’s happening “FUCKING FASTER THAN EXPECTED”. And when you read about this latest NASA study, like here in this Guardian article, it’s void of any emotion or urgency and delivered with such dull uninspiring science talk that you’re just like “BORING. Who cares. What else is on?” These kind of articles really have no purpose whatsoever. There is absolutely no point to them anymore. The Washington Post really took the prize for ‘Most Pointless and Ineffectual’ in its coverage of NASA latest findings about how we will all be baked alive soon enough. But it did include a fun treasure hunt for the kids! Hey! Hey! Can you spot the Irony?! An irony so great and pervasive and relentless it will spell the end of everything?!
Kristine Mattis, a self proclaimed “skeptical scientist” and “disobedient servant” who is “tweeting self-evident truths no one wants to hear”, describes well this wall we’ve hit when it comes to science reporting.
I also wonder, while the Cicadas are underground that whole time, eagerly awaiting to emerge, do they sound like wide-eyed Ariel from ‘The Little Mermaid’, singing about what it might be like “up there”? Hee hee, what a darling thing to imagine.
Thusly, I fear we are going to gravely disappoint them.
Verily, their underground home will more and more be like a bunker (and then a tomb).
They could be the last to know about the apocalypse above.
After us, that is.
We seem to be dead last in knowing.
But at least we’re all ignorant together. Better to have nothing rather than less than nothing.
