Wasting the Earth Away

By Chad Marvin

In the summers, I work for The Town of Hempstead parks department. One of my coworkers there is quite interesting, he’s five feet eight inches tall, has plenty of stereotypic Italian bravado, he’s macho, he knows plenty of girls, he can infuriate you and get under your skin and yet part of you will still feel like you want to be his friend. One day while working with him as we trimmed a partially broken limb off a tree, he told me the story of why in college he created his own fraternity: I wasn’t about to let a bunch of assholes beat on me, when I should be beating on them” he eloquently explained. He felt as if he held a natural status of superiority over the others in his environment even though the system of that environment had functioned fine before he got there. While such a statement coming from such a person might seem like something you just say “yeah ok” to as you continue on with your daily affairs, the truth of the matter is there is much more than just the declaration of the alpha-male being expressed here.

What this is, is an aged anthropocentric idea, that we as humans need to go into an environment and clear all of the trees out, build a home with what was a home to many on what was a home to many as well, and then with those same materials, we must build a fence to keep the “assholes” my coworker had described away. Humans were not the first to occupy earth, if you’re a religious person you may even believe that the land and the animals were put on earth first. You may then too believe that man should "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth “(Genesis 1:28).”

Today after humans have ruled over the earth and everything in it, acting as the dominant species instead of acting gratefully towards all the species who allow us to live we have done irreparable damage to the earth. Moreover we have even moved away from the “fish of the sea” and “the birds of the sky” and created our own system in which people must partake in if they wish to “live” as we do now. The problem with all of this is that while humans have created their own environment, the one first presented to us still exists and is being smothered by the garbage and waste that we rapidly rear off into the world we live in.

In chapter four of Julia Corbett’s Communicating Nature, she discusses many of the issues that have arisen as a result of our work and consumer culture. Corbett says “Most of us live indoor lives, and the natural world is very much in the background of- if not divorced from- daily life.” She is describing the detached reality we have created as humans where we work in a capitalistic system crunching numbers all day so that we can have food on the table at the end of the day. But why not just grow the food and skip all of that? She goes on to explain the muck that we as humans have forced ourselves to trudge through in talking about how we essentially work to buy a house, to buy stuff for that house, to buy a car, to buy clothes; all so that we may have leisure time to relax… before we have to work again to keep all of things in our possession.  

Corbett comments on the mayhem that has ensued from this artificial atrocity we call our “lives” in saying “While it is true that consumerism is a culture in itself, it is a sad commentary to assert that we express and come to know ourselves best through shopping.” What she means here is that we are so far isolated from nature, that we have lost any true connection to it and now in a state of jumbled-disarray we supplant with material goods. And as we continue on this course of action we are exceedingly losing nature for we are literally burying it under the ample material goods that our lives revolve around in the forms of: food wrappers, plastic, e-waste, and the box that you got your new HDTV in. Corbett closes out her calling out of human consumerism in saying “Thinking that we can find solutions to our individual problems by buying products can only serve to detract from community life and broader public concerns, not the least of which is the environment.” If we continue to live the same way that we are now there is no telling how far this divide between humans and the environment will stretch.

Corbett continues to explain the wrong doings humans have impressed onto the environment in chapter five talking about leisure in nature as commodity and entertainment. First she discusses leisure and how its true definition is time in which you have “the self-sufficient activity of the mind, a mind which is its own best company, one that is not dependent on external stimuli for its action.” This is something that is quite rare today, for there are few places other than nature where one may be able to achieve this without being distracting by the unrelenting arms of consumerism. Corbett says “today’s marketplace encourages us to think of free time as yet another consumption opportunity and recreation as just another market.” This is true, in the world today do people not often shop for groceries or for the new charger they may need on their down time. Furthermore if you ever do have downtime and you want to buy a fishing rod or maybe some hiking boots are you not looking in the recreational activities section? It’s kind of funny how you will think of adults as the most superior people, who know the most when really all they do is go to work do what they are told, go to a store buy what they are told they need and go home to enjoy the things in their home they perceive to be necessary like watching TV.

There’s almost a sense of brainwash when thinking about this. And in due time will adults not tell their child to stop playing outside so much so they can “focus” and have all the great things their parents have. Wouldn’t it be greater to have the freedom to enjoy true leisure? This is a point Corbett is making. We live in such a fake world today where we have to do all of these things that we created in order to live, as if before humans occupied the planet or even industrialized it there was just no way to stay alive and safe while enjoying leisure time. Now if we are interacting with nature we are tending to our lawns or taking a walk through the park that probably cut down a bunch of trees to make the nice concrete path it has for you. Regardless, it is all centered around humans and regardless, we continue to smother nature and lose our connection to it. Corbett stresses in the end of her chapter “Commodification of nature is a theft of value from the natural world that cheapens it and does nothing to clarify or deepen our relationships to it.” We aren’t just hurting nature by living as we do, we’re hurting ourselves, and that surely isn’t something that is supposed to happen in the humans first world we have made so…

Perhaps we need to change our ways and rethink. In the documentary No Impact Man, we see Colin Beavan and his wife Michelle Conlin along with their daughter trying to live a year without having any environmental impact. This means no electricity, no throwing out anything, no driving or even public transportation, and even no toilet paper! Through the story we can see many ways in which humans are living a lifestyle that hurts the environment. Is it that hard to use sunlight during the day and when it’s dark, actually deal with that reality? Imagine all the trash he collected in a year of not throwing anything out, this documentary really points out just how far away we are from nature and how much danger we are doing to it because at the end of the day all of this families findings were only three peoples, imagine what billions of peoples pollution put together would look like. An article, Effects of Consumerism by Anup Shah details all that we are doing to the land in living in the materialistic culture that we live in. Through this article one can really begin to understand just how deep of hole we as humans are digging ourselves into. “Someone has to pay for our consumption levels” is just one line stressing the destruction we are causing. Humans have to change. This may seem hard but it really isn’t because all we have to do is return to basics. It is through farming, living communally and only using what we need that we will be able to live perfectly well without any negative repercussions. Through such routine actions we can change the minds of people like my coworkers and live better lives, and if not well, they’ll be the assholes.