Ghost Dance

 

"Derrick Jensen asks a question of every audience he speaks to over in the US. ‘Hands up’, he says, ‘anyone here who believes that this society will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living.’ The kind of people who go to Derrick Jensen talks never put their hands up, perhaps because they have gone through the despair themselves and found honesty on the other side."

- "On The Correct Management of Despair" by Paul Kingsnorth

Let's speak frankly here. The world cannot endure 7 billion human beings for very much longer. Not to mention that according to the U.N. median population estimate, it will be 9 billion by 2040. Even if everyone on the planet agreed absolutely to make sustainable living priority one, and actually put actions behind those words, it is too many. Not to mention that no such thing will ever happen. Were it by some miracle to actually happen, sustainable only means sustainable for humans. It doesn't mean the ongoing tragedy in the natural world would slow down. It is almost unimaginable that in any remotely possible scenario it would slow down.

We are in the midst of a mass extinction event. It even has a name: the Holocene Extinction. Approximately 200 species will become extinct today. Approximately 200 species will become extinct tomorrow. And the next. The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate (if humans were not here). 

Interestingly, or insanely, worldwide interest in extinctions and in preventing them is actually on the decrease.

Those who have gained power in a world of reckless consumption will never willingly surrender either their power or their reckless consumption short of human catastrophe, a human extinction or near-extinction event. By the time that happens, a full-on human extinction event may be unavoidable because we won't have much of a biosphere to live in. Two out of every three breaths of oxygen you take in is produced by marine phytoplankton, and the ocean's stocks of marine phytoplankton are decreasing by 1% every year. It is a decrease of 40% since 1950.

I'm sorry. If this is the first time all this has sunk in, I am really sorry. It's a terrible realization to be handed. But I need you and everyone to be awake now and face this. 

Environmentalism-as-usual can't solve this. Even radical environmentalism can't solve this. If a million people in the United States were to all immediately, today, become dedicated fanatical radical environmentalists and start monkeywrenching everything, they'd just steamroller you down and carry on. Not to mention that the numbers of really dedicated environmental activists is nowhere near that number, and even most of those wouldn't involve themselves in direct action. Environmentalism now has become about collaboration, trying to prolong the inevitable, trying to get more wind turbines and biofuels, as if carbon were our only problem.

I sincerely hope that everyone will change their way of life if they can, but even if you do and even if half the planet follows suit and does likewise (a hopelessly unrealistic belief), it will not ultimately change what's going down, it would just slow it some. There is no technological, social or political fix for this.

I am sorry to have to say this, and I'll probably be perceived as a monster for saying it, but there is one and only one state of affairs that will prevent absolute disaster. That one and only one state of affairs is for about 9/10ths of the human population of the planet to die ASAP. Pronto, STAT, right away, the sooner the better. Without the rest of the planet getting similarly effed up, a massive human pandemic, something of that nature. This and this alone would solve the problem, at least temporarily. Of course there is no guarantee that the survivors wouldn't turn around in a few hundred years and do it all over again, but we'll leave that to them to figure out.

The good news is that there is a prophecy that in fact predicts a mass human die-off that saves the planet. The bad news is that it is a prophecy, and prophesying much beyond what you'll have for breakfast rarely pans out. Rarely as in, it never pans out. Christians are still waiting for their Messiah 2000 years on. However, since it is germane to the conversation, please indulge me and let's take a look. My apology if I butcher the source material, it is not my intention. I mentioned the prophecy in a previous post.

Okay, very generally speaking, a Hopi prophecy states that in the very near future, the vast majority of humanity will die. This die-off will happen through mass insanity, mass deformity and probably varying combinations thereof (nice), so that people will essentially become like the living dead except in that without any lick of sense left in their heads they will all die because they won't be able to take care of themselves. If we're lucky, a remnant of humanity, those with pure hearts, will survive the cataclysm and the Earth will be restored and life starts over again. They in fact believe that something like this happened several times in the past, with a pure-hearted few escaping the bad previous world to restart life a new world. In this case however, this is the last world we get, so instead it is regenerated. There are a few problems with this prophecy however, aside from the not inconsiderable prophecies-never-come-true problem.

First off, the Hopi don't precisely have an indigenous word for "future," so this prophecy is at least likely to be post-contact (with Europeans). There was another somewhat similar post-contact prophecy among other Native American tribes, originally from a man named Wovoka. As adopted by the Sioux, it became a prophecy that the White Man would be run off the continent. This gave rise to the Ghost Dance which gave the U.S. Army so much needless consternation and supposedly was a contributing factor (freedom of religion anyone?) to tensions leading up to the Wounded Knee massacre.

Secondly, the belief in an inevitable prophecy tends to lend to a hands-folded, wait-and-see attitude. This is a bit inconvenient if the prophecy isn't actually true, though it is perhaps more restful than freaking out at imminent environmental catastrophe.

However, as I mentioned in a previous post (I forget which one), if you re-imagine the prophecy as a prayer, it makes a great deal more sense. As a prayer, you aren't waiting on your duff for a change to come, you are doing something (the effectiveness of which might not be self-evident I grant.) Yes you would be praying for a human catastrophe, and yes the prospects of that would probably creep most folks the heck out, but bear with me. 

Would not such an action be very similar to the Ghost Dance of the Sioux? It was not exactly an endeavor that bore much fruit (Yankee imperialists did not go home). However, just because you have an immune system, does not mean you don't get sick. It is possible that the Ghost Dance was a sort of immune response by this continent to its invaders, but it was an unsuccessful immune response.  The Sioux were relatively small in number to manage such a large prayer, with relatively few medicine people involved who might really be able to put some weight into it.

Now why wouldn't praying be just as useless as sitting on your duff waiting for apocalypse to come to you like delivery pizza? Perhaps most people would view it that way, but I think it is the only thing that might have some chance of actually working. You can't fight the system any more than the Sioux could fight the U.S. Army, if you tried through active civil disobedience of various sorts and actually managed to effectively threaten the powers that be, you would end up just like the Sioux at Wounded Knee. Dead, imprisoned, or something of the kind. And regardless, you can't kill off billions with civil disobedience which is what it would actually take. Those billions like their lives and would kind of like to keep them, thank you very much. The U.S. Army could stop riots and even stop dancing they didn't like, but they couldn't actually stop prayer very well. It's a pretty quiet affair. 

What if about 6000 of the world's most insightful shamans all agreed to pray every morning for the right germ to strike the human population? What if the world's 6000 most powerful wiccans, voodoo priests and magicians all did the same? All willing to take their chances like everyone else, of course. Would you like to be in the crosshairs of that? I wouldn't, though of course I would be if they did it, same as everyone else would be. I have in fact said that prayer a time or two, though I haven't managed to work it into a morning routine yet. Maybe I really should. 

There is a good version of The End of The World As We Know It, and there is a bad version. The good version is around 6 billion people die and things start over. The bad version is we keep on going like we are going and wind up with an ecocide on our hands, and maybe the whole planet dead. We don't really have a third option at this point. People won't change until a human catastrophe is already here, and the math at that point is pretty relentless. Even if the planet manages to live another day, we likely won't.

Here humbly submitted is a prayer for the good version of the End of The World As We Know It.

THE GREEN PRAYER

Mothers and Fathers, hear our voices

Spirits and gods, hear our prayer

We have become too many and we foul the land and water

We foul the air and destroy the homes of all beings

The time has come for a renewing fire to sweep the Earth

It is time for contagion and death to cleanse the house of Man

Please help us in our quest

It would not be right to exempt ourselves

If this cleansing comes and I die, I will be happy

If this cleansing comes and I am robbed of all I love, I will be happy

If this cleansing comes and I live, I will rebuild the world and remember the dead.

I will be happy when this comes because the Earth will be spared and renewed

and all things can return to their proper places.

Mothers and Fathers, hear our voices.