248) Day 16 -- Reason #16 to revolt against Predatory Capitalism: David Suzuki

David Suzuki is a Canadian hero. Many of us grew up watching or listening to him, through The Nature of Things, his many wonderful books (completely changed my life, they did), his fearless and inspiring activism, and the many programs and pieces of enlightening content produced through his organization, the David Suzuki Foundation.

David has spent his entire career and adult life finding more and more eloquent, brilliant and beautiful ways to drive home a single, central truth, a truth that challenges in the deepest way, the foundation of our very society, which was built on the pillars of colonialism, capitalism, and a Christian-Biblical narrative that puts humans outside of Nature, that separates the spiritual from the material, and that posits humans are somehow different from, separate from, and more “special in the eyes of God” than the rest of the living world.

This truth, held by David Suzuki, by the world’s indigenous people and their tens-of-millennia-old wisdom, and upheld by the modern sciences of biology and ecology, is dramatically the opposite of those things, the truth that Humans are not, at all, separate from Nature.  We ARE Nature.

Our atoms are built out of the materials of stars.  Our lungs breathe the air provided by plants and algae.  Our bodies are mostly the water that first coalesced on the Earth billions of years ago and now recirculates and is re-purified through an astonishingly complex web of relationships between the oceans, the earth, the sky, and countless living creatures that form everything from our soil and wetlands to grasslands and forests.

We are the Earth.  This is not just a slogan.  It is one of the deepest, most robust and profound facts of human existence.

And yet, we have built a civilization largely in denial of that fact.  And as our skyscrapers have risen and our jets have gotten faster and our guns have gotten bigger and our garages and basements and attics have been filled with more and more disposable goods that provided only moments of pleasure and usefulness before we shoved them away in favour of something Bigger and Better, our civilization has torn holes in the Web of Life, until now, the present, when we are seeing it unravel as biodiversity collapses, climate changes spins out of control, and everything gets more expensive and more difficult.

This Web of Life we are rapidly destroying IS our bodies; it IS our biosphere that protects us from the annihilating vacuum of space; it IS the very heartbeat of our civilization and sanity of our minds.

When all is said and done, about fascism, and colonialism, and the billionaires and dictators, and wealth gaps, and justice and fairness, and everything else, the foundational fact of our existence will remain — we ARE the Earth.  Our human bodies exist within quite narrow parameters of ecological functioning, and the biosphere maintains its functioning within those parameters BECAUSE OF the living web of ecosystems that self-organize to keep us all alive.

This is not a myth, although it’s captured in ALL of the indigenous mythologies, teachings, philosophies, and knowledge of the world. But it’s also a 21st century scientific fact, as worthy of being called “a fact” as literally anything that humans have ever discovered.

We are not, in truth, “killing Nature”.  But we are killing the Nature that is compatible with human existence.  And most certainly, with organized civilization. Because, as we tear more holes in the Web of Life, we are pushing Nature outside of its parameters of biospheric stability that are NECESSARY, 100% necessary, for human civilization.

This is, to me, the single biggest reason to revolt against Predatory Capitalism.  It’s an existential necessity, at this point in human history.  After billions of years of evolution that finally gave rise to Homo sapiens, we are committing collective suicide in a mere handful of decades, because of our belief that we are separate from Nature. It’s literally Life, or Death, for everything we know as a species.  

We can leave the world broken and re-formed to new biospheric parameters, and it will still be a home, to the cockroaches and jellyfish and other beings who will adapt and survive.  Or, we can finally choose Wisdom, and Love, and be stewards of the world, and learn to live in harmony with it. 

One of these choices is perfectly compatible with our system of Predatory Capitalism, at least for a while longer, until of course, it falls apart.  The other choice is compatible with a Web of Life in which we can survive, thrive, raise families, have friends, love and be loved.  

We must address the suicidal insanity of our current economic system.  There are no two ways about it.

In David Suzuki’s words:
“The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. 
If a mountain is a deity, 
not a pile of ore; 
if a river is one of the veins of the land,
not potential irrigation water; 
if a forest is a sacred grove, 
not timber; 
if other species are our biological kin, 
not resources; 
or if the planet is our mother, 
not an opportunity, 
then we will treat each one with greater respect. 

That is the challenge, 
to look at the world from a different perspective.”