Bright Shillings of March: Thinking Like a Biosphere
Excerpt: Threnody
Sometimes I hate the sky because it steals my children. I stand keening and floddered in the windy grass beyond Hobart airport as they’re borne beyond the silky blue hills, and vanish as wholly as if they’d never been. The wrench is placental; the lochiae of mourning can last for weeks. Comings are short, and goings over-long.
During one quick, rare coming we spent a halcyon day on Bruny Island. Two Tree Point was once the home of the Nuenonne people. Captain Cook watered here. Then came whalers, forest-fellers, and later, a murrain of shacks. While my clan constructed a sand-city, I beachcombed, probing the disquiet within the idyll.
The sea, luciloquent and turquoise in this sheltered bay, was acidifying. Phytoplankton – a million of these exquisitely diverse plants live in every litre of sea-water – generate half Earth’s oxygen; catalyse cloud formation, hence weather; are a major carbon sink and the basis of the marine food chain. Plankton cannot form skeletons in acidifying oceans; an invisible biospheric matrix, on which human wellbeing depends, is dying.
Acidification is caused by the very carbon dioxide pollution our excursion was generating; the true price of this day at the beach included one flight from Europe and two from Sydney, plus a hire car that embodied the violence, implicit and explicit, of our addiction to private, noisome mobility. We’d googled Earth to see where we were – instant knowledge based on rendering soil, air and water putrescent with radio-active sludge and hazardous chemicals generated by mining and processing the rare earths that are essential components of e-toys. The plastic enshrining those toys is oil-based, fuels ecological mayhem and war. Our e-excrement is traded by criminals and dumped on the poor.
We built driftwood boats, played cricket, swam, ate home-made sourdough bread with salad and apricots picked in the garden that morning. While the workers – ears and love-handles scarlet – gleefully diverted Resolution Creek into the moat, I rested, and wondered if our descendants would find our expedition as horrifying as we find colonisation, genocide and whaling, all culturally mandated in their own time. For we too were usurpers, treating not just less privileged humans but the 8.7 billion species with whom we share our only planet, and the entire future, as if they didn’t exist, as if they were Terra Nullius.
If most of humanity is in infantile relationship with Earth – exploitation and dominance – those of us who claim to be environmentally savvy are still adolescent. We push wantonly at the boundaries; are experts at self-exculpation and self-justification; own everything except shit and shadow; simultaneously embrace and maim the biosphere. I perjure myself with an iPhone (second-hand, I whine) which compromises the future of my grandchildren, while simultaneously enabling fluent communication with their stellar, hearing-impaired mother. Where’s integrity in this schizoid straddling?
Integrity requires a radical commitment to living within one’s carbon and ecological footprint, one’s eight-billionth share of Earth’s resources. My son works in human rights in Geneva; every day, his colleagues in Africa, Central Asia, Russia risk their lives – not just their egos, comfort zones and false entitlements – for truth and freedom. This is about truth and freedom too; the non-heroic, impossible, inevitable shift from the narrative of the lie to lifestyles recalibrated in ecological verities and adult accountability. And justice for all the children of all species – in perpetuity.
I keen for the whole Earth.
Published in Australian Options 2013