My visit to a dying local park
Some thoughts on interacting with nature: a distracting analgesic?
I'm at the park. It's not a big one, but rather an ugly little thing surrounded by busy streets and factories. There's hardly any wildlife here and it's quite tamed. There's a guy who comes here sometimes and puts houseplants in the ground, hoping they will grow. Other people come to mow the lawn, transforming it into a carpet of devastation.
I have to be careful here as it's not the safest place around. I'm looking for something to photograph, and I see some flies on a tree trunk. Later I'll get home and find that I took a few good shots. It's hard to see any detail because they're so small, but I've got a macro lens and it magnifies the world.
There's beauty I see in the photograph that's hard to see in real life. The narrower depth of field and close up view reveals a new world. But no matter how beautiful the photograph is, it doesn't give the feeling of peace of just observing wildlife. However, what I've realized is that despite this, I hang onto the photograph.
I understand the reason: this park is a sick fragment of the once flowing beauty of nature. The photograph hides the sickness and just shows the beauty. That's probably a big reason I like wildlife photography in the first place. I often think that photography would be much less interesting to me if I could always just be surrounded by nature. Then, I’d just sit and observe. Maybe I should photograph more ugly things.
This is what technology is doing in conjunction with our consumerist and hyper-capitalistic system. This system wears a mask: it convinces us that we are rational and that our choices are best sorted out using competing preferences as measured by our ability to pay. Underneath this mask is a grotesque reality: it kills, and it provides analgesics for its killing. It destroys relationships we have with nature, and provides entertainment in its place. It is a ruthless and artificial evolutionary system whose evolutionary pressures are the ability to net profit, and it’s driven by our basal and maladaptive instincts. Its acolytes are the techies and the top brass of big business, but we all make it go.
Compared to wilder areas, this area is suffering an there's not much life. I see some spiders on the trunks of trees and of course there are ants. There's a woman with a child and she's stamping on an ant hill, crushing it for amusement. Typical of the sick nature of humanity plugged into our global society.
If it could be considered alive, the amalgamation of humanity and advanced technology would certainly be considered very intelligent and unfortunately psychopathic. It uses all sorts of tricks to ameliorate the underlying unease of its destructive reign.
I often think that my own writing may in fact be helping it: what if it just allows the vestiges of humanity to release a little steam? Oh yes, someone realizes the weirdness of society, someone is doing something. I can relax. Or else, perhaps I'll go off into the backwaters and immerse myself in the remnants of this wild earth. Perhaps those which have the most trouble do everything in their power to first ameliorate their own friction with the system, and that results in them just going away into the reserves so carefully created by the system.
Or are things getting better? Sometimes, I have hope. I see some unusual creature that I've never seen before. How could that exist still? And aren't there dams being dismantled now and a new United Nations High Seas Treaty? CO2 graph, reality check. I guess it's hard to know the future. Perhaps we are moving towards sustainability, or perhaps we're just making our resource use more efficient for more people and more land use and more destruction.
I think this ambiguity indicates that we need something more than just incremental efforts, something like a global philosophy and global moral resolve to live harmoniously. Is that possible? Or are we truly moving with such massive momentum that all we can do is think about it in some vague, pseudo-intellectual way, and then go back to the same old lifestyles with a few new bandages.
One thing I do know is that being around nonhuman life, small and large, makes me feel better. Those small creatures I'm looking at are worth fighting for, so I keep looking for solutions.