By Maria Millers
Even without the disturbing images of the killing fields of overseas wars, local news can be equally unsettling. From extreme weather events to images of young offenders armed with machetes breaking into homes to the illegal dumping of waste, all played out on our screens this week.
While not as severe as first anticipated ex-cyclone Tropical Cyclone Alfred still created havoc with strong winds bringing down trees, flooding and damaging homes and leaving thousands without power. The argument continues whether these increasingly severe weather events are part of a natural cycle of climate change or are they being made worse by human activity?
What the Alfred cyclone in Brisbane did remind us was how we must respect nature.
English Romantic poet William Wordsworth writing against a background of revolution, industrialization and social upheavals (not very dissimilar to today), saw nature as a sanctuary from the dehumanizing effects of all this: offering the individual a spiritual and morally grounding experience during a time of upheaval.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; –
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
(From “The World is Too Much with Us”)
The aftermath of COVID is still with us and our young are bearing the brunt of most of its lingering legacy: interrupted education, isolation, dependence on social media. For many particularly those from broken or dysfunctional homes there has been the frustration of unrealized ambitions often leading to antisocial behaviour of drugs and violence fuelled by social media. All normality of youth has been upturned and lost opportunities deferred or delayed.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run
(“A Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes)
This week we saw a reintroduction of bail laws for young offenders. The nightly reporting of children sometimes as young as 12 wielding machetes and terrorizing people in their homes mostly to steal cars has made the community feel frightened and unsafe.
But a lawyer speaking on talk back radio this week who has represented many of these children urged people before supporting the new measures to visit a magistrate court and hear the stories of these offenders. He sees remanding more children as only an easy band-aid solution to a complex problem.
And when there are problems with our youth we should all be prepared to take responsibility. Parents, teachers, law enforcers must help them find their way in a world that seems both overwhelming and indifferent.
Surely we can move away from the lock them up and throw away the key mentality’ and address this lost generation’s problems with positive programs. Reconnecting with nature could be one.
Wired minds, disconnected hearts,
We’re glued to screens, but still, we’re apart.
Every post, every like, every share,
Still leaves us feeling cold, unaware.
Chasing approval in an endless race,
But we can’t escape this empty space.
Disaffected youth, lost in the noise,
Yearning for meaning, but finding only void.
(“The Disconnect”, anonymous)
Finally this week we were confronted with the ugly images of illegal dumping of household hard rubbish and other waste in the bush, on empty land, in waterways and on roadsides. The amount of waste our consumer society generates has become a major problem. From industrial and medical hazardous waste to the everyday household food and packaging.
A good question to ask is why do we have so much waste?
Why people dump rubbish in the way reported this week could be sheer laziness or the inconvenience of making the effort to take unwanted items to a council tip, where fees charged are high. Council attempts at providing dedicated bins and drop off centres have only been partially successful. Perhaps this is the ultimate in a breakdown in community pride and disrespect for the natural environment.
The three examples may seem to have no connection but perhaps they do. Perhaps they show how we are increasingly becoming disconnected from nature and from each other. and how we have embraced consumerism as a way of life.
To some it is becoming clear that our way of living has to change. But this will be rejected by many and make others uncomfortable.
Our economic system has undeniably brought many positive things but now we are reaching the point of The Law of Diminishing Returns across all human activity. What brought benefits in the past no longer does so as we face serious environmental, climate and social problems.
Economics expert and bestselling author Ulrike Herrmann argues that she sees no other way to solving today’s problems than the need for industrialized countries to check global growth. Our throwaway society has to become a circular economy. The industrialised countries must therefore bid farewell to our current obsessive consumerism. and strive for a circular economy in which only what can be recycled is consumed.
This cannot be achieved without personal commitment to giving up certain elements of lifestyle and some central planning. This of course will be ferociously resisted. But as she suggests, we may have it forced on us by some future environmental disaster. When there is talk of falling standards of living perhaps we should begin to define standard of living in terms other than consumerism.
And once again reconnecting with nature is a step forward for a better future.
Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” captures the calming and restorative power of nature, highlighting the need to protect it. Berry suggests that we should cherish and protect the natural world, which offers peace amid modern-day worries.
And we should reconnect our lost generation of youth with the restorative power that nature offers us all and mostly for free.
When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
Of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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Was it inevitable that ‘globalization’ would give rise to a balancing out of the common wealth and lifestyles across all countries? It would seem so, but for localized propaganda and political actions. It infers that the common wealth and lifestyles of the wealthier countries would diminish, whilst those of poorer countries would rise, along with the release of predation on the environment.
Of course, notions that equity exists within most countries is absurd – the perennial political battle between the haves and have-nots persists, and therefore, also the incidence of influence, rhetoric, propaganda, corruption and secrecy.
And under the neoliberal paradigm, there’s an overwhelming domination of corporations, and the agglomeration of corporations. Corporations that prima facie operate competitively with self-interest and profit the core, seem to have universal equity and environmental preservation as an expendable second string. Albeit, community consciousness and science and tech advances apply pressure on those old notions.
Whilst the ‘west’ persists with their old ‘business as usual’ biases and squabbling, China has in 40 years taken the efficiencies of capitalism and corporations, and slowly but surely, with strong regulation, and a focus on universal benefit, completely outstripped the obdurate ‘west’ on every measure.
The squabbling and propaganda of the ‘west’ internally and outside of itself is causing its bankruptcy morally, financially and environmentally. With the advent of T-Rump II, the old ‘western’ extractionism and inequities are being sent into hyper-drive and defensiveness. Chaos reigns to the detriment of sustainability – just the type of circularity we don’t need.
In the absence of political courage, the best choice is to continue to act at a community level, striving for the benefit of nature, its circularity and sustainability. The successes will inevitably cause them to become ubiquitous.
The author’s plea for youth (and perhaps others, older) to ‘reconnect’ with nature ought to be applauded. It logically implies, however, that there existed a connection that has been lost, or discarded or wilfully neglected. This may or may not be the case. The plethora of e-devices in the lives of young people in association with the scarcity of time available for adults to connect with their offspring leads to an inevitable set of circumstances where young people become wedded to phones, tablets & computers at the expense of everything else. Connection with nature is way down on the list of preferred activities, and particularly so for urban individuals, many of whom rarely get to be up close to natural settings. I was astounded some years ago when working in a north Asian country to encounter a child aged around ten who said that he had never touched a tree in his life. I suspect the same might apply to hundreds of thousands of young people here in Australia.
At a personal level, my childhood and early adulthood were spent in the country. I had high school teachers who mentored kids in bush craft, bird-watching, plant identification… these interests have remained throughout my life. I doubt any school kids today benefit from these types of involvement.
A future where an emerging generation has little to no sense of connection or relationship to nature is not one to be welcomed, albeit that those of my generation won’t be around to witness it.
On a side note, there are around 650 national parks in this country. I suspect that there are very few that are visited by many, and a great majority whose annual visitor numbers are in the double or triple digits range.