"I don't find it hard to be green, I find it fulfilling"

Rage Against Environmental Decline
By William Deverell



I believe in taking action, urgent action to save this wounded planet. Meanwhile, I sit here and wait for the mono titis, as I have waited for the last two winters, but they no longer come. Mono titis, they call them here in Costa Rica, squirrel monkeys — high-flying acrobats who used to scamper about jungle and orchard, joyfully filching avocados and bananas. They come no longer — their territory has been carved up by roads and power lines and the parking lots of hotels and condos, concrete goliaths rising above the remains of what was once a great rain forest.

Here and in British Columbia I have watched the wilderness systematically destroyed by quick-buck developers. Gas-guzzling SUVs roar up and down roads, or sit there, spewing exhaust, like panting predators pausing from the chase.

So we carry on in the false name of progress. We clearcut old growth, fish out our oceans, blight our lakes and rivers. As the world’s oil supply flatlines, we Canadians gloat – we’ve got the oil sands! So it’s full speed ahead as we rush lemming-like to the precipice. Though to be fair, that’s a bad rap. For the lemmings.

In subscribing to the mantras of economic growth and sustainable development (that favorite oxymoron of global warming deniers) are we simply uncaring about future generations, about the survival of humankind itself? Or did T.S. Eliot have us pegged bang-on when he said humankind “cannot bear much reality.”

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. We have bought the bafflegab invoked by selfish capitalism, whose power over the global economy, whose pervasive influence over politicians and mainstream media, whose hoarding of the planet’s overtaxed resources, whose spinning of convenient untruths, have all combined to dumb us down, to create feelings of learn’d helplessness, to cow us into passivity and submission.

Reduce, reuse, recycle — these are such simple and obvious antidotes to the Age of Waste they need hardly be stated. Respect for all life on Earth, for biodiversity, finding solutions to the overpopulation crisis before solutions find us — these are the concerns that consume my cranky senior years, the core issues that must be shouted, bellowed. Rage against the dying of the planet. Shed that comforting costume of liberalism, get a spine, be angry, be prickly, be radical — revolt against a system that stifles sustainable economic ideas while hyping globalization, unrestricted markets, and rampant consumerism. I cringe when the mass media equates growth with progress.

Fifty years ago Erich Fromm wrote in The Sane Society: “So long as we are more motivated to have than to be, we shall continue down the tunnel of consumerism. We shall do so despite knowing full well that the light at the end is not the sun. It’s the train.”

So I decline to be remembered by my descendants as one who didn’t warn about the onrushing train. I’m proud to be accused of being an anti-growth pro-slow tree hugger. I don’t find it hard to be Green, I find it fulfilling, it helps me keep faith that my little threatened friends, the mono titis, will return to share the fruits of our orchard.

For This I Believe, I am William Deverell in Costa Rica.

From: This I Believe