Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

First Comes Love

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-3446907

2164-0041

Ana Levy-Lyons,

That gay marriage went from impossible to inevitable in this country in such a short span of time is a testament to the wonderful suppleness of the human heart. Through this process we all got to witness firsthand how societies, like individuals, have the thrilling ability to change from the inside. It has been breathtaking to watch as, household by household, gay people have become human in the eyes of the American public. Their commitments to one another have come to be seen as real commitments, their parenting as real parenting, their love as real love. Our collective hearts opened and then the laws changed, in that order, slowly at first and then quickly.In a recurring drama of our American social theater, the hot-button issues of one generation are often matters of common decency for the next. In one generation it’s acceptable to proudly fly the Confederate flag and fight for segregated schools; in the next generation it’s not. In one generation you can argue with a straight face that women should be ineligible to vote; in the next generation you can’t. In one generation it seems reasonable to pass sodomy laws; in the next generation same-sex couples can legally marry. Such changes build gradually over decades, even centuries, like separate trickles of water slowly forming streams and merging into rivers. But once they join, the current is strong and swift, and suddenly the naysayers find themselves on “the wrong side of history.” And the current doesn’t go backward: once we have identified a site of collective spiritual constriction and released it, our new openness and wisdom carry forward into the future.The environmental movement today finds itself somewhere in the middle of this process. We are still living in a time in which it is politically acceptable to fight against clean air and water regulations, to try to obstruct international agreements on global warming, and to promote fracking and drilling for oil within fragile ecosystems. It is still socially acceptable to throw bottles in the garbage, get takeout in Styrofoam containers and plastic bags, eat meat daily, and water our lawns. Our paltry environmental victories are politically expensive, haggled in back rooms through gritted teeth and with pinched noses. We do, of course, have some political activism and books and movie stars arguing for environmental stewardship. But clearly the tipping point has not yet been reached. The current has not yet shifted the consciousness of our cultural soul.What will it take to engender that shift? If we’ve learned one lesson from the success of the gay marriage movement, it’s that it will take nothing less than love—in this case, love for the sacred, natural world and everything that is part of its delicate web. Ultimately there are no statistics dire enough, no news reports dramatic enough, no storms devastating enough to convince us to make the large-magnitude changes we will need to heal our earth. The shift is too profound for us to be reasoned into it. First must come love. We’ll need to feel akin to all living beings, from the bees to the rain forest trees, and attach our hearts to the interconnected web of all life. We’ll need to know that a mother lion will risk her life to protect her cub, just like we would for our children. We’ll need to hear the flute sound of an owl and see how light filters through the summer leaves swaying high in the trees. We’ll need to remember how much it used to snow when we were kids and the pure joy we felt as it fell.When I was a little kid, I didn’t have just one imaginary friend: I had an entire jungle’s worth of imaginary animals. They would follow me around wherever I went—gazelles and elephants and chipmunks and opossums and snakes and lions. I always had a mouse on my shoulder and maybe a bird or two on my head. I loved them and saw it as my job to protect them. I’ll always remember the first time I went camping with my friends in high school. It was my first real forest with real animals. And it was magical. We were canoe camping down the Delaware River, pulling our canoes onto the shore and pitching our tents in the evening, cooking over a campfire, and talking long into the night, staring at the coals. I remember the sweetness of the cool, clean air, the night sounds, and the stars above. It’s been a long time since I’ve slept outdoors and I miss it.This is all part of my personal “eco-autobiography”—the story of my relationship with the natural world. We all have such a story, whether it’s a narrative of connection or of disconnection or, in most cases, of both. It’s a healthy and beautiful thing to write and tell our stories. Many, like mine, are journeys from more connection as a child to less connection as an adult. Some of them are stories of salvation and joy. Some are repositories of sadness. Some of our stories have a violent edge to them: that natural place, the secret spot we may have loved as a child, is now ruined or gone. It has been replaced by a housing development or bisected by a highway. The stream is dry, fertilizer runoff has choked the marsh, the forest has been logged, the field is now a mall. How much do we let ourselves cry about that? How much should we let ourselves cry?Drawing again on the wisdom of the LGBT movement, I believe we should let ourselves cry a lot. We should grieve privately and publicly for the loss of each species and each habitat. We should grieve for the people whose lives are already being ruined by rising waters and drought and polluted lands. We cry too little given the magnitude of the losses we face. We must not really realize it’s happening. Instead, we are slowly acclimating to life on a fatal trajectory. We’re desensitized: we don’t feel our connection to nature and we don’t feel our disconnection. We don’t feel our utter dependence on our ecosystems and we don’t feel the pain as they are harmed. We’re insulated from it by our modern world. So we don’t feel the gratitude, either. Most importantly, we don’t feel the love. At least not often.You could say that we know the natural world because we see it around us. But that “seeing,” too, can be deceptive. We often don’t grasp that a highway has bisected the patch of forest that some kid used to love, because we are usually only seeing the forest while traveling seventy miles per hour on that very highway. We may even be appreciating the trees, not understanding the devastation caused by the very means of our ability to see them. We see animals in a zoo; we see lush green lawns in desert climates. The list of all the ways we are alienated from nature goes on and on. It is a terminal alienation.Our relationship to food offers a sobering example. Farming, hunting, and eating used to offer humans a very conspicuous umbilical cord to Mother Earth. But in consumerist societies, food is often so reconfigured that it’s barely recognizable as plant or animal. Take ice cream. What is ice cream? If you were telling an alien, you might say that ice cream is a cold treat that comes in many colors and flavors, with or without sprinkles (don’t ask what a “sprinkle” is), with or without chocolate chips (don’t ask where the chocolate comes from). Ice cream is delicious; it’s a ritual; it’s sold from trucks in the summer; entire pints may be consumed solo after a breakup. Ice cream as we know it is completely removed from its source: warm milk from a mother cow, intended by nature for the cow to feed her calves.For most of us, there was some point in our lives, whether we were aware of it or not, when “the environment” became a cause: an “ism.” Environmentalism. It became an issue that one could have different opinions about. You could be an “environmentalist”—or not. The word “environment” comes from the Old French word environer, which meant “to surround, encircle, or encompass.” I think that’s the best way to understand it still today. We all live inside the bubble of our environment. It surrounds, encircles, and encompasses us. Completely. There is no “outside.”When we humans harm the environment, we harm that of which there is no outside. In slow motion we are destroying literally everything that matters to us. Everything we love. With this understanding, it’s hard to see how anybody could not be an environmentalist. It’s hard to imagine how anything could be more important than reversing that harm and beginning the healing of the earth.I care tremendously about our human social issues—I want people to be free from poverty and hunger and violence and to gain civil rights and equality. But if we don’t get things right with the environment in which all those people live, we are all doomed, starting with the poorest, least powerful, and most vulnerable. All our good social justice work will have been, in retrospect, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We can no longer afford to see environmentalism as an “issue” parallel to other issues. We need to shift our thinking from “issue” to “ethic.” Environmentalism, meaning the nurturing of the environment as a whole, has to infuse and guide all the other work that we do on behalf of any of its constituent parts. Fueled by love, from top to bottom, in every domain and dimension of our work and play, it has to become the ethic by which we live our lives.I believe that the religious counterculture offers a way to move toward this ethic. Rather than passively accepting the desensitization that secular culture has bequeathed us, spiritual life prompts us to greater and greater sensitivity. Prayer and meditation invite us to stop and smell the roses. Contemplative traditions may teach us to spend time in nature or to write our eco-autobiographies, tracing our connections to the natural world. Religious traditions offer rituals of grief—contexts and formats for expressing communal grief that help open our hearts to what we’ve lost. They restore our senses—and begin to shift our spiritual consciousness. And many religious traditions teach us to bless our food and sanctify the act of eating, honoring the plants and animals to whom we are existentially indebted. We cultivate gratitude for all we have been given by the Source of Life.Lastly, and most importantly, the countercultural ethic of progressive religion decenters the individual in the universe. The hubris of human conquest over nature is deflated and replaced by awe at the sheer grandeur of it all—awe at the chain of life balanced so delicately, with every element serving its essential function and with each of us only a tiny speck in the expanse. With this ethic, we do not think in the language of “rights,” but rather in the language of reverence and the language of love. This has been key in the LGBT movement and it will be crucial for the environmental movement as we open our hearts to the sadness of loss and to a newly innocent love for the environment in which we live. By practicing this ethic in our community, we can cultivate the love we need to change the world.As for me, my imaginary menagerie has been replaced by one real dog. And she gets me to go outdoors more than I would otherwise. And that’s a good thing. But I hope that over time my eco-autobiography will recount a return to a more intimate connection with nature. I pray that my love will deepen and that I can transmit that love to my children. I pray for my love to be a trickle that will become a stream that will contribute to the torrent that will eventually sweep the land. A flood of love. And I pray that, if I am lucky enough to have grandchildren, I will be able to honestly say to them that, fueled by that love, I did everything I could to nurture and heal this gorgeous earth.