The privileged ones

(This was filed as the editorial for the Feb. 28 Southbridge Evening News,  but I've added links and made a few minor changes.)

BY GUS STEEVES

We are all children of privilege.

No matter how much effort any of us has put into becoming “self-made,” we all owe a huge debt to luck – the luck of living in a period of education, science, technology, communications, curiosity and wealth on a scale that has never existed since the days of fire. Even more important, though, we all owe an even huger debt to the other Earthlings we share this world with.

Over the weekend, one image stands out from among the things I saw – a repeated scene from the film "Fresh" of worms wriggling through a double handful of rich, dark soil. THOSE are the kind of Earthlings I mean – the simple, nameless beings that make our lives possible. Without them, we simply cease to exist, and they've been here vastly longer than we have.

That's what makes a lot of what's going on in the ongoing clown show of the presidential primary season particularly scary. Seen from the perspective of life on this planet, as opposed to some candidates' obvious preference for some other realm, the idea some of them tout that Earth exists to do our bidding is patently ridiculous, dangerous and extremely irresponsible. Their “solution” to the fact we have overdrawn several of Earth's accounts is to deny reality and double-down on the bets, rather than stop gambling with our future.

On one level, I can see why. For centuries, even millennia, the dominant ideologies – secular and religious – have largely agreed that humankind has no physical limits, even when they debated (and killed each other over) which interpretation of mental limits was “correct.” Physically, there has always been enough to keep constant growth going, and technology has often been devised to address crises that threatened that growth. In many cases, the consequences were ignored because they happened elsewhere, there was some other resource to replace the vanishing one, or the damage happened to something people didn't realize was important.

We cannot afford such ignorance now, especially willfully reinforced by politicians, corporations and others pursuing their own selfish interests. Their greed and hubris is shredding the very underpinnings of our society and our ecosystem, endangering our long-term survival on this world in the name of profit and denial.

The profit part is obvious; the denial maybe less so. What I'm referring to is this: Any economic system, regardless of the label, exists to transfer wealth, with the only source of that wealth being Earth herself and the various Earthlings resident here (including us). Instead of creating wealth, the system takes some of what exists, rearranges it, and redistributes it away from other species to humans. Usually, it further concentrates any benefits in the hands of a small percentage of humans at the expense of most of the others, even when laden with rhetoric about freedom or equality – and that's true be it oligarchic, feudal, capitalist or socialist, as such systems have been practiced throughout recorded history.

That's because our major secular and religious systems actively deny the basic truth that we are not special when seen from the universe's perspective. The universe, in fact, doesn't know we exist, although this planet certainly does (probably not literally but in the sense that our actions have major ripple effects on other species).

What may well determine our continued existence is how we treat those other species. Do we work on creating a reasonably equal relationship with them, or do we keep de facto enslaving them? Do we show we're grateful for the fact they feed and clothe us and respect them as living beings, or do we keep abusing them like throw-away products?

An example of the comparison is how we farm: do we let cattle be herbivores, roaming the land and eating grass as they evolved to, or do we confine them in big metal crates, pump them full of drugs, hormones and chemicals, and feed them a sweetened mixture of corn and dead farm animals? Do we continue to treat whales and dolphins as entertainment, or as the intelligent sea-dwellers they are? Do we make an effort to get to know the woodlands, rivers, etc., all around us, learn what lives in them, and make our homes and lifestyle fit the places they are, or do we keep trying to force them to be places they are not?

Why do we treat our cars far better than most living beings?

The fact we live at all is an amazing privilege, an incredible experience we share with millions of other species, all of them our genetic cousins. Instead of ripping more and more out of the Earth just for ourselves, let's use what we already have to heal the damage in the most effective ways possible to benefit ALL life, not just ours.