Theodore Roszak
| Bart Simpson and the Tiger Theodore Roszak
|
Theodore Roszak is the author of The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (Touchstone Books) and, with Mary Gomes and Allen Kanner, is the co-editor of Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (Sierra Club Books). He is the author of several works of fiction, including Flicker and The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, both available from Bantam Books. The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, described as an eco-feminist retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, won the 1996 James Tiptree Prize for literature that extends our understanding of gender.
I AM SITTING in a crowded airport waiting to board a plane that will fly
me home from a distant city where I have been attending a conference on
Artificial Intelligence. Beside me in the waiting room, a little boy of about six years old is casually flipping through an American magazine. He pauses on one page to study the picture of a tiger. The illustration is part of an advertisement for Exxon Oil. The boy spends several seconds gazing at the photographed face of the great beast whose image, even in this tawdry commercial version, preserves a certain lordly dignity.Then he turns the page to confront another advertisement. At once the boy brightens. He recognizes the picture. It is an animated television cartoon named Bart Simpson, the current media rage. Excitedly, the boy turns to his mother to show her the picture, which also happens to be emblazoned across his tee-shirt. I think: by the time this boy is my age, Bart Simpson will have come and gone, replaced many times over by similarly ephemeral fictions. And by then the tigers will also be gone, never to be replaced. They may not even survive in zoos; not all the wild things agree to reproduce in captivity for our convenience and amusement. When they have no real place of their own, they quietly surrender to extinction. Someday children coming upon the picture of a tiger will view it the way we view the dinosaurs, wondering if such creatures ever really existed. But the extinction of the tigers and the gorillas and the wolves and the whales will be different. We will have exterminated these species, unthinkingly, without purpose, without remorse. I have never seen a tiger in the wild. Nor a gorilla or a wolf. But as citified as I may be, something in me nevertheless insists that it is important these beasts should be there sharing some corner of the world with me. If they perish, it closes an episode in planetary history that represents millions of years of evolution. Granted, extinction is a constant theme of life on Earth, one of nature's ways of pruning, improving, and clearing space. But if it is to happen, best that it happen as part of some grand global transformation that has a certain geological, even cosmic grandeur to it. Some think the dinosaurs met their end sixty million years ago in the wake of a meteoric collision that cast the planet into a worldwide winter. Other species were rendered extinct by the drifting of the continents or the advance of glaciers, only to have their place taken by new types. There is an almost ceremonial magnificence to such processes that matches the magnitude of the calamity. We might consider extinction on such a scale as an "act of God," meaning not only that it happened before our time and beyond our control, but that it happened on whatever we take to be the highest authority.
But the tiger in the Exxon advertisement is not doomed to so dignified an
end. The demise of its species will be fortuitously bound up with oil
spills like that which Exxon, in its money-mad recklessness, inflicted upon
the Alaskan coast a few years back. All these are expressions of heedless power on the part of a human culture that is running amok, wildly expending its technical cunning and industrial energy in all directions. And for what purpose that is worth the death of a species? Too little of what we do with our affluence is done to feed the hungry, heal the sick, comfort the desperate. Between the fate of the Earth and the luxuries, frivolities, and greedy profiteering to which we devote our technological might there is no sane proportion. Yet we live in this imbalance, degrading the planet without the capacity to hear its cries of anguish and anger. The little boy turns a page. A species dies. A television cartoon takes its place in his life. He does not know, he does not feel. At his age, I was just as uncaring, a child raised on the entrancing illusions of urban culture. Superman and Popeye were more real to me than rainforests and whales. The words of the semi-legendary American Indian leader Chief Seattle, echo in my mind, a voice that has attained nearly prophetical stature among environmentalists. I know the pronouncement to be apocryphal, but it is nonetheless moving. What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of Earth.
As greatly as they may differ in theory and practice, all schools of
modern psychiatry agree that the question of truth lies at the core of
madness. We go crazy when we refuse to face painful realities, when we
lie to ourselves, hiding from our shameful fantasies. Lust for the
mother, hatred for the father ... these guilty secrets have long-since been
laid bare. But what of the guilt that comes of annihilating whole species
of our fellow creatures, not because we must do so to survive, but in
ignorance and for the sake of nothing better than ephemeral amusements,
petty pleasures, quick riches? We are after all, in ways that may even
be part of our innermost genetic inheritance, tied to the beasts from whom
we evolve. At what risk of madness do we break faith with them?
There is an historical dimension to this matter that makes the
environmental criterion of sanity peculiarly relevant in our time. In the
past, societies have, in their ignorance, blighted portions of their
habitat sufficiently to endanger their own survival, but the urgency of
the matter was much less than we feel today. The species with whom we
share the planet carried on in blissful disregard of the blunders
perpetrated by their human cousins who were so often too smart for their
own good. Populations relocated and multiplied. Soon after the calamity -- a few decades, a few centuries -- the land was healed, the ruin mercifully
covered over. The rivers rolled on, the great natural systems of the
planet closed upon the damage and continued functioning unaffected.
Now all this has changed. Our power over the global environment has
Viktor Frankl, one of the commanding figures in Existential psychiatry,
was able to bring the most extreme of "boundary conditions" into his
life's work as a matter of personal experience. A survivor of the
holocaust, Frankl had traversed the depths and heights of human nature as
a prisoner in the death camps of Nazi Germany. He returned to the world
determined to integrate the hellishness of what he had suffered into
contemporary psychiatric theory. Though he respected the work of his
predecessors, he reflected almost mockingly on the comfortable bourgeois
origins of his profession.
Thanks largely to Frankl, the horror of the camps and of the war as a
whole has forced serious psychiatry to revamp its understanding of the
human condition. The task has been a wrenching one; but to avoid it in
favor of therapeutic business as usual would be cowardly. Frankl insisted
that there were parameters of terror and despair that have to be
confronted. "So let us be alert -- alert in a twofold sense. Since
Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know
what is at stake." (Man's Search for Meaning, New York, Washington Square
Press, 1959.)
Now we encounter another landmark in our exploration of the psyche, the
most imposing thus far. We come upon it as our technological power
attains global closure. What Auschwitz was to its human inmates -- an
expertly rationalized, efficiently organized killing ground -- our
urban-industrial system is fast becoming for the biosphere at large, and
for ourselves as an inseparable part of that environment. The dimensions
of psychiatric theory, and with them our understanding of our connection
with all things human, nonhuman, and transhuman, must grow to include the
planetary habitat as a whole. Once again, to shrink from the challenge
would be cowardice.
A final word about my quotation from Chief Seattle. These days, people
who quote the Chief are apt to draw a ton of letters informing them that
the quotation is bogus. I know. As a historian, I admit to some unease
about using this passage, at least when it comes to the letter rather than
the spirit of the Chief's few surviving pronouncements. While some of his
remarks were noted down by contemporary listeners in the mid-nineteenth
century, most of what is attributed to him today comes from a free
"recreation" by the screenwriter Ted Perry for a 1972 ABC television film
titled Home. Perry heard Chief Seattle's words quoted at a rally on the
first Earth Day in 1970. They inspired him to write a play about the
pollution of the environment. He of course exercised some dramatic
license with the Chief's words. Most of what now goes out under Chief
Seattle's name has come to be mixed with Perry's rewriting. Though much
of it, like this passage, expresses a reasonable facsimile of the
traditional worldview, it is proably best treated as folk wisdom in the
making, as much the work of our culture as the Chief's. Whoever wrote or
spoke these noble words, I quote them here in that spirit.
© 1997 The Ecopsychology Institute. All rights reserved. |
© 1997 The Ecopsychology Institute
The city is Rio de Janeiro, an ailing
third-world metropolis whose government and financial masters have been
maniacally plundering one of the planet's last rainforests. More than it
needs computers and Expert Systems, Brazil needs its jungles. And beyond
that, its cities, teeming with violence and cluttered with garbage, need
social justice and decent sewers. But almost as if high tech might be the
magic wand that will dispel these brutal ills, the Brazilians I have met
on this visit have been preoccupied with modems and e-mail and multimedia.
Bound up too with this airport where
I am sitting, whose planes are fueled by Exxon's oil. Bound up with the
devastation of the Brazilian rainforest, which is going on night and day
somewhere west of where I sit. And bound up too with the high tech that was the
subject of the less than necessary conference I have seen fit to travel
eight thousand miles to attend. It is even connected along less visible
lines with funny little Bart Simpson, whose fictitious existence is
dependent on the technology I have just finished discussing with other
experts flown in from all over the world.
become enormous and practically instantaneous. A single human invention
may be marketed and put into use around the world before we realize what
harm it can do to the environment. We are being warned that within a few
decades a trivial product of industrial culture -- some novelty or
convenience like the CFCs in spray cans -- may, out of simple inadvertence,
be able to warp the biosphere in ways that will derange age-old ecological
harmonies for millennia to come. 
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