"The only healing for Extinction, and so Extinction IIlness,
as they are entirely intertwined, is stopping Extinction."
— Deena Matzger
[Editor’s Note: We at Tikkun have been proud to have articles from Deena Metzger, whose novel A Rain of Night Birds was reviewed on our website by Cynthia Travis on October 11, 2018. In this piece, Metzger captures the grief and pain we all experience living at a time of global extinction and offers the only solution – to stop extinction. I’m hoping that her article will stimulate you to move to embrace solutions appropriate for the level of problem we face, and rather than only focusing on little steps, you’ll give some energy to obtaining endorsements for and promoting our Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ESRA). Yes, it’s “unrealistic” in the current political climate and as Metzger points out, if we want to save the life support system of the planet, we’ve got to step beyond what even our most progressive politicians tell us is “realistic.” I’ve just finished writing my next book (to be published in the Fall of 2019) which gives a more detailed strategy for what we need to do. But a first step is to read the ESRA and circulate it widely. But first read Deena’s wonderful and insightful article below. Many blessings, Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com]
“Everyone says climate is the most important issue of all, and yet they just carry on as before. I don’t understand that. Because if the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t. We have to change.”
— Greta Thunberg, 15-year-old climate activist, self-identified as autistic, speaking at the UN Climate Summit in Poland, December, 2018.
— Greta Thunberg, 15-year-old climate activist, self-identified as autistic, speaking at the UN Climate Summit in Poland, December, 2018.
The insight came swiftly, undeniable and overwhelming, like the fire storm that devoured Paradise. Instant and devastating. The impact and understanding immediate.
I had been reeling from the news of the last years regarding climate disruption, wars, famine, hate crimes, the desperation of migrants and refugees, and the incomprehensible chaos and brutishness of our current president – as have we all – and also from a series of events which I had met individually and, without realizing it, had compartmentalized in order to respond from an open an unimpeded heart. But coming home after many days away to phone messages from two different women who could not speak coherently because they had broken into sobs, I was alerted to the grief that they were carrying for all of us which could not be contained in a personal story. I knew then these are not merely difficult times. And even this might not have been sufficient to alert me to the extremity of the critical shift in our weather, external and internal, had not another message been left from a friend whose daughter had just been killed by the Thousand Oaks shooter and another from a relative on her way to the Pittsburgh synagogue where there had just been a massacre. On Friday November 13, 2015, I had stayed up all night emailing with a friend in Paris as she hid in her apartment after the bombings which had just occurred in her neighborhood. And in the last year, I had been advising several friends and colleagues who are offering trauma counseling and community support to the Parkland survivors and their families as well as to students and faculty in Pine Ridge who were trying to meet a rash of suicides and attempted suicides in teenagers and younger children. There were also three deaths of young people close to me in the last month. A startling number of friends and acquaintances, formerly competent and active people, have been unable to function for long periods of time due to disabling depression, anxiety, and despair; I do not know if they will recover. Two members of our small, well-educated and trained community are homeless, unable to find work or permanent housing with friends or relatives. An alarming percentage of friends’ children are suffering from addiction, schizophrenia, depression, and are in danger of committing suicide. Two women will meet with me this week to explore writing about living with wary children (plural) suffering mental illness while another friend called to ask for prayers for yet another young man incarcerated in a mental hospital. One of our Daré (community healing circles) members reports monthly on the condition of two sons in and out of mental hospitals over the last ten years. There has been more mental illness and addiction in my extended family than I had ever conceived possible when I was young and more children in my kinship network suffering from conditions that range between high functioning Asperger’s syndrome and extreme autism requiring full time care.
At night, I dream the anguished cries of polar bears, grizzlies, fur seals, whales, wolves, elephants, giraffes, lions, whose habitats are overrun, toxic and gravely dangerous, who cannot live a moment without fear of the next action by the ravenous two-leggeds who hunt or gawk, who pollute, destroy, and dominate. Though I had to evacuate for a week because of the firestorm threat to Topanga, my discomfort did not compare to the death in the Woolsey fire of two of our very, very few mountain lions when 85% of the wild mountain park that was their territory burned. Meanwhile, the rangers cautioned us not to put out water or food because “the animals are resourceful” even though there is no water to be found in this drought which caused the fires. Simultaneously, the Camp Fire changed everything as people were vaporized or cremated in a fire that was hotter than any natural fire we have known. A filmmaker friend who traveled to Chico and Paradise found people gathering – Climate Uprising – to face the climate crisis even while sifting through the ashes for signs of their loved ones and trying to imagine how to survive and rebuild. The probability that there was and may continue to be a release of radiation from the toxic and radioactive super site at the old Rocketdyne lab in Simi Valley is democratically experienced by all beings which means the remaining mountain lions and all the flora and fauna and human beings, myself, my children, my friends included within a hundred miles.
What was my realization? Here it is:
We are all going extinct.
The animals know this and now all humans know this as well. Sensing the imminent death of all species, the cellular understanding of our common fate is making us ill. Our nervous and physical systems cannot bear this terrible knowledge. The growing understanding of the reality of the human caused 6th Extinction is resulting in Extinction Illness.
Contemplating the extent and pervasiveness of despair and violence across the globe, the increasing aberrance of human and non-human behavior, I see that all humans and non-humans know this, all human people and all beings, animals, trees, birds, insects, fish, know this. And all of us are being driven to some form of madness, pain, or dysfunction. For the animals, Bear, Wolf, Elephant, Whale this results in unavoidable and unmediated terror. We humans know, with or without awareness, that we are responsible. And so, we, entirely crazed, become a species that commits ecocide even as we die of it. The different signs and symptoms are ubiquitous and no one is escaping it.
We know we are going extinct. We know this consciously and/or unconsciously. Each person on the planet knows this. Extinction is upon us and no one is immune to it. All beings sense our/their imminent death. Not only their individual deaths, but far worse, the death of their species. An unbearable thought. And beyond that, the death of all species ….
Please continue this article here: https://www.tikkun.org/extinction-illness-grave-affliction-and-possibility
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