Drought has come to an area that we associate with high humidity and effulgent pervasive vegetation. I’m talking about the Amazon rain forest and, in particular, the areas around the Amazon River and its tributaries. Manaus is a major Brazilian port city on the Rio Negro. which is a tributary of the Amazon. The water levels on the Rio Negro are the lowest that they have been in fifty years. Looking at a photo of Manaus and the Rio Negro that was taken recently, all the boats that should be going up and down the river, actually appear to be in dry dock. It’s really sad because the Amazon River system is the major conduit of transportation for the Brazilians who live there, as the highway system is quite undeveloped. It is crucial for the economy of the Amazon region as well as for the whole country of Brazil. Furthermore, as someone who has been to Manaus and had the opportunity to take a day trip down the Rio Negro, it is an awesome beautiful river when it is not suffering the effects of a drought.
This is one manifestation of the vacuumization that is occurring to natural areas around the world. Humans come in and start the ongoing relentless process of the destruction of the organic grounding that has acted as a template for the bonded interaction of humans as well as all the various creatures that roam the earth. Humans do this because, along with all the benefits they receive from organic grounding, they have to deal with all the catastrophic events that occur in nature: the earthquakes, the floods, the mudslides, the avalanches, the rockslides, the tornadoes, the hurricanes, the tsunamis, etc. Then there are wild animals to contend with as well as poisonous plants. There are droughts and famines and extreme heat and extreme cold. Finally, there is the worry about the dangers that emanate from the positive aspects of traditional natural environments. People become so comfortable in these traditional natural environments that the environments become like wombs in the external world. Wombs that cause people to undifferentiate and lose their boundaries as distinct human beings. For all these reasons, people struggled to break away from these traditional natural living environments, and to create modern technological living environments where supposedly they could maintain strong comfortable living environments that they could control.
Now modern technology can cover over nature for a while, can repress it, but evidently, it can’t do it forever. Sometimes, rather than simply repressing nature, modern technology gradually sucks the life out of it and slowly vacuumizes the land and waterways on which it has built its replacement world as is the case of the port of Manaus. And sometimes the repression of the traditional natural environment results in the creation or amplification of a tension-pocket that explodes forth and destroys both a lot of areas inhabited by humans as well as a lot of natural areas. Here I am thinking of the amplification of hurricanes that is occurring as a result of climate change. This, normally one of the more destructive manifestations of a traditional natural living environment, is being unnaturally amplified in such a way that it is creating situations where it is increasingly hard to ride the hurricane out and where the destruction is making it increasingly costly to rebuild. In short, these modern hurricanes like Helene and Milton end up leaving experiential vacuums. Unfortunately, whether it comes from a gradual numbness or from an explosive tension-pocket, the amount of overall environmental destruction as a result of climate change is already quite extensive.
And it is occurring as a result of a fundamental misconception. That nature would remain forever malleable in the hands of humankind. And that it would never bite back at the hands that control it. But now that we have seen that the old model for dealing with nature was flawed, perhaps we can develop a new model that deals more effectively and more precisely with the reality of the situation. In the traditional natural living environment, the existential danger for humans was that of losing the defined discrete boundaries that kept us human. In the modern technological living environment, the danger is that of floating off in a living death in an endless experiential vacuum. We need more flowing blendable continual organic stimuli to pull us out of our numbness. Fighting climate change is not simply a matter of fighting the physical destruction of nature. It’s also a matter of fighting the terrible effects of sensory distortion on our minds and on our souls.
©2024 Laurence Mesirow
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