The whole letter-to-your-descendents thing can get schmaltzy, but when the good people at desmogblog invited me to give it a whirl, I thought why not? I've been thinking about my own mortality lately, and thinking about the kind of world my kid and her kid(s), if she has any, will grow up in. And what do I want them to know about me?
This:
Dear Great-great-Grandkids,
I’m sorry. I am so sorry. For some of what I’m sorry for, you don’t even miss: you’ve never known it. You've never known what it's like to tramp in a world far from civilization, a world in which "nature" seemed far, far from the rules and regulations of humans and their culture; where nature was something essential, something outside of citified life and human society. My generation presided over the end of Nature as something separate, other, and immune from change by the forces of civilization. This was a step on the way to kiling nature entirely, replacing it with a Factory Planet, a planet in which every living thing was allowed to live only because it served the purposes of humans who had economic designs on it. Oh, when I was young, Nature was so romantic then! It was a comfort and a spiritually regenerative experience to be able to move and live and breathe in a nature that we could think of that way.
If sanity ever prevailed in the time that lies between you, there, and me, here, by the time you read this the quality of the environment may be on the mend. That would be good. I hope that is the case. If it is, you should know that even your mending ecosystems are poorer and more strained than the ecosystems I knew when I was young. Do you still have polar bears? Bees? Glaciers? Tropical islands? Did the waters rise and set off mass migrations of populations inland? Is Vermont still a retreat that harks back to a nineteenth century balance between humans and nature, or did it get overrun by people looking to escape starvation and the effects of climate change elsewhere?
And you see, as much as I want you to know things, I want to know things from you. Do you go outside much? Do you have a patch of forest to play in, a forest too thick to see through, a forest that will stimulate your imagination? As a kid my nature tramping was in the the forests and tidal marshes along the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal; they seemed immeasurable to me when I was ten and twelve. I grew up, and came to understand that the marsh extended only as far as that road I knew a mile away; I came to understand that nothing on this planet is infinite. I wish the leaders who wielded power in my generation had learned this. They acted as if the planet could give to us infinitely from its bounty, and take from us infinitely the wastes our economy pumped out. In my own time it seems that finally, over the issue of global warming, most people are beginning to recognize that this isn’t, and couldn’t possibly be, true. Whether they’ll insist that their leaders know this, and what their leaders will do about it, remains an open question right now.
I was a teacher and had students back in my day, and I tried to tell them about these things. I even used you, unborn you, in my arguments. For one course in American History I had to read a dozen essays on the general theme "slavery is bad, and a lot of the men who signed the Constitution had slaves, so they were bad men." And me, I rebelled against the ordinary sameness, the smug anachronism, of what my students wrote. (It's a good practice to suspect unexamined group-think whenever everyone says the same damn thing.)
One student made a public apology to the black students in the class for the slaves that his great-grandfather owned. "How could he have owned slaves? Didn’t he know it was wrong?" Of course he did, and of course he thought he couldn't do anything else. And I found myself telling all of them: "If we are lucky, we will have grandchildren who will sit in class like this one day, and they’ll say, about you and me, "Grandad had how many internal combustion engines? Three cars, two lawnmowers, a leaf blower, an ATV, a boat, a jet ski, a back-up generator? Didn’t he know that fossil fuel use was wrong?"
What Jefferson said of slavery is true of my era’s addiction to oil: we've got a wolf by the ears. (Do you have wolves in your world? Most of my contemporaries have to take on hearsay what Jefferson's metaphor was about; they've never seen a wolf in the wild, and have only a imagined, vicarious idea of what taking a wolf by the ears might mean. If you've ever seen a snarling wolf, and seen the teeth that could do you damage, you'd have some idea of the aptness of Jefferson's lament.)
Too many of us in my generation were too completely the products of our times, willing to do the easy thing, willing to let our lives and our economic acts depend on fossil fuel, willing to let profit-motivated corporations define for us the true and the right and the good. Were you raised by your parents? I really hope that the system by which children are raised and acculturated through commercial advertising was changed before you were born. Me and my contemporaries, we were born into this system, just as Jefferson was born into a world in which slavery was normal and accepted. He tried to change it, but still, he owned slaves. I’m trying to change this world I live in, but I still own internal combustion engines, still burn oil. Less than others. More than I like. More than I should—-but to say it that way reduces the matter to individual moral choice, and that's not what it is. The problem, like slavery, is systemic. Individual slave owners could set their slaves free and some did--with mixed results, because the world that knew slavery wasn't ready to accomodate freed ex-slaves. But personal acts like that couldn’t abolish the system, couldn't eliminate the institution of slavery. For that, we needed something more than individual acts; we needed a social movement, Abolitionism. Because you are reading this letter, somewhere between you and me there must have grown up the ecological equivalent of an abolitionist movement, a movement to change the way we think about nature and how we treat it. I hope it took root and spread without the tremendous tragedy of a civil war.
I send much love to you, there in the future, and I hope that you inherited the best planet that it was in the power of my generation to give you. Somehow, I think that this was probably not the case. And for that, too, I am sorry.
Eric Zencey
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