Family life in a nature-loving world
My wife and I are part of a large family. We have no children, no pets, but all the kin in the world. You, too, are part of this bonded group.
It is true that we will never know the identity of the last common ancestor that you and I share with the old lady down my road, the birds in the back garden, the worms in the compost pile, the bacteria in my stomach, your stomach, and the deep sea, and all our other living relatives; but we can be sure that they were very much like us. For they pursued a life within the ecological bounds of our vibrant and incomparable planet.
The tree of life on whose limbs we all sit is one with innumerable bifurcations and a barely comprehensible splendor of creative manifestations. Yet we are told, in the modern world, that the nubby protuberance labeled Homo sapiens is the most important part or the only important part (if not a separate thing altogether). Only with the budding of humanity’s twig—this worldview contends—has the rest of the tree achieved its true value and meaning.
Through such a supremely arrogant distortion of reality, we justify the desolation and cruelty of big agriculture, the industrial pillaging of sea life, the erasure of rivers, the toxification of the ecosphere, and the continuing distension of the already-bloated human population at the expense of almost every other living being on Earth (ugly terms, yes, but for the ghastliest of problems). The twisted lens from which this distortion results is human exceptionalism, and any person who can see the world without it will understand the heinousness of our modern ways. Ecocide is fratricide, sororicide, and infanticide. We are destroying our own family.
While I describe the sum behavior of humans, I must note, of course, that culpability is skewed toward the business elites and the power holders of church and state—the people who have the most to gain from wielding the twisted lens. Indeed, the large majority of humans, just like nonhumans, are victims here. As this point is often overlooked, I will reinforce it: For most humans, the actions underwritten by human supremacy are detrimental. And as the human population grows further, and the Earth becomes ever-more ecologically degraded, the cleft in fates between the rich clique and the poor masses will only grow. In other words, buffering oneself from the effects of a dying planet will become a luxury that, even among the human community, few can afford. For much of the rest of life, existence—if we continue with our destructive ways—is going to be grim if not impossible.
So just as for a group of close human relatives (the traditional definition of “kin”), you will see that the family life of a nature-lover is filled with concerns about the present and the future. But it is also, like the human-focused equivalent, filled with joy and love.
An affinity with other life—human and nonhuman—drives my own existence. I don’t feel the need for more spiritual fulfillment than I can gain from, say, the sharing of laughter with a loved one or a quiet walk in the woods. And believe me when I say that there is nothing special about me in this regard, other than, perhaps, a greater willingness, compared with the typical Westerner, to be receptive to nature’s manifold beauty. Where others charge on with head down, I stop, look, and listen.
And so bringing children into the world, for my wife and I, would be superfluous. Raising our own young would also make our caring inequitable. We would need, and surely want, to devote much of our time to our child or children, but that would be at the expense of the members of our wider kin group. Thus, we will continue to live child-free and surrounded by all the family we need.
