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| Frederick Buell's From Apocalypse to Way of Life, available from Amazon.com. |
The common crows, mouths agape, prowled about and there seemed something symbolic with their black image considered by some a harbinger of death or, at least, difficult times.
A further mental complexity arrived through the reading of Frederick Buell’s 2004 book, “From Apocalypse to Way of Life”, in which he discussed the environmental crisis in the American century, a scenario easily extended for the whole world.Yasi made landfall some 2000 kilometres north of where I read and watched the crows, but the impact, beyond clear skies and a slight breeze, was endless warnings and then constant news about the devastation.
The effects of the cyclone, strangely, are being felt in other places, for instance, in Victoria with a deluge across the state, sufficient to see rescue and emergency services hard at work.
What we are experiencing is the opening gambit of the global warming that climatologists have been predicting for decades.
Humans have long imagined themselves as standing apart from nature, but the arrival of Yasi illustrates the fallacy of that view, just as nature driven difficulties in disparate parts of the world also clearly illustrate that same fact.
Like many other authors, Buell warns us of how we rationalize the deterioration of the planet, or how we repeatedly excuse ourselves of deforestation, freshwater depletion, ocean pollution, biodiversity loss and how human narrative says little about how we resolve, or escape from this impasse.
Having read only about 80 page of Buell’s work, I’m unsure what way of life he will suggest, but should he reflect the thoughts of many others, it seems likely he will discuss the need for a more restrained way of living in which we put fewer demands on earth’s environmental resources.
Huge industrial throughput of the past two centuries and the resultant refuse and toxins have stressed nature’s sinks, but that which is probably most stressed is the human psychology “sink”, something facing even further demands as it contrives, understands and deals with a new way of living.
