The Ecological Imperative - I
Scaring Myself
What is the bane
of the man
in the current era
of over-information
and under-understanding?
I fear: it is
he himself-
the breeding man.
And, like all
sources of error,
unlikely to recognize himself
as his own nemesis.
He breeds
like a rat, unmindful
of his being the plague
to the world around
and to
himself, as well.
He struts around
on his little dung-hill
wishing power
over ever-larger heaps of refuse,
he calls
marketable products;
feverishly replicating
his pathetic little self
over ever-increasing pockmarks
on the face of this, the
otherwise beautiful
Planet Earth.
Consuming
ever-greater expanses
of living panoramas
and replacing them
with saleable
and unsaleable
deserts of death;
Congratulating himself, mistakenly
for having conquered Nature,
a miniscule part of which
he himself
actually is.
Funny,
how it escapes him
that no part,
which militates against its whole
ever survives
to tell the tale:
the infected appendix,
having surgically severed
and dumped the body
that once housed it.
Like the rat,
breeding uncontrollably;
Unlike the rat,
living to consume.
Before long,
what always happens
will happen: the plague
that is the breeding man,
will
perforce
out-breed the resources he needs
and collapse at the altar
of his exponentially growing wants.
Do solutions exist?
Of course, they do.
Does he know them?
Of course, he does.
Will he implement them?
Of course,
not.
At least,
not until, he has received
a real scare.
And hopefully,
while he still has
the wherewithal to correct
his course, without
too much pain.
Avoiding,
an almost certain
catastrophic unravelling
of his ever-more complicated dreams
of his own, now
near-non-existent
future.
Can he still dream?
Of course, yes.
Just that,
the dreams must be simpler,
more internal.
Gandhi’s
of near-sovereign villages.
Buddha’s
of spiritual,
near-asceticism.
My own,
perhaps,
near-non-procreative.
The rats,
pausing momentarily from their race,
must protest:
“the race must go on”.
What race?
Why must it go on?
If man can reduce
other species to extinction;
how can he find unjust
restrictions on his own
consumption, and reproduction,
especially when adopted
to save himself
from extinction.
And unless he wakes up, in this,
the dark, long midnight
of his (in)humanity
and edits his dream;
his Whole,
the Almighty Nature, might
unbeknownst to him,
choose to get the pest
exterminated.
-
owais
--
This is first being published here.
