War Against Ourselves. Jacklyn Cock
consumption; to repair, recycle and reuse; and to ‘live simply so that others may simply live’ as Schumacher expresses it (Schumacher, 1963: 12). The German social theorist and activist Wolfgang Sachs argues that calls for poverty eradication have to be accompanied by demands for ‘wealth alleviation’. He writes: ‘There will be no equity unless the corporation-driven consumer classes in North and South become capable of living well at drastically reduced levels of resource demand’ (Sachs et al., 2002: 37).
But change is difficult. The United States of America is responsible for 24 per cent of total carbon emissions, so I watched Al Gore’s award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth in that hotbed of conspicuous consumption, the Hamptons, with interest. I was delighted by its impact on the audience, but depressed by how little my hosts changed their behaviour. Their addiction to air-conditioning and wastefulness in relation to ‘leftover’ food continued unchanged. But of course, I had flown to New York in the first place, which puts me in the same category of ‘carbon criminals’. Monbiot writes: ‘On a return flight from London to New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: the very quantity we will each be entitled to emit in a year once a 90 per cent cut in emissions has been made’ (Monbiot, 2006b: 173). He concludes, ‘long distance travel, high speed and the curtailment of climate change are not compatible. If you fly, you destroy other people’s lives’ (Monbiot, 2006b: 188).
Nevertheless, change is essential. Monbiot has argued that people in rich nations (especially the United States, Canada and Australia) must reduce carbon emissions by 90 per cent by 2030 to contain global warming, before it reaches 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the point at which major ecosystems begin collapsing (Monbiot, 2006a). As McKibben points out, we have known that human beings were dangerously heating the planet, particularly through the use of fossil fuels, for 20 years, but emissions have continued to soar. As he writes, the United States ‘uses more energy per capita than any other country’ (McKibben, 2007: 6).
The theologian Thomas Berry maintains that ‘the human community and the natural world will go into the future as a single sacred community or we will both perish in the desert’ (cited in Martin, 1993: 43). Creating such a single community has to begin with confronting our alienation from nature. This condition of alienation involves what the ethno-botanist Gary Nabham terms the ‘extinction of experience’ — a blunting of our capacity for joyful, mindful and responsible living. To overcome this ‘blunting’, he argues for direct and different contact with wild nature, for an ‘intimate involvement with plants and animals; direct exposure to a variety of wild animals carrying out their routine behaviors in natural habitats’ (Nabham, 1993: 73). This could be valuable, but the notion behind this strategy is of nature as something ‘out there’, and synonymous with the ‘wild’. Our relation with nature is much deeper and more intimate than this.
While exploring this intimacy, the American philosopher Henry Thoreau argued that we first have to learn how to live deliberately and mindfully. He advised us to ‘live each season as it passes, breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit and resign yourself to the influences of each’ (cited in Nabham, 2002: 35). But ‘tasting the fruit’ involves a level of awareness that many of us lack.
Readers should ask themselves when they last really looked at a piece of ordinary fruit like an apple. The American journalist Michael Pollan writes:
Slice an apple through at its equator and you will find five small chambers arrayed in a perfectly symmetrical starburst — a pentagram. Each of the chambers holds a seed (occasionally two) of such a deep lustrous brown they might have been oiled and polished by a woodworker (Pollan, 2001: 10).
Nature is full of such perfections, and allows for miracles such as the transformation of fruit into a substance that can change human consciousness — wine. There are many other such transformations, involving ‘raw nature’ combined with human effort and ingenuity, such as the transformation of wheat grains into bread or of the hard dark berries of the coffee tree into cappuccino. Independent of human interventions, wild nature contains many miraculous transformations, such as the egg that becomes a Crowned crane, the bee making honey in its thorax, the communication between trees and the architectural achievements of ants. Following Thoreau’s advice means escaping the mindless consumption of frozen, packaged foods available irrespective of the seasons. Much of the emphasis of the grassroots environmental activism described later in the book involves trying to overcome people’s alienation from nature by restoring their relations with their immediate environment — the land, water and food.
For this reason, Nabham decided to reduce the distance his food travels. His book, Coming Home to Eat (2002) describes his year-long commitment to eat only foods produced within a 250-mile radius of his home. For him, food should be treated as something sacred, an idea that connects to the rituals of ‘grace’ and the dietary restrictions that mark all religions. Nabham ended his year with a ‘sacred pilgrimage like a walking prayer — a prayer for what healthy food means — how it is wrapped up in most social and environmental justice issues’ (Nabham, 2002: 292). With friends and neighbours — all pilgrims for Just Food, Slow Food — he walked 240 miles in the Desert Walk for Biodiversity, Heritage and Health, a ‘multicultural pilgrimage fuelled by native foods and medicines, prayers and songs.’ They ended the walk with a bread-breaking ceremony using loaves of white, processed bread. ‘A white bread for white America ... symbolic of the dominant culture.’ They threw it on the ground and
leaped high, stomped and danced until we flattened those plastic-wrapped globs of doughy airbread into the ground. We had broken bread in an altogether unprecedented sense, by accepting no substitutions for true communion with one another and this sacred land (Nabham, 2002: 299).
The problem with this account is that for the half of South Africa’s population living in poverty who are part of half the world’s people living on less than two dollars a day, bread — especially white, processed bread — is a luxury. Social justice demands that we take account of the needs of people living in places like Orange Farm, housed in rudimentary tin shacks without access to water, electricity or sanitation. For all the 250 000 households who still have to rely on the hated ‘bucket system’, proper sanitation is an issue of both environmental and social justice. It is these people — the poor and the powerless — who are most affected by the abuse of nature. Justice involves changing the distribution of power, resources and opportunities in the world.
Our future depends on realigning the relation among power, justice and nature; on linking their needs and those of all the creatures with which we share this planet. When we acknowledge those needs, see and appreciate nature in our everyday lives — in encounters with the food we eat and how we grow and cook it, the water we drink and the air we breathe — we will be living more fully and mindfully. When we are aware of the hidden sanitation pipes, when we can see nature in commonplace objects like an apple or a glass of water, as easily as we now sometimes see it in wild places and creatures, we will have moved towards a better understanding of our place in the ‘great complex dance’ of all life. But this is only the starting point.
2
UNDERSTANDING NATURE
INTRODUCTION: ECOTHERAPY IN THE DRAKENSBERG MOUNTAINS
‘Think like a mountain’, the early American conservationist Aldo Leopold said. In his view, mountains have the potential to change our thinking, to enlarge our view of the world and to ground it in a sense of perspective. The mountains of Yosemite moved the pioneer American environmentalist John Muir to write of their ‘spiritual power’ to make people realise that they are not separate from, but part of nature. As he expressed it: ‘You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature’ (Muir, 1996: 100). The Drakensberg mountains may not possess the grandeur of the mountains of Yosemite; however, for a group of ex-liberation struggle combatants from Soweto, scarred by their experience of South Africa’s long years of violent conflict, the challenge of surviving in the Drakensberg mountains for seven days deepened their self-reliance and their capacity to come to terms with the past, to respond to challenges, and to relate