All decisions are local.
Whether it comes from information overload or filter failure, it's easy to see why people sink into emotional weariness, depression and despair. It's logical, really. One of the debates I (an avid reader) have been having recently is whether or not reading is useful. It may be an odd question, but I'd like to know the answer: in which areas are people making better decisions now than they were prior to the invention of the printing press?
But that's a side-track. The point is that knowledge has become a simple argument for inaction. I know this goes against much of what's been lauded about the Occupy movement and the dramatic transformations of the world as a result of awareness and connectivity - read "The Arab Spring" for a simply summary argument-by-example.
But I'm standing next to a pile of compost that I mistakenly placed near a stone wall. The wall provides lovely safe homes for breeding mice and by putting the food-scraps compost bin nearby, I had inadvertently prepared the way for a mouse plague.
I'm interested in the future of the environment and in compassionate relationships between all living and non-living things. Composting is a part of that process. Growing food, revegetating the 15 acres of native bush, being mindful of others, practicing compassion... I find my philosophy pretty ho-hum, really: not particularly radical and certainly in danger of being as trendy as the next person's.
But when I thought about what to do with this compost pile, it made me happy. The great art and opportunity of living where you live, instead of just being a "tourist with a message" or someone who is free to keep their ethics abstract, is that most days present an opportunity to make a decision and act on it.
In less than six months: 2 mice can become 500
Mice breed rapidly. In less than six months: 2 mice can become 500. And since the process is close to exponential, that 500 is on its way to being a see of seed-eating rodents within a year. The focus of research into this is on its impact on crops and the economy. The secondary focus seems to be on the spread of disease. Mice can eat about 10% of their body weight in grain each day. And if you're a mighty eater, you are also by nature a mighty producer of urine and faeces. Yuk.
But imagine the impacts on seed-eating native wildlife, including native mice and birds. Think also about the chances of native grasses and plants to set seed with 1,000s of hungry mice scouring the ground each night.
So me with my compassion and kindness mentality was totally happy with the idea of killing a few baby mice. Well, not totally happy. I don't enjoy killing things. And I don't tend to draw much of a line between warm furry things with eyes and cold wet slimy things that seem to be nothing more than tongues and anuses or microbes without mouths. I do draw a line between animals and people, though. Hmmm. This is where it gets tricky.
But the beauty of it is that all decisions are local, and in my local experience I have not had to choose between killing a person and doing something else. (Although Peter Singer would say that by buying a kayak instead of giving the money to Care Australia, which I did a few years ago, I certainly cost the life of a child somewhere who could have been saved using that money. And did I really need a kayak that someone would just end up stealing anyway? Well, hmmm... that's another debate.)
The local experience of this moment was simply: do I kill the mice or not?
A person with better meditation credentials (i.e. he can tell me how often he meditates and how deeply he meditates and how he has managed to reach an advanced state of sensory awareness while meditating) and perhaps a case of compassion fatigue or what I'm going to describe as "information induced despair syndrome," looked at the same situation, and came to some different conclusions.
1. Don't kill.
2. Don't kill in sacred spaces - like a Buddhist retreat centre. (If it has to happen, it can happen somewhere else.)
3. Don't make me do the killing. (If it's necessary, someone else can do it.)
When pressed, he was okay with the following idea:
Not killing mice (or rabbits, since they came up in conversation) will mean that certain local wildlife populations become extinct.
That's fine. A life has - or a seething plague of lives have - come into being and are therefore sacred.
He was happy with the idea that humans had no particular responsibility as morally aware creatures to look after other creatures.
Pests and weeds as ecological rather than human ideas
He claimed that "pest" and "weed" were just human words used to describe plants and animals living in places where people don't want them. "Weeds" and "pests" may be used this way occasionally, but a better definition takes into account - or is imaginatively from the point of view of - the whole ecosystem. Weeds and pests by definition decrease biodiversity, create monocultures and are, then, usually undesirable from the point of view of most of the elements in the ecological system. Not all, perhaps, but on balance, the ecosystem probably doesn't want the pest or weed in it. It decreases the chances of the ecosystem persisting into the future. (Of course, this may not be the case, say, in an already degraded environment, such as a severely eroded gully, where gorse may be in some senses an improvement.)
His argument was that life goes forward and that not interfering in the process was better than doing the "wrong" thing - i.e. killing an animal (especially one with eyes).
You can read all the books you want, meditate deeply on "right work" and become oh-so-fay with all the latest jargon, but it bothers me when people can't see that their decisions, which amount to an action-by-omission, lead to a lot of suffering just because they don't want to do something they find uncomfortable.
they don't want to do something they find uncomfortable.
"All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing." I don't think a plague of mice is "evil" but hopefully it is clear that action through omission matters.
That mis-quote, commonly attributed to Edmund Burke, raises the question: why? Why do they do nothing? How do these "good men" justify it?
In this limited, local example it seems that one way is to misapply general rules to specific questions. Or, in short, make all sorts of noble arguments about doing good to avoid confronting the fact that problem is that they don't like reality. And aren't comfortable with the responsibilities that modern society has largely insulated them from.
But how can one justify killing?
The fear is that there is no clear line once one starts. Again, the fear is based in part on an idea that actions aren't local and specific, that every action establishes a rule or must follow one: that every action is in some way a general statement. This seems to be based on the desire to stop thinking. If I can establish a rule then at some point I can hand over that function to the rule and get through my day more easily.
Lazy?
Killing other things within my ecosystem.
I don't say that to imply that it is "my" ecosystem in a possessive, human-centred sense. It is the ecosystem in which I take part, I exist, and on which I rely to exist, as does every other element in the system. "Don't kill" is an easy rule. "Promote life" might work better. But it's when promoting life = killing something that the debate gets interesting. How can I kill something and pretend that I am not asserting my separateness, my superiority or exteriority to the suffering of other animals?
I think there are two answers:
1. If I relate to the good of the ecosystem, rather than the good of the individual animal.
2. If I accept that death and life aren't really exclusive phenomena. To do this I have to embrace the fact that I will die and that's okay. So it's okay to think that other creatures will die, and that our deaths might be good and necessary for life to continue. (For a way to think about "Life" with a capital L rather than an individual life, see point 1.
Am I connected?
When I had my boat stolen off the roof of the van, and before that my gear stolen off the beach while I was swimming, the thing that I felt most strongly was loneliness. I felt that by stealing my stuff what the thieves had articulated most strongly was their complete separation from me. The consequences for me did not matter for them. They were not affected by them. The circle of influence - such as that which links every element in an organism - did not seem to apply to them. Experiencing this act in this way, I felt isolated and lonely.
When I chose to kill the baby mice I had to wonder if my action was different from the actions of the people who stole my stuff. Was I in my way articulating my separateness from the mice?
"Surely. Surely killing something is the clearest way to express that the outcomes for the mice are different, separate and inconsequential in relation to mine?"
But I wonder. I still wonder. I don't think so. It all comes down to your attitude towards death, I guess. A bit dramatic, perhaps. A bit deep ecology with a twist. But for me the issue came down something like this:
I could die, too. Any time. Things die. Things come and go. Impermanence is the nature of things. When the mice die I am still the same as them, I am still subject to the luck of things and the fact that life is cyclic.
Sure, there's a difficulty in being the being that brings about the end of another creature's life, but that's just a part of accepting the responsibility of having a brain and the ability to reason with it, to do the maths, and hands that can act. If I care about native wildlife then killing pests and weeds is a necessary part of my responsibility. Even ones with eyes.
In this instance. This time.
And in the end, when I came to turn the compost as I moved it, I didn't find any mice, so this all turned out to be an abstract process anyway!
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