#106: Destruction & Resurrection
The developers in my town have torn down a strip of my childhood. The trees have been killed, as have the animals who called their canopies home. I reflect on this strange new world.
Synopsis: The developers in my town have torn down a strip of my childhood. The trees have been killed, as have the animals who called their canopies home. I reflect on this strange world we find ourselves inhabiting, where the natural is disregarded, plundered, exploited, and razed — and the artificial is worshipped, protected, and forever exalted.
When I was a child, I was particularly enchanted, and in quick succession horrified, by a VHS tape I found at my grandmother Gwendolyn’s home, containing a film you might recall, titled FernGully.
FernGully told the story of a group of peaceful tree dwellers — mythical faeries — exuberant beings, who existed in harmony, free of industry, noise, and pollution— until evil arrived in the form of capitalism, forcing deforestation and death upon them all.
The businessmen, gruff, unfeeling beings — or perhaps beings who had lost touch with the empathy with which I believe we are all born — saw in that beautiful oasis only the potential for personal gain and decided to destroy everything that lived among those trees in the pursuit of profit. It is no wonder I grew into such an ardent leftist given my early viewing materials in the late 1990s.
I remember FernGully now as a premonition, a warning of the world that has come and will continue coming for us all. It is now retold again and again in so many different forms — Pocahontas, Avatar, in the poems of W.S. Merwin, and the essays of Audre Lorde — and with good reason, as we continue to watch titans (too generous a word) of capitalism and business plunder and destroy every living thing, poisoning the air we breathe, making our beautiful blue-green planet increasingly unlivable.
“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.” — Alanis Obomsawin
I think of this now, as I sit on the wooden dock my father built with his bare hands, by the pond in whose shimmered reflection I was raised and nurtured.
The sun is rising overhead peacefully across the horizon, evenly spreading its light. The orange tabby we’ve taken in and been calling Oliver kisses my calves, unsure of why I am staring at this notebook and feverishly writing instead of petting him, a task I will gladly return to as soon as I am finished.
What must the world be like for Oliver who cannot see what I see across the way? The death that is encroaching upon us like a virus, a plague, slowly spreading from meter to meter, house to house, upon our injured land.
I tell you all of this, of FernGully, of my anxiety, of things you already know, because at long last the titans have found even me — our small little pond of paradise has been cut and is bleeding.
This pond where I grew from a boy into a man, full to the brim with trees surrounding, waters full of fish of so many species, skies populated with finches and cranes, geese and mallards, grounds covered in wild grasses, waters teeming with turtles and life.
This beautiful sacred place that has remained so unchanged for the nearly 24 years I have called it home, and the hundreds of years before that it was home to the Tsalaguwetiy, the thousands before it belonged to only the heavens and earth itself.
And then men came.
Mother told me about it over the phone, the sounds that their saws made. The screams of the steel against living wood. That they had purchased land that was not theirs, the other side of the pond that has forever held a canopy of green. That they came at the height of nesting seasons, cutting down tree by tree, full of freshly hatched birds, who were crushed in the falling of man-mangled branches. That they cut the life from the land, ripping up everything in sight. Not even the stumps remain, the ancestor roots mulched and shipped someplace to rot.
I resist the urge to show you a photo, for staring too long at the destruction fills me with despair, but I had to write of it, to tell you what I have seen. Perhaps I can be an omen for you, one that might change our fate. One that might encourage you to protest or replant or regrow.
As I stare at it now, forcing myself to survey the damage, I see no green at all, just piles of red-brown dirt. A mill of some kind, wickedly constructed to breathe out plumes of endless black ash billowing into the air, the lungs of some poisonous thing, undoubtedly killing us slowly with each respiration.
When will we learn? How many species must die before the destruction ends? I think of all those little bird babies, the bluebirds and the nuthatches, who never even were given a chance to live, who never even matured enough to know the pleasure of their own song. Sweet innocent things who only weeks after being brought to life, were slaughtered indiscriminately.
Who like you and I were hungry to fly, to sing, to explore, to eat, to see the world, and its many wonders. I hope their souls haunt whatever these capitalists build. I hope whatever luxury condos arrive are haunted by the sounds of all that had to die for them to have such fine, bright, muted things.
Those animals were innocent. How panic-stricken the mothers and fathers must’ve been, returning home from gathering food, searching the wreckage for the bodies of their children.
As I hear the songs now — the singing of the survivors — all the birds who remain, I feel a warning to their melody. Things feel so ominous now. As Merwin once said: “with the animals dying around us // taking our feelings we are saying thank you // with the forests falling faster than the minutes // of our lives we are saying thank you.”
Today, I will hug my mother tighter. My father too.
Soon my sister and her husband will arrive, appearing at the portal of our front door as if from the gates of nowhere. We will spend the day wrapped in one another’s loving reunion, conversation will flow, we will build puzzles, prepare meals, and still the birds who have lived and lost everything will go on singing — begging us to finally, finally, listen.
If you are reading this, I hope you too will hug your loved ones tight.
I hope you will think about what you can do to give back to the world today, whether to humans or our animal friends. Perhaps you might go buy seeds and plant flowers or trees in the park or the woods near your home. Perhaps you might do a kind deed for someone in need, or maybe, you might take care of yourself with a little more grace, knowing how quickly it can all go asunder.
I am wishing you peace & healing along the path,
With love, always,
Alex
If you would like to support this publication, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. When you become a paid subscriber, you make it possible for love & liberation daily to remain free for as many people as possible and you also help fund the bi-monthly writing contest. Regardless of your subscription status, thank you for being here. I am sending you all of my love and gratitude. ❤
breathtaking - thank you for this. I feel mourning with you
Beautifully sad. Thank you, Alex.