The Service of Life

E.O. Wilson in his highly personal book, Biophilia, highlights his personal response to nature and strongly urges humans to care for their home and the many inhabitants who call it home, including the flora and fauna. The heartbeat of this book is his assertion that our natural affinity for life—biophilia—is the very essence of our humanity and of the more-than-human world. This innate drive towards a flourishing life he imagined as the connection between all of us.

I first read the word biophilia, in this book, and learning that it meant that I, and those of my species, have within our cells, a leaning towards life, felt instinctively liberating. What is puzzling then, is how this propulsion has gone so horribly wrong. It reminds me that everything lovely, if taken to its extreme has a terrible shadow side. The images declare that humanity's love of life, of the 'good and comfortable life', has resulted in so much of the opposite of life - death. We appear to have mutated this seemingly desirous affinity, to the point where our lust for our personal good life, vastly supersedes the life of others, including our own species. It's actually laughable (in a grotesque way), our statement of universal human rights. The words are so aligned with biophilia and yet the actual attitudes and behaviors towards members of our our species is quite incongruent. Add, our life-quenching attitudes towards the more-than-human-world, and we have quite the mess.

There has been a lot of response to this chaos within the human condition. So much finger pointing and condemnation along with the heightened anxiety about the edge of the cliff we seem determined to drive ourselves over. In the face of such massive commotion, I can attend quietly to my attitudes and behaviors, which although are only a tiny drop in the ocean of need, are that one, for which, I have stewardship over. Forest fires burning out of control, permafrost melting, oceans warming and more species eliminated as I write this page. Too overwhelming if I look it full on in the face. So, I turn deliberately away from the deluge of death images and cultivate those life-affirming attitudes and behaviors that are my personal biophillia.

What can I say about that small action? No a lot really. Am I doing it to make a statement, as an act of activism? I think not. We, are so far gone into the land of no-return, that these actions are not really going to alter anything, except in me, and perhaps have some small impact in the myriad of relationships that weave in and out of my ecosystem. The aim is not to impose change on others. This is a great relief after all these years thinking it was my job to alter other people's behavior. It's enough to assume the grave responsibility of my own actions and reflect on how even small, barely observable, changes create their own relational ripple effects. More than enough even to be in active recovery of life-affirming connections. I imagine it as a lifetime of small life-affirming activities.