A Religion of Forgotten Things
This was written originally to give substance to feelings I could not describe very well to my family and friends regarding my strange practices of giving a portion of my food at nearly every meal back into nature, and of collecting things which seem valueless in a safe place. Perhaps some of the tone of this little essay comes from feeling voiceless and slightly mad even amongst those I was closest to.
How do you honor your ancestors? Do you keep a coin for your grandfather or your great grandma? A book of pictures? Who will you give them to when you die?
Do you keep anything for other animals you have known?
Do you keep any rocks or wood from some special place you have been?
Sometimes it is hard to explain why I keep a normal old rock from a crick I know of. I hope I still have some of that sassafras from those forests that were taken down not too far from my backyard.
When it comes time to save a bit of what is passing into destruction, we are often left with hard choices.
What is sacred? What should be saved? Should we think kindly on the species going extinct and remember their flavor and nature? Should we keep something for thought and memory about such beings?
To me any species of living thing falls in this category of worthy of inclusion, since there is really no way to judge the value of one life or species over another.
I personally save tree limbs, pine cones, leaves, bones, rocks, moss, any old living thing from a particular place which will be a bridge to what I hold dear or to some thing on its way into destruction. A treasure horde of life and culture passing into death. Often these are biological riches--not ones associated with wealth by today's cultural standards. Yet I ask you, how would we ever know that we are doing well at preserving the diversity of life on earth, especially when it is filled with so many more than we could name or count in a book?
I am careful to not disturb the life I see or experience in any given place, and I am certainly not a believer in pillaging nature’s riches as our species is so very greedy as it is. Witnessing a place and capturing it in a tale, song, or image is often just as good as taking a sample or something the place won’t miss (like plastic detritus).
Part of the power of cultural ignorance is simply due to the fact that we have necessarily re-interpreted many environments and habitats as our personal resource bank. Whole regions of Earth have become culturally transformed into treasure hoards for private companies and militia. It is hard to go to a mine and see anything but the mine as the reason to be there. Our cultural infrastructure creates a layer of distortion on top of anything it is near.
If our industry is to remain a thing of privatized greed, where do you expect anything else can survive? Industry produces at a desperate speed, energy is harnessed and expended at great cost. We are in some ways always in a state of wartime production because of this.
If we never leave this state of production at break neck speeds, we are then limited by the same short sightedness that is evident in the striving of all species and their cultures: we have no idea how the balance of nature and resources intersects with our ideas of what we need or deserve. We are often blind to anything that is not considered important by our peers or directly relevant to those that have the weight of cultural power behind them. This is most obvious becaus4 those who have the majority of the money determine what is important and what cultural production involves. The lines are drawn so that all the things that are being driven to make money are strictly controlled and a maximum profit will be generated from their production.
The problem lies in the wanton destruction of other habitats and other cultures for the sake of the primacy of industrial production. Industrial productions is a force which is is nearly exclusively designed to create vast wealth in a few hands in exchange for a short lasting convenience–a trinket for a buck. The cost to nature is much bigger–everywhere now we see the work of the wealthy in the form of single use plastics, industrial cleaners named like weapons of mass destruction for everyday use– Comet, Tide, ROUND-UP, Clorox, Spot Shot, Ajax, Dynamo… The weapons manufacturers realized that regular folks want to cleanse their house with the same force that some folks in the military destroy whole cities with. The problem was that both the products employed in war and now at home were equally harmful to life though on different time frames.
The point I am trying to make clear here is that so many people think that nature is dirty. But the opposite is true-our industry makes a dirt none can suffer long and survive untarnished (the list of diseases and conditions created by industrial products is large and quite long). Our “forever chemicals” and advanced weaponry have no real purpose or use outside of an economy that is bent on creating private wealth for a few people during their lifespan. Why would anyone create a chemical such as a PBT that can hardly ever be destroyed, creates dead zones and destroys and mutates the very fabric of life, DNA, into very unpredictable and unreliable new forms--except for a short sighted private gain?
And the drawbacks are that they are created by the destruction of things that are perfectly natural and have a wide use in nature established over billions of years.
It means that industry which creates all molds in a weaponized mode or form–whether by pace, product or design--creates an impoverished world that can simply more easily be exploited by the same forces which are said to make our human lives better, Human Cultural Power.
I would not elect to blame the few rich people who own the great majority of human wealth for all the ills of the world. And even though the idea of religion I here offer is one which in some part seeks to preserve life and especially other species of life and culture that are ignored, wantonly hated or destroyed by the forces of human cultural production–even then there are reasons why none are to be blamed for the whole debacle.
Everything we create means death to something else. To make a book a tree must have been cut down, because that is how we make books. Perhaps if the spine is leather an animal would have to die for that book to be created.
This is why when I take something from nature to preserve some part of its past and place I don’t like to give it a meaning that makes it into trinket. When you buy a necklace made out of copper and the jewel is an acorn–that acorn is now a piece of jewelry. It is not very different from taking a human corpse and making it into an art installation or making the parts into jewelry items. In both cases something lived and was made into jewelry. If you saw someone wearing your grandmother's ears as jewelry you would likely be horrified and extremely angry–but still we wear the furs of dead animals, wear their bones and body parts as status symbols. These are common cultural practices, and very old ones too, but that doesn’t make it such a great idea or somehow noble or the best idea. Culture changes just as the seasons do.
I think it is obvious that there are many very complex issues here. The most difficult ones are the ones that seem to be the limitations of all cultures in that cultural production must be blind in some ways to be so imminently productive. A religion of forgotten things would seem to be the only real antidote to this common plight.
Preserve what is without voice, forgotten, lost, silenced, or being destroyed in some form or part.
Do it with care and an understanding of the complexity and diversity of the world we live in that gets lost and swept into the wastebin of human cultural history.
