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My name is Fiona McLean and I started volunteering at Seeds at City in early November with the understanding that the industrial agriculture system is not sustainable, is grossly unhealthy and inhumane. Many months later I became an intern which, of course, comes along with additional responsibilities. There really is so much to learn, the variables are in constant flux, and feel as if we’re all really left with more questions than answers.
At the same time I feel as if my experience has helped me to remember and connect with my authentic self and the instinctual knowledge that comes along with that. Throughout our entire lives we are taught to hand over our trust to experts. We are taught to be rational. We are taught that our resistance and daily activities should follow along the path which has been arranged for us by the system. The truth is our bones already know how to live. For most of the past 500,000 years, when Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, all humans lived in sustainable relationships with its land base.
One has to wonder: Should the point of it all be to “succeed”? Are we here to dominate, to beat, to destroy, win games, and build wealth and status and walls around ourselves? Getting caught up in stupid egocentric comparison games only makes sense in an artificial world where the game is rigged. Can we be so deluded by our own participation in the killing to think that we can continue as we are without it all leading to utter disaster?
It really is this simple: Our survival depends on our interactions with other species. We need diversity and like all species we depend on others for our existence. So when we make the profound and important shift from that of competition to that of cooperation a wonderful paradigm shift occurs. Now the point is to invite others into our movements, begin to understand their truth, and incorporate it into our own so that a new perspective emerges.
So what would it take to finally demolish all of our reasons for not acting against ecocide? And let’s be clear: War has been declared and is being waged against the world, and a refusal to acknowledge this war does not mean it is not happening. Here lies the fundamental secret: If we we’re to look upon all living things, along with ourselves, as one collective soul it becomes impossible to live in denial about the destruction of our eco-system, poverty, oppression, etc. It becomes downright excruciating to contemplate that 80% of the world’s forests are gone. Or that a human being starves to death every three seconds. Or that one hundred plant and animal species are going extinct every day. Or that there is a Texas-sized area of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean known as the “trash vortex”.
Therefore, seeing things from a different perspective is one of the most important yet difficult things we have to do. It requires of us to constantly deconstruct what we believe and perceive as our entitlements. It requires of us to never be satisfied that we are satisfied and it takes courage to accept that everything we know just might be wrong.
Importantly, while determining that we will dedicate our lives to resistance is not sufficient on its own, it is but a necessary first step that most of us have not made. So instead of just sitting in a classroom (or elsewhere) absorbing pre-packaged spectacle, pick up a rake, plant some seeds and try to remember your own process of learning, feeling, understanding, and ability to resist in ways that are not predetermined for us. So go do it. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “When you are right you can never be too radical.”
