There Is No Assigned Role

John Seed

I don't think we have any role that has been assigned us from anywhere else. Our choice may be similar to the role of the first photosynthesizers which inadvertently created all of this oxygen thereby causing the first mass extinction and giving rise to the aerobic epoch. We may be giving rise to the radioactive epoch or some other miraculous thing, that after five or ten million years, will fully populate itself and every niche will be full. I feel that our role is innocent. I don't hold the view that we are some terrible scourge or cancer, although to ourselves and to our own future we may be. It has never been clear to me whether those early anaerobic photosynthesizers, who generated all of this oxygen, survived themselves the process. Some things obviously survived because here we are talking about them.

Robinson Jeffers says that as we speed up, we start to radiate and shine.¹

"You making haste, haste on decay: not blameworthy." "Meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic."*

So as we speed up and glow like a meteor there are no moral questions except within our own frame of reference. In the larger frame of reference creation and destruction are equal, there is not a moral side of creation. If the anaerobic bacteria had been wiped out by photosynthesis we wouldn't be here. History is written by the victors and who knows who the victors will be. Cockroaches may look back and say, "It was kind of sad for them but it was really good for us."

To the universe, humans are not needed more than ants; I feel one of the mistakes we are making is to think we are the reason all of this took place, that we are the point of the story, the stars of the show. We are not. We are swirling around like everything else. We may be in a position to forestall the closing of the Cenozoic period and preserve the Cenozoic remnant including ourselves for another fifty or one hundred million years before we become extinct and before the ants or whoever comes next take over. I'll vote for that personally. I feel like our story has just begun. The dinosaur had one hundred fifty million years. Why should we give up now because we want another hair dryer or whatever the story is? If we only understood who we are from a bigger perspective than we might be in the position to change our destiny and so change our role.

The idea found in Thomas Berry's writings is that our purpose here is to celebrate. That is a profound understanding as long as it doesn't lead to a sense of denial that here we are - mammals that have just created the conditions for the end of mammals. There is something profoundly regrettable about that. I feel that any celebration we do has to be tempered with a strong commitment to our incarnation. It is not enough to escape to that largest view and to tower beyond tragedy. We have to take strength from that largest view and dive as deep as we dare into that tragedy to attempt to avert it or at least to warn our people. I feel a little bit cautious about endorsing the kind of joy that comes from the big picture because I think it is too easy for us to hide there. That is definitely an option but I don't think that's our role.

For us to produce less of ourselves would require that a whole new level emerge. That may be what we are witnessing, the birth of this new level. It's not only the reproduction but also the accumulation. We are trying to surround ourselves with this kind of security that is an honorable acquired trait. There were those at the time of our ancestors who did not have this in a strong degree. Their babies did not have babies and so they are not around to inform the gene pool. We are descended from those creatures that did whatever they had to do to have lots of babies, following the fundamental commandment to survive, the urge to be. Now our minds tell us in order for that urge to exist, to fulfill itself, we have to do exactly the opposite of what we have done for over a million years. To make that connection between our understanding and that most primal and fundamental of all urges is even deeper than the urge to reproduce, because the urge to exist existed before there was any sex. It is not a precedent situation and I haven't received any insights or information that we are going to make it.

There is nothing else to do unless you decide to oppose that urge to exist. I believe our best chance is to want that as much as possible. But, of course, that opens us to the sorrow and pain to a deeper extent. Thich Nhat Hahn says the most important thing we can do is hear within ourselves the sounds of the Earth crying. If we are prepared to realize that we are not going to be destroyed or crushed by the suffering of our world, and if we are prepared to experience that suffering, then we are not afraid to go to that place of really wanting us to continue. It's like being in love with someone who is going to be hanged in the morning and choosing to love him/ her all the more rather then to pull back.

I don't think guilt is helpful to our survival. I also don't think lashing ourselves, or despising human beings, or comparing human beings to cancer, or to bacteria on a petri dish, eating itself out of existence, or other such images are useful. I think we need to bask in the glory because it might give us a picture of how good it might feel if we can make it out of this next siege.

We are sometimes accused of not liking human beings. We did a calculation on how many human beings would fit on the planet over the next two hundred years before we wipe ourselves out. Then suppose for the sake of argument that the optimum number of human beings living sustainably on the Earth at one time is, say, 100 million and that this number of human beings will continue to thrive here for another billion or two years before the sun heats up sufficiently to make mammalian life unlikely on the Earth. In this scenario, we would get orders of magnitude more humans on the Earth. So, it is really the "business as usual" crowd who are misanthropic and we who are the true "humanists." We love humans, we'd just rather have them spread out over hundreds of millions or billions of years rather than squeeze as many as possible on the Earth for a few generations followed by none at all.

¹Robinson Jeffers. "Shine Perishing Republic," Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924).