Animism in the news today: flipside

Yesterday I commented on Tom Ridge’s definition of land in CA, AZ and PA as “sacred.” Today I bring up a related issue: the comprehensive toxification of land and water in the US. The EPA released a report yesterday that says that it “found mercury — a pollutant primarily released from coal-fired power plants — and polychlorinated biphenyls in all fish samples it collected from 500 lakes and reservoirs from 2000-2003.”

I’ll make 2 simple points.

1) This clash between the sacredness and toxicity of our lands is a manifestation of the clash between our pre-modern spiritual and modern industrial capitalistic value-systems. Spiritually, we find deepest meaning in being linked to the land—as Ridge’s expression attests. Economically, we poison the same land as a “normal” day-to-day business activity. Talk about bi-polar—

2) So, mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls are found in every fish, even the those living far from cities. And when we eat them, mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls become part of our bodies. Mercury destroys our nervous systems, and polychlorinated biphenyls give us cancer. Yes, this is horrifying; but it’s not the point I want to make.

My point is that when we see smoke coming out of coal plant, or a tailpipe, the smoke is not polluting the “environment.” It’s poisoning the cells in our bodies that allow us to see, think, reproduce.

The idea of the “environment” is passe, a relic of an era when people thought the “environment” was “out there.” The EPA study confirms what “primitive animists” have maintained all along: what we call the “environment” is actually our bodies. There is no such thing as the “environment”; and the very concept alienates us from the truth expressed for example by Moses Maimonides, the premier Torah scholar of the Mediaeval era: “The Hebrew nefesh (soul) is a homonymous noun, signifying the vitality which is common to all living, sentient beings. (Gen. i. 30). It denotes also blood, as in ‘Thou shalt not eat the blood (nefesh) with the meat’ (Deut. xii. 23) .”

The EPA’s scientific analysis of human and fish “blood” reveals that “the vitality which is common” to us—our nefesh—is poisoned ubiquitously by our “normal” everyday economic activities: the way we choose to live. It is possible to live without poisoning ourselves—no?

UPDATE: Who ever would have thought those shopping bags we see stuck up in the trees, and the water bottles we drink from, become our bodies and make us sick?

The garbage that litters the “environment” isn’t “out there.” It’s in our cells. We are the environment.

Related posts:

1. Animism in the news today
2. biocultural history: an exercise in self-consciousness
3. economic “externalities” and ecocide
4. Animism
5. Inhabitation