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“We’re like people living in the penthouse of a tall brick building. Every day we need 200 bricks to maintain our walls, so we go downstairs, knock 200 bricks out of the walls below and bring them back upstairs for our own use. Every day. . . . Every day we go downstairs and knock 200 bricks out of the walls that are holding up the building we live in. Seventy thousand bricks a year, year after year after year.”

What on earth is this guy talking about? That’s absurd. Who would do such a thing?

Me. I’m doing that.

The writer’s referring to the fact that, due to an essential flaw in our cultural program, humans (me, and I presume you) destroy two hundred species of life a day. Every day. These sickening but true words were written by Daniel Quinn, in a speech of his called ‘The New Renaissance,” which you can read here.

Right now, I’m taking a class in Personal Ecology at Depaul. It’s a prerequisite, and I figured I might pick up a few new ideas on how to be a little more environmentally-friendly, but I wasn’t expecting any major eurekas or anything.

My professor assigned us Quinn’s book Ishmael to read over the course of two weeks. I sucked it down in two days. It was that good. I mean really good.

Eureka!-good.

It’s the story of a man who meets a highly intelligent gorilla named Ishmael. The man wants to know how to save the world and the gorilla promises to teach him. Ishmael proceeds to systematically school the man in the true nature of the destructive cultural subcurrent running through all civilization.

The sum of Ishmael’s message is fairly simple (though I highly, highly encourage you to follow his thread for your self ). Somewhere around the time of the agricultural revolution, we got this strange idea that this world was made for us instead of us being made for the world. As Quinn puts it in “The New Renaissance,” “Humans belong to an order of being that is separate from the rest of the living community.” This notion, he argues, is at the bottom of a great deal of our strife and struggle.

I tend to think he’s exactly right.

The fact is, there is a massive ecological problem facing us right now. Either the problem is with the Earth itself, or the problem is with us. As far as I can tell, the Earth works pretty great, so my guess it that the problem must be with us, and more specifically, with our perspective.

My perspective.

Laws aren’t going to do it. The Kyoto Protocol’s not going to do it. Recycling’s not going to do it. Hybrid cars are definitely not going to do it.

But if we could get it into our heads that this is our home and our neighborhood and not our kingdom, that might actually do it.

And, of course, there is the living it out too. That’s the domain of the laws and recycling and hybrid cars. But those are effects, not causes. The perspective shift has to come first, or else the effects will be empty and feeble.

I don’t know how to go about doing something about this other than to communicate this perspective to you. I think it’s the only way it’ll happen really. Bono could talk about it on TV and people would get excited for a while, but the only way I think its going to stick is for me to begin seeing life in this way and to talk about it with you. And for you to see life in this way and to talk about it with some other people too.

And so on.

Until we all decide it’s time to stop playing Jenga.

-Adam

“During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet–or they’re not. Either way, it’s certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then humanity will be able to see something it can’t see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don’t figure this out, then I’m afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we’re driving into extinction here every day–as many as 200–every day.”