Most of us live in the ashes of history. Where we tread, legends have been forged, forgotten, and forged anew for a thousand years. For some of us, several thousand. A war of non-renewable resources has been fought for a hundred years on the same shores where once the first city stood. Tunisia is on the brink of revolt (again) just where ancient Carthage once ruled the western Mediterranean. And half a continent of farmers are currently battling a biblical swarm of locusts on the slopes of the Cradle of Man.
Now imagine that you were asked, nay; expected, to live up to the political and policy decisions from that time. Would you? Would you respect the sanctity of the decree of the God-Kings of Ur, the Senate of Carthage, or the family group alpha of a pre-language homonid?
Probably not. Why? Pfft, well, you’re better than they, non? Your life is more important to you than decisions thousands of years old, non? How would you even know what they decided? You can’t fathom cuneiform, Rome erased the legacy of Carthage, and who knows or cares what animistic nonsense the proto-humans may have grunted about. Of course you wouldn’t. Because you’re a modern human. Taken to modern problems. Concerned with modern solutions.
And yet, that kind of respect for what came before, into a pre-historic span of years and evolution, is what we expect of our progeny. That is exactly the kind of… consistency of action that we demand, not just from future humanity, but even whatever creatures will rise in our wake. That sort of persistency is what we demand of the sentient cockroaches of long-come tomorrow.
“This is not a place of honour. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.”
These are messages suggested by the legendary Sandia report to ward off encroachment of nuclear waste deposits in New Mexico. An effort to codify precautions associated with a waste disposal facility that’s meant to last well beyond the scope of human civilization. A waste disposal facility that’s meant to endure, not just a political mandate period, not just a generation or two, not just the life-span of a society, but a geologic span of ages. The report takes into account events beyond changes in administrations or zeitgeist (which can be fickle enough), but occurrences of earthquakes, floods, solar flares, meteor impacts, and sea level variations substantial enough to send New Mexico down onto the ocean floor.
I’ve alluded to the concept of current human activity having lasting consequences beyond a human’s scope to grasp. The average human can’t think much further ahead than next week. Perhaps they can manage to plan a vacation a year or two ahead. Perhaps they have professional ambitions stretching a decade into the future. Perhaps, if we’re exceedingly lucky, a national policy maker can grasp a time-span of some fifty years (though mostly they fall short to just minding a period of time until the next election cycle).
And yet, humanity produce consequences that will last for millions of years. And in our vast arrogance, we assume that any contingencies we could possibly imagine to plan for right now will last for such an extended amount of time. We plan for nuclear waste to stay in the dirt for hundreds of thousands of years, well into the span of time where continents may table-flip the fuck away with the deposits. We believe we can solve our dependencies on fossil fuels by shoving the carbon dioxide by-products back into the ground and expect the cork on that bottle of disaster to stay stuck until the carbon dioxide turns back into oil. We pump non-degradable chemicals miles below the surface in an effort to coax more oil out of the earth, and can’t imagine it ever getting out when we can’t even imagine what we’re going to have for lunch tomorrow.
Humanity is the caricature that believes that they can take a shit on the floor and hide the woopsie forever and ever by dragging a carpet on top of it. Adding, of course, that the shit is infused with degrading Cesium. Sounds stupid? Well, we are. Stupid and completely incapable of imagining that the carpet won’t be enough to hide away our shame forever.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”, Lovecraft wrote a hundred years ago. Naturally, he referred to his ludicrous racism and critical misunderstanding of natural sciences, supposedly because he had “too delicate a constitution for math”. But it is not an unwarranted sentence. It is indeed a merciful thing for humanity to be unable to grasp the full consequences of our actions. Like children. Or kittens. Because if we actually understood the vast implications of our consumer electronic abuse, our transportational desires, our travel fetish, or just our love of gourmet food, we would quickly crumble. Which is why it’s such a mercy that we’re so good at shoving our heads in the sand and ignore all those consequences.
But we need to stop. We need to grow up. We need to handle our imprint. We need to clean up our own shit instead of just pulling a rug over it. We need to turn our disruptive splash across time and space a little more proportional to our perspective. To stop causing ripples so far beyond our scope to see them.
“With great power comes great responsibility” has become a tired cliché, but it is none the less true (if you add a little [the need of] in there). And as it turns out, aside from mindless natural disasters, there’s never been anything so powerful on this planet as a human with a tool. And its time to start weighing that responsibility as highly as that power.
/Sebastian Lindberg 10/8-2021
WastedWords 