Extravagance

“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance!” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Is the earth made for excess? Witness the deciduous business:

If nature is so extravagant, why have I always wanted to live so lightly? Why resist the feast?

I grew up in the 1980’s in America, born a couple years after Ronald Reagan’s administration deregulated the advertising industry and opened the floodgates for advertising to children. In that way, President Reagan is partially responsible for my decision to be a child-free adult; the idea of limiting and monitoring my hypothetical children’s exposure to media and advertising—not to mention the very existence of so many plastic! plastic! plastic! products screaming from the store shelves—gives me the shudders. But I know it viscerally, I can still conjure the sick-sad feeling of the want: the bright, smooth, perfect, new thing in the box. The irresistible jingles caught in your head, teasing you in your dreams. Unkinking the twist wire that traps Barbie in her pink packaging and freeing her to live! Except that, seconds later, her dress is mussed and her hair is tangled; nothing is perfect for long once it’s off the shelf. Something so longed for quickly becomes, once gained, a guilty lament. I wanted it so badly and now I have it, but I only want something else.

For some reason, I took this childhood lesson and learned it, and thus became a terrible capitalist. Why have so many of my fellow humans lived these same experiences but decided to be good capitalists, to pursue that money, money, money? Do they genuinely find more enjoyment in the attainment of a material thing? Is their happiness over a car that smells like it just came off the assembly line that much greater than mine ever was over my Christmas toy haul? Or are they only following nature’s instincts: grow, unbounded: grow, grow, grow! Is it really just odd of me to care about the space I am taking up on this earth, the literal footprints I leave behind me?

I’ve been pondering all this, while nonetheless continuing to behave eccentrically. Hoarding plastic bags for reuse; ferrying recyclables hundreds of miles to the nearest processing facility on our route rather than give into local custom and tossing them; wearing the same perfectly functional clothing for decades, beyond it’s limits of fashionableness. Tyler and I, of course, are a unit of eccentricity; our habits are communal and so it doesn’t feel like eccentricity, it just feels like living. But we live in this world, and are daily reminded of our otherness. Every supermarket we enter is a repudiation of how we live. Just the shelves of plastic bottles alone! In every supermarket, half the aisles and more than half the products are just things I would never buy on principle. An easy example: water in a bottle is not a thing to buy, except in an emergency. Like: hurricane or flood-level emergency, not whoops, I got thirsty on the way to work. Similarly, why wouldn’t I cut my own carrots? Why buy pre-sliced cheese? Why are these oranges in a superfluous plastic net? Oranges literally grow within their own natural packaging; there should be no need for the net. You see, a trip to the supermarket is agonizing! Can you imagine me navigating the toy store?

But, very evidently, we are weirdos. Very evidently, billions of our fellow humans see fit to invent, manufacture, market, and buy a million billion seemingly useless, profitless things. In America, we call their right to this free market part of the “pursuit of happiness.” Nevermind the minority of us who find it physically impairing to avoid the glare and noise and horror of this excess. Us rare lightweights of the consumerist world can just huddle in our isolation and keep muting the commercials. Heck, just turn off the TV if you don’t like it. Everyone else has a party to be at, and we are spoiling it with our whining.

Excuse me, but screw that. I might be a minority, but I feel like fighting. You want to dump toxic effluents into the world’s rivers so you can order limitless cheap clothing on the Internet and have it delivered for “free,” at further cost to the planet in emissions as it whizzes from warehouse to shipping center to your door, and then back to the shipping center when you decide it isn’t, after all, flattering? You want to drain the wetlands for luxury real estate or commercial endeavors? You want to market something stupefying to innocent children or vulnerable populations like sick people desperate for effective treatments, so you can make a buck? You prefer your water bottled because it supposedly tastes better? Fuck all of that. I say: your vision of the pursuit of happiness is standing on the neck of my pursuit of happiness. I want you to get off my gorgeous, wild and free meadow of a lawn.

From Prayer Dogs, an essay by Terry Tempest Williams on the endangered Utah prairie dog:

“Iron County commissioner Gene Roundy said, ‘I think it’s a crime against society that a prairie dog can move into your front yard and you can’t take care of it.’

Whose society?”

Ever since I read that, this question has been ringing in my head: Whose society?

Give me the boundless prairie expanse of sky! Give me the vast tundra with its overabundance of lichen and berries! Give me flocks and flocks of waterfowl and warblers and sparrows and shorebirds! Restore the swamps, regrow the forests. I’ll take my extravagance in the form of a continent’s waste of untapped resources, please. Let the fossil fuels rest where they lie. I prefer my life to be more challenging in the immediate, simpler on the whole, and I don’t want what you are selling. Don’t even tell me what it is, you waste your breath.

October, as we all probably agree, was a month of anticipatory anxiety steering toward the extensively hyped election. But we very possibly don’t all agree on the outcome of the election. I am only going to mention this one thing, here, of all the things I am disappointed about: I am disappointed so many voted to put their wallets before the environment or the well-being of their fellow creatures on this planet. “Drill, baby, drill,” is the famous environmental plan of this incoming administration. Nothing could be cruder, more short-sighted, or more offensive to my society: the society of prairie dogs and geese. Though the persistence of the burgeoning shelves of plastic bottles at the supermarket should probably prepare me for that eventuality, I am still consistently, naively crushed to learn that people just don’t really care. Can I persuade you, Reader, to at least stop buying the bottled water? Probably not.

If you are reading this, and you made it this far, perhaps you are a sympathizer. I know there are a few of you out there. Minority, but still in existence. What do we do? How do we shore ourselves up? I’m open to inspirations. This whole year while Tyler and I have been outdoors, snaking our way across the country in pursuit of the varied bounty of wild America, has been one long drink at the well. I’m full of proof that this wildness is worth preserving, that the beauty of nature is more enriching than the paved blandness of big box suburbia. All I want to do right now is insist, again and again: Look, here, at this, the perfect world. How can you resist its beauty? How can you ignore its call?

They say when you are angry that you should take a deep breath. We all should start with breathing:

“Phenomenologically considered—experientially considered—the changing atmosphere is not just one component of the ecological crisis, to be set alongside the poisoning of the waters, the rapid extinction of animals and plants, the collapse of complex ecosystems, and other human-induced horrors… our disregard for the very air that we breathe is in some sense the most profound expression of this oblivion. For it is the air that most directly envelops us; the air, in other words, is that element that we are most intimately in. As long as we experience the invisible depths that surround us as empty space, we will be able to deny, or repress, our thorough interdependence with the other animals, the plants, and the living land that sustains us.” — David Abraham, The Spell of the Sensuous.

Breathe deep and claim your part in it, this whole wild planet.