Page 15 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2
P. 15
out of time past and I live now and I've been to school and there are highways and pickup trucks that
Yellow Woman Never saw." Isn't this...what so many of us feel...looking at the "life" of our cities and
suburbs (really, the "life" of our economic system): there it is-‐-‐Life Itself! Who can doubt it? Isn't it
more real than the lives of salamanders or obscure crustaceans? So long as highways and skies are
filled with transportation (with evidence of commerce), our god lives!
May 27
A 2007 quote from Jonathan Schell: "When I wrote The Fate of the Earth in 1982, I said that, first and
foremost, nuclear weapons were an ecological danger. It wasn't that our species could be directly
wiped out by nuclear war down to the last person. That would only happen through the destruction to
the underpinnings of life, through nuclear winter, radiation, ozone loss. There has been an oddity of
timing, because when nuclear weapons were invented, people didn't even use the word 'environment'
or 'ecosphere.'...So in a certain sense the most urgent ecological threat of them all was born before
you could understand it. The present larger ecological crisis is that context."
So, this is the realm of Necessity that preoccupies me these days, both as writer and reader. What I
must know, what I'm writing to find out is: what is it like to go on, consciously, under the sign of
species suicide? Why has our history come down to this? Aren’t there other ways to live, and how do
we invent them, and who is this vast “we” that somehow has to make that choice?
I leave aside for now the question of the practical activity required to institute a desperately needed
harm reduction program for our species and planet, a task that belongs to everyone and not just to
writers. I submit to you that the experience of a type of collective insecurity never known before in our
history as a species is the contemporary context for all writers’ inventions, whether or not we
acknowledge it. It would be more than absurd for me to offer prescriptions for meeting this challenge,
but because I am struck by our slowness to take up the task-‐-‐after all, given the signal triumphs of
technologies of destruction in the first half of the 20th century alone, one would expect Precipice
Studies to be far advanced by now!-‐-‐I want instead to address some of the barriers to so doing.
1. The question of humanity’s future on the planet—the question of “the planet’s” future—the
question of what we even mean by saying “the planet”—our disorientation and grief before the
17
