I thought Solnit's acknowledgment of younger people's "fury" at inheriting a world spoiled by their forebears, relating it to her experience as someone older, would bring affect out into the open, as well as the generation gap between me and the students. The way she honors this righteous rage is lovely:
maybe your fury pointed in the right direction is a treasure: a non-fossil fuel, a clean-burning fire, a passion to do what we need to do. Fury can fight for all that is still with us and all that is worth protecting. And there is so much that is worth protecting. ...
the fury you feel is the hard outer shell of love: if you’re angry it’s because something you love is threatened and you want to defend it. ...
I know the fear and fury about climate destruction is also life wanting to live, and it’s generosity that wants life, and good life, for others—other people, other species, other lives in times yet to come.
This last line is central to Solnit's suggestion that we are called to be part of the larger story of "life wanting to live," but in the event it took some work to get the class to hear it. Some students thought Solnit was really telling young activists to put their rage aside: I suppose this advice, which sounds lovely from my end as a member of Solnit's generation, sounds patronizing from the receiving end, as if it were our call to give young people permission to be angry, or to interpret their rage for them. Touché! The best I could do was convince them that Solnit really does see strong feelings like fear and fury and grief as resources, so long as they don't lead to despair and hopelessness.
Amplifying Solnit's argument a little I suggested that these powerful feelings should be understood and honored as more than individual. It is life itself which grieves and rages in us, life understood as something larger that we share and participate in, linking us to "other people, other species, other lives in times yet to come," who share our distress and our hope. But to to get that point across I needed to realize that Solnit's refrain "life wants to live" sounded to many in the class sinister, not inspiring! Doesn't it give us permission to continue devastating nature, asked one? This understanding of life as inherently predatory and conflictual (Lynn Margulis' "Neo-Darwinian capitalistic Zeitgeist") stood in the way of appreciating Solnit's hope. We'll have to work toward a more symbiotic sense of the wonder of life.
A final reason I hoped this piece would serve as a good start for our journey together had to do with particular religious cadences to this idea of "life wanting to live" - it is a course called "Religion & Ecology" after all! - but nobody had picked up on them. Solnit's essay ends with a religious exhortation.
Morissa also sent me a quote from the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
I thought the way Judaism shows up explicitly at the very end would be a good way to start exploring the contribution religious traditions might make to ecological understanding; it's especially powerful coming after an exposition which has focused on recent history of successful struggle - this brings a deep historical frame to our challenges. But in order to recognize that one would have to know what the Talmud was, which only one student apparently did! (Actually the phrase isn't even from the Talmud but from the Mishnah Pirkei Avot 2:15-16, in one Rami Shapiro's contemporary rephrasing which also enlists Micah 6:8's famous injunction that what G-d requires is "but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God' - which also drew blanks.)
In the end, it may have added to an appreciation of the power of Solnit's ending with religion for students to discover that that's what she was doing. But trying to loop back to hear the Bible in "life wants to live" may have been a bridge too far.
We need to understand the worst-case scenarios and the suffering and loss happening now, so we know what we’re trying to prevent. But we need to imagine the best case scenarios, so we can reach for them too. And we need to imagine our own power in the present to choose the one over the other.
Was I just imagining it or is there an echo here of the urtext of l'chaim?
I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the LORD your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live... (Deuteronomy 30:15-19)
Solnit isn't a religious writer. She's described herself as the child of a lapsed Catholic mother and a non-practicing Jewish father (a description which sounds like many of my students!). But I think the force of "life wants to live" and the call to "want life, and good life, for others" comes in part from this religious source. Reading these famous words from Deuteronomy in this context it becomes clear that on our choice - which begins with recognizing we have the power to choose - depends the weal or woe not only of humanity but of the land, too. You don't need to think a text like this is revealed to feel its force. If Solnit didn't have this in mind she should have!
Was telling students that these powerful texts were at work in the background of Solnit's argument enough to make them work for them? Might it even have made the class receptive in ways they wouldn't otherwise have been to ancient tradition? Hard to say, although one student after class told me he was Jewish but knew little about his tradition and was thrilled to encounter it here. Perhaps I've been able to plant a seed. Perhaps venerable old religious traditions (and not just contemporary "spirituality") do have something to contribute to our understanding of ecology, starting with very the nature of life!
