Rev. Billy Talen for BuzzFlash: Three Sides to This War, Ukraine, Russia and the Survival of the Earth
March 2, 2022
By Rev. Billy Tallen
Animals and plants don’t get a lot of copy when the war reporters address the cameras with their stern faces. The only bit of nature that we can see in the videotapes is the occasional trees reaching up, their branches with imploring gestures as the buildings burn.
War is the most damaging of all the human events for the natural world. War is the human act where we are farthest from the Earth. In war, we are so busy taking life that we don’t notice life as a force. But peace is made of the Earth, and war is also. And the Earth is the third party in this war by Russia on the Ukraine.
Imagine a world in which the toll of war is more accurate, where all living beings are counted among the casualties. Imagine how different it would be if we were able to study the impact on our living biosphere as the war unfolded. And how would the war’s violence look in the context of the great extinction of life that is now ongoing everywhere on the planet.
If you can imagine the reporter facing the camera with a statement like, “The 300 tanks advancing from the borders are burning gas and carbon is pouring into the air.” The absence of - shall we call it “earth reporting” - leaves the public simply without the larger life of the Earth’s in the picture at all.
War is in fact a formal and narrow set of statements, which repeat again and again. Where is the Earth reporter? There will be a first reporter for the Earth. You can hear her saying, “Russian cluster bombs are killing the endangered Saker’s Falcon and two rare species of bush-crickets.” That’s what we should hear.
We have an obligation now, with what we know of the inter-connectedness of all life, and with the high stakes of the great extinction, to bring the natural world to the foreground. We can’t afford to have any human drama that doesn’t mention the Earth, not now. We will have to discover a whole new kind of language - to foreground the Earth in sporting events, fashion shows, or when Paul McCartney emerges from a limo.
As the Sixth Extinction accelerates, it is inevitable that this new language will be found and practiced. The shift will come from a realization that the Earth is always there, even in our most expensive and exclusive dramas. We create some kind of stage to present a politician, for instance, and we proceed as if the Earth is not there. The celebrity on that stage is made of the material of the Earth, and so is the stage.
The air that the political breathes, the energy in the lights that makes the politician vivid - the drama is a re-arrangement of the elements of the Earth. Our habit of creating a space for our common vision that we believe is under our complete control, all bought and paid for, vacuum-packed from all intrusions… that is the conceit of human supremacy. But human life cannot be walled-in completely, the Earth can never be disinvited.
To see the life of the Earth everywhere is a gift of the withdrawal of living things in the extinction. We are the predator that has triggered this sudden death of our civilization. The childish empire restoration by Vladimir Putin begs the question, “Will human beings do this all the way to the moment that we can’t breathe, when we can’t walk freely on the surface of the planet, when the orders-of-magnitude greater power of the Earth gives us our final hour?
Will we still be at war, squabbling humans, chasing each other with small explosions that spit pieces of metal across the air? Will we, even at the very end, insist that we don’t have time for the third power in our war, the one that is taking all of life in another direction?
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