The Light Of Blind Buying
We consume not just stuff, but moments in nature that we can never recapture
An unenlightened man glaring at us
We are moving from Kona, Hawaii.
We’re building a home in Washington state. When we bought the site, I loved it for its natural views. Mountains. Trees. Clouds. At night, moon and stars. There were few houses here, and no visible roads. No power lines, few man-made distractions upon the horizon. We paid a premium.
Suddenly, one day, I am distracted by a guy with a light on.
It’s light pollution. His glaring light comes on at dusk, and goes off at dawn. He may or may not ever be there. The light is on, anyway. Every day.
This light is super bright, a mega, LED spotlight. One can also make out — his house is in the far distance — that the house is huge. A hulking sort of McMansion carved into the side of the Cascade foothills.
Eighty percent of people on the planet live under the glare of artificial light.
We searched years for a place in the rural countryside to avoid that, and of course, all its wake.
At the risk of sounding privileged ourselves due to this, I feel like this person (could be a she…) is being incredibly selfish. To burn a bright light that confuses and endangers wildlife, steals the stars, disrupts natural rhythms, and in the long run burns carbon and materials, and therefore pollutes, is selfish.
The man doesn’t know he’s selfish.
This realization, that maybe the man — I still think “man” is most likely — doesn’t know how upsetting he is to others, struck me hard. That’s what entitlement really is, the ability to use without paying any mind to who, or what, is used, or wasted.
His lack of consideration, even for the insect apocalypse we are dangerously allowing as we continue to obliterate habitats, pollute, poison, and plunder along our not-so-merry-anymore way, haunts me every time I peer into the piercing stab of his outrageous lighting plan.
Without the bugs, the birds have little to eat. Without the birds, I know why the caged soul stings.
Noise pollution, motors, grinding, roaring, trash trucks, mowers, blowers and more, drown out the sweet pleas of those birds that remain.
Single use madness
As mentioned, we bought for the view, and our gaze is always Eastward.
I am an American. My nation is the second highest emitter of carbon, after China. We are first in our amazing “ability” to produce trash. We produce about 240 tons per person, per year. It stinks.
Every day, we hear more bad news about the environment, about the fights in investment to ameliorate, fix, prepare, and prevent. We hear political rumbles. We see little change. We hear about trash wars, too. Who profits from it. Who pays for it. Who dies for it. At present it is mostly wildlife and the impoverished of the world. Air pollution alone accounts for a least 7 million deaths according to the World Health Organization.
But, also every day, there are people buying, wasting, consuming, and ignoring all of it. They drive unnecessarily. Eat junk food in junky trash containers of single use plastic, paper, and more. They stuff plastic shopping bags with plastic crap without a second thought. They buy beverages in plastic bottles.
Single use is the use of the patient, but finite, Earth for an ephemeral moment.
The cost is infinitely greater, the price of our souls. The loss of our values.
This summer, in record-breaking heat, I waited in line for a woman who was lamenting the swelter while the cashier stuffed her plastic shopping bags with more stuff. I wanted to tell her she could be part of the solution… she could waste less. Buy less. Use canvas. Drink tap water. So many things we can do.
Of course, I chickened out, mumbling only something about how next year will be hotter. On fire more. Flood more. Kill more. Displace more.
Out of sight, out of our minds
We do this because of our entitlement.
It’s what I realized after just a few of the many hundreds of hours more of my lifetime to come, where the offending bright light will continue to bore into my brain, and maybe, sear my soul.
Where did our entitlement come from? It wasn’t just manifest destiny, or slavery, or racism, or sexism, or any ism. It came from our inability to recognize exploitation and selfishness.
Domination hierarchy insists that some privileged people shouldn’t ever have to think about garbage, or death, or disease, or desecration. Or devastation.
Our values are no longer about the sacred. They are no longer about love. Loving the beauty of the forest, the song of the birds, the music of the river, the kinship of the beasts, fields, and flowers.
Spirituality matters to our kind.
We love bats. The fabulous, gorgeous bats flit around at dusk, feasting on pests like mosquitoes (not so much in this drought year) and just being amazing in their acrobatics and swoops. We never spotted more than one this year: a solitary, brave, lunging maniac of fluttering velvet. And when he/she swooped, our view was obscured by some guy’s light pollution from miles in the distance.
Knowing that the man miles up the valley will never know what he is doing breaks my heart. Can he ever know what good he could do?
One man could do so much to make a huge benefit in thousands of lives, both human and planetary other. Each of us can atone for all we take by simply taking less. So much is lost when we throw away our membership to a vital kinship with nature.
My fondest hope is that we are better than that. We, each one of us, are waking up to what is at risk. What we lose through disconnection. Then we will realize our value, our worth, and our values. We will dim the harsh, polluting lights, and curtail our menacing trash.
And we will do everything possible to protect this sacred being; while all is still “Being,” the only planet we can truly call home.
We will gain our minds, just in time. We will help save some bats, and then they can help save us.
