Apocalypse No

By Chris Roth

What has this imminent threat done to our perception of time? How have other technological and cultural developments caused our sense of time to change? Are we on a linear path, a crescendo of population growth, accelerated pace of life, and exponentially spreading human impact, leading to apocalypse? Are we entering the "end times" foretold in some of our religious traditions? And if those times come, will they come with a "bang" or (less spectacular, but perhaps more insidious) with a "whimper," as T.S. Eliot suggested?

Nuclear technology has greatly amplified the human potential for precipitating apocalypse, but it is hardly the source of it. We in the West have had a yearning for ending time for much longer than we've had the physical capacity to cause such an event. Devoted churchgoers have for centuries sung songs like "Newbury," lyrics by Isaac Watts:

Lo, what a glorious sight appears
To our believing eyes!
The earth and seas are past away,
And the old rolling skies.
From the third heav'n where God resides,
That holy, happy place,
The New Jerusalem comes down,
Adorned with shining grace.

His own soft hand shall wipe the tears
From ev'ry weeping eye;
And pains and groans, and griefs and fears,
And death itself shall die.
How long dear Savior, O how long
Shall this bright hour delay?
Fly swifter round ye wheels of time
And bring the welcome day.

New technologies are often introduced with the premise that they improve the quality of life. However, as Jerry Mander points out in In the Absence of the Sacred, many technologies that allow us to accelerate the pace of life serve primarily to heighten anxiety and decrease quality of life. Perhaps this is because, at their deepest, unconscious levels, they embody not a life wish, but a death wish, the same one that has fueled the Western obsession with apocalypse for several thousand years.

Where did this obsession come from?

Somewhere, apparently, the seeds of alienation, of a death wish, were sown, and grew, and multiplied. The emergence of patriarchal, dominating cultures, worshipping a Sky God instead of an Earth Mother, seems likely to have had a very close connection to this phenomenon, but the purpose of this essay is not to argue causation. Did some disgruntled males with chips on their shoulders, acting out their fear and alienation in perhaps unprecedented ways, start a series of events thousands of years ago that has led us to where we are now? It's anybody's guess, but blame is not very useful.

Whatever the cause, the alienation--the desire to assert human control over time and place, to be masters rather than students of the earth--spread like a cancer to which general immunity was low. Many people and many cultures were extinguished because of it, some were converted or co-opted and became carriers, and some managed to resist. The attempts to extinguish, convert, or co-opt, and also the inevitable resistance, continue to this day. They play themselves out within each of us.

How, specifically, have we attempted to hasten the apocalypse?

To make the wheels of time to fly swifter round, it is first necessary to intervene where time is proceeding at a natural pace. Earth-based cultures attuned to the rhythms of the days, months, seasons, years, and various other natural cycles can never be made to accelerate to apocalyptic speeds. For many thousands of years, the imperialistic predecessors and companions of the "Industrial Growth Society" have been bent on destroying those cultures, taking their lands and mining their resources in order to fuel their own growth and to speed up time.

Colonialism, the industrial revolution, and political strategies and laws which separated common people from the land all set the stage for our "progress" in the twentieth century. As a result of our innovations and the cultural changes which have accompanied them, human time often no longer even vaguely resembles natural time. The telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television, computers, video games, and other technologies of modern life have given us ever-increasing measures of freedom from natural time and natural place--they have allowed us to redefine time and place to suit our own impulses.

When, through the use of technology, we instead of the Earth are in charge of defining the pace of life, time seems to assume dizzying, ever-increasing speeds. And place, too, is now defined through technological relationships, and largely divorced from the natural world and from the place-based human families and communities that used to help define who we were. To many of us, cyberspace now seems like home, and our physical location is incidental. We may have no idea what plants are in bloom in our area, or which seeds are just ripening, or what animals are mating, or what phase the moon is in, but many of us can find out the time down to the second, at any moment. The Earth's rhythms are a lot less controllable, less predictable, and more organic than the clock time which guides most of our days--and they are therefore infuriating to us, if we're bent on freedom (our own) and control (over the external world).

As John Trudell observes, freedom without responsibility is a recipe for disaster. Freeing ourselves from natural time and place, we seem to be cooking up just the apocalypse we've been yearning for all along. "Fly swifter round ye wheels of time / And bring the welcome day." It has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? Especially when we feel so disconnected from the Earth, and so caught up in the cult of acceleration, that apocalypse seems to be the fulfillment our identity, our destiny. The dreary rhythms of the earth, seas, and old rolling skies have become downright boring. What do they have to do with us? We are children of the end times, not children of the Earth.

Does it have to be this way?

To answer this question, I'd like to reflect some more on the experience of growing up in the nuclear shadow, since that is how I first encountered, in a palpable way, the notion of apocalypse.

As a child growing up in the sixties and seventies, I passed through two stages in relation to nuclear technologies before taking their threats seriously. My first stage was ignorance, for which I was and am very grateful. Childhood is no time for immersion in nuclear despair, and I doubt seriously that a young mind, still full of wonder at the world and immersed in the immediacy of daily life, can conceptualize anything as awful and abstract as a nuclear bomb or a nuclear meltdown.

As I began to understand what adults were saying about nuclear weapons and nuclear power, ignorance gave way to denial. A part of me developed and then fiercely clung to the thought that "these things can't really exist." By which I meant: "I have never seen them; their potential effects are too awful to imagine; I feel no sense of impending doom or danger in the world. They are just a mind game, a figment of the imagination, created by neurotic people who haven't discovered that life is good." A variation of this attitude admitted that they might actually exist, but believed that if none of us gave them power by worrying about them, nothing bad could happen. Whoever or whatever had created the world would not have done so in order to have it destroyed senselessly. The nuclear threat was just a bad dream.

At some point, in my late teens, I started to comprehend more fully, and to get worried. The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor occurred when I was seventeen. Soon I was expecting more meltdowns, or a nuclear conflict precipitated by the ever-escalating nuclear arsenals of the superpowers. As the comfortable, secure environment of my childhood slipped away, and I prepared to go away to college, my fears increased. I listened to WBAI-NY, where speculation on further Three Mile Islands or nuclear conflicts was common. Throughout my college years, full of internal challenges, I alternated between a carefully cultivated dullness to and separation from the horrors portrayed in the news media, and a very keen sense that the world, especially the urbanized world with which I was familiar, was on the brink of destruction. I read If You Love This Planet, by Helen Caldicott, and I was convinced that we would be lucky to make it through another year without a major nuclear incident. Maybe that wouldn't be lucky, though. After all, apocalypse would give us an easy way out of worrying about our own personal problems, about all the other problems on the earth, and about apocalypse itself.

Needless to say, in order to entertain such thoughts, I must have been experiencing some alienation myself. I have never felt so much distance from my childhood, from my past, from everyone and everything familiar and important to me, as I did during that period. I could hardly remember being a child, and thought about it (on those rare occasions when I did) only with impatience. My own sense of time--of the cycles of my own life--along with my sense of place, had somehow been taken away by the demands and expectations of society (embodied, in this case, by the educational system which had captured most of my energy). The sense of natural time, timelessness, and home that I had experienced throughout childhood had been replaced with an ever-accelerating ride on a one-way track which seemed to be heading to oblivion. Its guideposts were not instances of connection with others or with life, but a trail of individual accomplishment and despair that seemed more and more hollow.

I wrote Kafkaesque stories, which I kept to myself, in which the symbolic world ended with either a bang or a whimper.

And finally I got tired of that kind of thinking.

For one thing, for several years the world had repeatedly been failing to end as expected. For another, I was learning more and more about alternatives to the dominant cultural paradigms. I had changed my educational course in order to travel around the country with a small environmental education school, spending time in diverse ecosystems and with various Native American and other land-based cultures. I saw that there were other ways of experiencing the world than through my own cultural lens. There were radically different ways of being, of relating to time and place.

What I think of as natural time and timelessness have a close relation to one another. Both were present in the deserts of Northeast Arizona where I spent nearly two years after college. The mesas, canyons, and plains made geological time visible, and were reminders of how small our piece of time is. Any notions of acceleration, of bending time to our own will, or of ending it, seemed grandiose and foolish in that setting. The annoying babble of Western civilization would someday fade away, those rocks seemed to be saying, and time would go on as it had before. The native people there cultivated the same attitude, continuing their ancient yearly cycle of rituals, dances, and celebrations as their ancestors had and as their children would. Time was very obviously a circle there, not a straight line. Against that backdrop, the apocalyptic culture of acceleration appeared as an aberration; the slow time of the desert and its native people was the reality.

Leaving that setting, reentering the white world, was a culture shock for me. That time out of time in a native desert homeland had seemed much longer, much more meaningful, more timeless, than its length would suggest. The culture I reentered, by contrast, seemed to be largely "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." However, I came back for a reason: to learn to garden and to reattune to the earth in practical ways, while finding a place in the culture I had fled.

I soon received a rude reminder of the nuclear shadow. Part-way through a six-month gardening apprenticeship, our group was greeted one morning with news of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown. As if this news weren't alarming enough, later that same morning we heard sirens going off for no apparent reason, and our conversation quickly reached the point of speculation (and real fears) that this might be "the end." (Perhaps a local meltdown, or radioactive drift from Chernobyl, or a nuclear bomb�?) The sirens turned out to be for an apprentice, experiencing a severe attack of asthma. Although neither her world nor ours ended just then, everyone was scared. It hadn't taken long for me, after leaving the Reservation, to get back into the frame of mind which half-expected apocalypse, though such an event no longer seemed to hold any significant redeeming features.

Despite my wish for life to continue free from the threat of apocalypse, I still had a basic lack of faith in life that showed up in other ways. Although I knew intellectually that people had been growing food crops for centuries, and would hardly have chosen crops that were likely to die at any moment, I was still deeply worried about every seed I sowed. It was miraculous to me that the vegetables and flowers we planted actually grew, that they would still be there when I looked the next day. I kept expecting them to disappear, and for a long time thought that it was just a fluke that they didn't. Almost everything else I knew was uncertain. The world had seemed to be on the very brink of destruction, with time and place contorted and changed until it bore no resemblance to what I once knew. How could these plants grow so calmly, so confidently, at their own speed, in their own place? Didn't they realize that the world might end at any moment? Didn't they worry about that, the way I did? Why weren't they shriveling up just from the stress of thinking about it? Or did they know something I didn't know?

The more I gardened, the more I realized that those plants, that soil, and all the gardens and gardeners I worked with did know something I didn't know back then--or that I'd forgotten. Gradually, as season followed season, I recognized that time was going to go on. I saw that certain cycles repeated themselves, and could not be suppressed or controlled. The life force is powerful, and invites participation. And I, who had become a straight-line perfectionist in my adolescent and early adult years, discovered that there are no perfect ways to garden, no ways to avoid mistakes--but that, paradoxically, there are actually no mistakes. Life is remarkably forgiving, and failures are just as much a part of the cycles of learning and growing as successes are. Everything becomes compost. The end of one thing is the beginning of something else. Time in the garden ebbs and flows with the seasons, and there are few ways to either slow it down or hurry it. It's mostly beyond our control, and it's wondrous.

In gardening, the notion of apocalypse, of one culminating event of perfection or spectacular failure, is absurd. The notion of escaping the cycles of birth and death--or of wanting to do so, as individuals, people, planet--is absurd. The idea that we are separate from the earth, destined to be alienated, needing to prove ourselves and deliver ourselves into some other reality through one final big bang (or, in the disappointing, "failed apocalypse" version, a slow-death whimper), is absurd. If we can accept and embrace the many little deaths, and births, and webs of relationship that occur in the garden, and everywhere in the world, perhaps we'll have less impetus to both flee from and embrace the big Death that is embodied in the idea of apocalypse.

This is not to deny the nuclear threat. It's just to assert that we won't improve the situation at all by expecting apocalypse to happen. We may be able to bring much of what we call human time to an end, but time in a cosmic sense can't be touched by us, and even our grandiose ideas of earth-destruction may be inflated. As Winona LaDuke reminds us, we are going to be here, for many generations to come. The apocalypse mentality can cause us to live without hope, and without true forethought, as if the earth will end tomorrow. But we know it won't, no matter how big a mess we make. The sooner we recall the rhythms of natural time, and harmonize with them, the sooner we'll take true responsibility for our actions, instead of pursuing an illusory freedom from natural cycles. Freedom, in that sense, is just another word for "nothing left to lose."

The lessons I've learned in gardening have come within a cultural (or subcultural) context which very much supports them. On farms, in intentional communities, among ecological doers and thinkers, students and teachers, writers and musicians, I've noticed the same patterns in my relationships with people as in relationships within the garden. The organic ebb and flow occurs in all spheres of life: within ourselves, among us human beings, within the whole web of existence. The lessons we learn in each sphere can be applied to the others. They are not, in fact, separate spheres.

So I've ended up in sweat lodges and in community circles singing some songs quite different from Isaac Watts' "Newbury." In these songs, apocalyptic temper tantrums (no matter how expertly disguised) have no place, and we are part of a flow of life that goes on and on:

We all come from the Goddess
And to her we shall return
Like a drop of rain
Flowing to the ocean

Blessed am I, spirit am I
I am the infinite within my soul
I have no beginning and I have no end
All this I am

We are the old people
We are the new people
We are the same people, deeper than before

The earth, the air, the fire, the water
Return, return, return, return

Oh she will bring the buds in the spring
And laugh among the flowers
In summer's heat her kisses are sweet
She sings in leafy bowers
She cuts the cane and gathers the grain
When leaves of fall surround her
Her bones grow old in wintery cold
She wraps her cloak around her

Hoof and horn, hoof and horn
All that dies shall be reborn
Corn and grain, corn and grain
All that falls shall rise again

Human time and natural time do not have to be at odds. Apocalypse is an aberration, a thought-form that we can let go of. It has reached a crescendo perhaps in order to teach us something about taking the consequences of our actions seriously. But human time only seems to be a one-way freight-train, filled with nuclear waste, headed for a cliff. In actual fact, that train is only a tiny speck against the backdrop of geological time and against the accumulated wisdom of the universe, and it does not have much steam left. When we start paying attention to, and engaging with, that backdrop--the amazing, nurturing context which contains all of our mistakes--we will recognize that true human time is natural time, an endless cycle of cycles.

Chris Roth is editor of Talking Leaves and of The Beetless' Gardening Book: An Organic Gardening Songbook/Guidebook (http://members.aol.com/growseed). The well-known song lyric, "Time is love in the garden, baby, I wanna freeze and can," comes from that volume's ode to food preservation, while the equally popular "Twelve Months a Year" sums up the Beetless' appreciation of the cycles in a year-round garden. Chris, too, is a year-round gardener, at Lost Valley Educational Center in Dexter, Oregon, where (despite repeated predictions by the fundamentalist Christian community which preceded Lost Valley on the land) the Second Coming has never yet occurred. As a consolation, however, many sunchokes (a.k.a.Jerusalem artichokes) have sprouted up year after year, with no help from the gardeners. Chris' sense of humor, like the sunchokes, pops up and dies back in cycles. When it's dormant, he writes essays. Reach him at [email protected].

�1999 Talking Leaves
Winter 2000
Volume 9, Number 3
Human Time, Natural Time

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