WALLS
Robert Frost said it first and clear enough: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” His walls were stony ones, upended and broken by frosty, heaving ground. The walls I do not love are stony too, built not on pastureland, though, but in the hearts of men and women. These heart-stone walls, held fast by a mortar mix of fear and a very human bent for being right and those different, dead wrong. We, thus, protect our neat and tidy interior lawns from the invasive and rambunctiously threatening swamps and woods beyond our perimeters. This tangled, messy jungle outside our wall is us, humanity, all eight and a tenth billion of us. In our richly diverse abundance, we exactly mirror nature’s untamed profusion. Rather than celebrate, however, we poke our heads above our ramparts with suspicion and protective violence in our hearts.
The Ethnologue, a respected resource on the languages of the world, lists 7,164 languages spoken today. Compound that can of worms by adding over 4,000 religions. To this, according to the UN, throw in one hundred and ninety-five different nations. And if that isn’t enough of a mix in our human mosh pit to drive a frenzy of wall construction, stir in a mixture of skin color, politics, gender and income stratification that border on caste identity. Walls upon walls upon walls.
Many of us wind up so alarmed by what we perceive to be a dark and threatening human swamp on the other side of our wall that we arm ourselves against the onslaught in much the same way we take up pesticides and lawnmowers to protect our lawns from insidious, weedy invasions.
Whatever it is in nature that wants to upend our walls also abhors a monoculture. Mother Earth, even that piece of her that graces the shoulder of our country roads is rich with unkempt diversity. The menagerie of saplings, grasses, wildflowers, sedges, shrubs and the insects, birds and other critters that chew on the leaves, pollinate the flowers, munch one another, make their homes, hide and make love is amazing, and exactly what makes this little planet so gloriously alive. Where a neighbor mows the shoulder and ditch the result is impoverishment. Stubble and ants abide, little more; a troubled, dreary patch of near lifeless tidiness. Life wants, instead, to splurge extravagantly.
As it goes with lawns and farm fields, so it is with us, the wall builders. Within our boundaries we would have a field of human corn stalks, of one color, one height, all bending the same way in the wind. Some of our politicians and preachers make the most of this, conjuring enemies and demons out of the richness of human diversity; building walls around us as if around a crop; harvesting us in our uniformity. And swaying to and fro together in their wind, we fall for their monolithic premise.
What opportunities for enlivening connection we miss, how bland our well-kept human lawns. In the face of a planet whose resource gifts we are rapidly using up, and waters our manufacturers are poisoning with PFAS, vinyl chloride, PCBs and so many other “miracles of modern chemistry”. In the face of our dying planet, they urge us to ignore the mess, look in the next store window and buy the next new thing.
Nature rumbles against our destructive ways, our lack of respect, our ingratitude and our careless ways. As our climate becomes ever more chaotic and dangerous our once marvelously balanced planet has begun shaking down our walls as it swings to dizzying, destructive extremes. Drought is followed by flood, wildfire by downpour driven mudslide and hurricanes like Helene bring whole cities and states to their knees.
The time for demons and enemies is over. Today, openings appear in Frost’s poetic, stone fences, allowing ideas and solutions from our great human multiverse to penetrate and squeeze their way into our heedless, shop till you drop, rock hard mindset. Something quite unexpected is beginning to happen. We begin to notice that our walls not only kept others out, they also kept us captive. We begin, slowly, to understand why nature celebrates boundless diversity, why she undoes our walls and invades our lawns with weeds – the riotous diversity of life ensures survival on a changing planet.
Lately, finally, we’ve begun to make global agreements in the UN Climate Change Conferences where nearly every country on Earth signs onto Earth care treaties in a unanimity rarely, if ever, seen before. It is more clear than ever that new ways of thinking and living are called for, or our future is a dark and painful one. South Korea now covers bike trails with solar panels, shading bikers and making clean, cheap electricity. Indigenous people around the world are demanding legal rights for nature and protections for our dying planet. China’s Belt and Road Initiative offers real hope of vital economic growth to many of the least developed countries around the world, offering their people a livable future at home instead of desperate migration north. Minnesota solar farms find that insect and bird populations soar among the native landscape planted beneath the panels.
And that is precisely why we so desperately need one another, especially those who understand and value the primacy of sustainability, of living with the needs of future generations foremost in mind. We can relearn the uncompromising lessons of a joyful, creative, sustainable life from our more traditional sisters and brothers around the globe. We can learn to think ahead seven generations, we can make good decisions for tomorrow’s kids instead of for the making of another dollar today. We owe this to those future children we may never meet but love from the depths of our hearts.