Primary Responsibility to the Earth

Elaine Stanfield

Humanists are people of goodwill, right? And religious people also so

regard themselves and often are, right? Humanists are people-oriented and say personal rights are the most important. Religious people also tend to forget that other things than people matter. So where do environmentalists come in? Pathetically last—on the hindtit so to speak.

But the survival of the planet depends on concern for our fellow-creatures on this Earth, who actually constitute our own survival—protection of the eco-system that is our life support. Concern that people are now outnumbering those values: Not "human values," but Earth values.

We environmentalists believe that it could be more important to save an elephant than any number of brain-damaged, crack-addicted babies, rapists, wife-batterers, child abusers, or murder-ers, all of whom are overpopulating this fragile planet, polluting, destroying, and making war. Sexual abuse is rampant, our air unbreathable, our water poisoned as in the process we kill the precious birds, and dolphins, and beasts.

Our topsoil is vanishing and our agriculture is less viable every year. So I see our responsibility not just to people, but to the Earth, as primary.

Yes, we women are nurturers, but there is a lot more to nurture today than in the past, when women were kept barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

Television seems to spend most of its time worrying over people's feelings. (Just tune in any talk show, Oprah, Donahue or any of the multiple that seem to produce new progeny every day.) We wish they would spend less time worrying about who is fucking who, and show just a little bit of consideration for

Spring 1993

"I see our responsibility not just to people, but to the Earth,

as primary."

the Earth's feelings. When John Muir spoke with reverence about the red-woods and the giant sequoia trees, he spoke with eloquence: "The Sequoia gigantea is nature's forest masterpiece, it belongs to an ancient stock, has a strange air of other days, a thoroughbred look, inherited from long ago." This is what we are destroying in order to house the overpopulation of heedless breeders called man. Cleveland Amory wrote a book called Man—Kind? which told in horrendous detail of our inhumanity to the animals.

Even Helen Keller, forgiving of her terrible infirmities, said: "That the sky is brighter than the earth means little, unless the earth itself is appreciated and enjoyed," and subsequently Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man not especially renowned for such sensibilities, said, "The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself."

Now, since I have little patience with religion, most especially organized religion, I expect it goes without saying that the religion dictated by the pope is evil. He and Mother Teresa trotting around the world telling exhausted women it is their duty to keep on having children and not use birth control amounts to a disregard for Mother Earth. If there were truly respect and reverence for God's creation, even the simplest mind should be able to compute that "Be fruitful and multiply" was said as a kind of blessing for another era, and today we've already done that. See Susan Bratton's book Six Billion and

More. In trying to reach the religious community, she subtitled her book Human Population Regulation and Christian Ethics. I met Susan on a whale-watch trip in San Ignacio, where the forgiving grey whales not only allowed us to pat them, but proudly showed us their babies. It's a mystery, after all the killing, why they still want to be friends with us. It was a mystical, life-giving, awesome experience that will live with me the rest of my life.

It's time to join forces, time to act. It's time to stop patting ourselves on the back for being people of goodwill, get off our butts, and start doing something for our planet, starting with joining and working for population and environ-mental groups. Belonging to the human-ists is just not enough. Not when excess children in Rio are actually being killed by government agencies. Not when a third of India's unwanted children are brain damaged. Not when the U.S. Academy of Sciences along with the Royal Society of London can come out with this joint statement: "If current predictions of population growth prove accurate and patterns of human activity on the planet remain unchanged, science and technology may not be able to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment, or continued poverty for the world." Not as the Population Bomb keeps ticking, and Paul Ehrlich's statement is ever more true that we are sawing off the limb on which we sit.

No. Not today. Not in this era.

Elaine Stanfield has been an advocate for the environment and population control since she read Malthus in 1935. She serves on numerous boards, includ-ing Californians for Population Stabil-ization (CAPS).

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