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Wallaby’s Child

   Just after Christmas last year I spent a blithe and peerless day in a near blizzard at Mount Field with my children and their partners. The vast living silence of water, sky and glaciated stone was as profound as a prayer. The wind scooped spume in handfuls from the tarns. In the draughty shelter where we had our lunch, an elderly Englishwoman read Tasmanian history while she waited for her family. A passing ranger eyed my umbrella with an expression my son described as, ‘Get these muppets out of here.’ A wallaby and her child, as integral to the place as snow falling on pandani, graced us with their presence. Back down the hill it was summer again, and Russell Falls were in sheer magnificent flood. We played Poohsticks on the bridge and no-one quite fell in.
   As we were driving home through the stench, noise and implicit violence of our highway system, a place deeper than my conscious mind presented me with a decision; since I may not despoil what I love, I will not go to Mount Field again until I can travel there in a way that is congruent with that pristine, powerful, intricately breathing landscape.

   There is a question I continually ask of the trees, the compost heap as it transmutes rot into roses, the night sky. If the inevitable, impossible task of our generation is to restore a planet, what must I do? What is required? What part of the work is uniquely mine?
   Another fragment of the answer, smaller than the moment on the way home from Mount Field but just as adamant, emerged one early morning in Melbourne. I’d just got off the overnight train from Sydney and was strolling towards friends and breakfast. Outside the Royal Hospital for Women in Carlton was a large notice that said: ‘Breast Screen. Hazardous Chemicals.’ And between one breath and the next, another decision made itself.   If toxic waste dumps are the price of health, I’m not colluding. No more mammograms. It was as simple and as difficult as that. Does the stricture include dental X-rays for my precarious teeth? I don’t know yet.

‘How do we love all the children of all species for all time?’
   Bill McDonough’s prophetic question has been forming and informing my life since I first heard it some years ago. He’s an architect, and one of his core principles is that harmful substances may not be used.
   Does that apply from some mythical date in the future, or does it mean me, us, now?
   Do I have the right to use anything, anything at all, for which I’m not personally and wholly prepared to take responsibility? Can I even talk about being responsible when it’s not me who has to live the consequences? How do I measure those consequences?

‘Power’s erratic, so when the iron’s on, I let the neighbours know. We do our ironing together.’ Afghan woman heard on ABC Radio National.
   I live in Denison, nominally one of the world’s greenest electorates. I love my steep, leafy suburb, yet it’s full of two car households, environmental weeds, dog-shit, en suites, dumpsters and home extensions. It’s also squanderous with things, with stuff; play-stations, lawn-mowers, spas and fax machines. Pantechnicons draw up at the local park and unload entire toy and sports stores along with the children. It’s commonplace to jet off interstate and overseas, and own shacks at Bicheno or on Bruny Island. Every other car jostling for a parking spot at the corner shop has a no war sticker. The owners are presumably inside buying food flown and grown with the oil wars are fought over. Is the concept of responsible ownership of private cars as oxymoronic as nuclear safeguards or military intelligence?
   When another of our corner shops was held up at knife point last year, a group of us decided we were tired of fear, and spent a joyful morning door-knocking up and down the street, collecting messages of support for our shopkeeper and his family. I’ve lived here for ten years, and had no idea I had such diverse and interesting neighbours. Yet I’ve hardly seen any of them since. Everyone gets into their cars and drives away. Mobility trumps community.
   Then there’s the proliferation of ‘green’ stuff. Where do organic flushable nappies end up? Do we really need a dozen kinds of New Age cleaners when bicarb and vinegar do the job just as well? Are Huon pine breadboards, solar-powered CD players and hand cream made from recycled dolphin’s milk simply anodynes, the luke-green equivalent of low tar cigarettes? I’m an ex-smoker and I know all the self-delusions and self-justifications that buttress addiction.
   How can we even contemplate extending our capacious houses, however greenly, while millions of our sisters and brothers live in cardboard boxes and sewers and refugee camps? How can we?
   If my annual equitable carbon quota for all purposes – heating, cooking, and travelling – is 0.4 tonnes, and each passenger on a Sydney – London flight emits 0.98 tonnes, then it seems to me perfectly clear that I may not fly to London.

‘My commitment is to truth, not to convenience.’ Gandhi, cancelling a peace march that people had travelled from all over India to attend.
   Are we putting too much energy into the political process, into activism, and not enough into the rigorous business of embodying our beliefs and concerns in the way we run the nitty-gritty of our lives? If we aren’t living the radical change we advocate, then all our fine words and policies have feet of clay. If something matters enough to start a conservation group or a political party, why aren’t we individually and collectively embodying it more? How can we save the world with one hand and destroy it with the other? It seems to me that we’re still living as if we didn’t really believe in our own urgent truths.
   I once heard a speaker on Radio National say that what women mustn’t do is copy the patriarchal model of success, which tends to be shiny on the outside and slovenly at home. I think she meant that success must be ‘through and through’, and we have to change the baby in the middle of the night and clear the gunge out of the kitchen drain in the same spirit we might bring to defending a forest in court or blockading a nuclear power-plant.
The public face of the conservation movement is passionate, compassionate, honest and courageous. But are we doing the invisible, unsung, drudging work that matters just as much if not more? If we have a function, a fundraiser – a film night or a green festival or a sustainable homes tour – and everyone drives there, what’s the point? Is it any different from the Exxon Valdez oil-spill that worked wonders for the Alaskan economy? As long as our bottom line is money, not environmental accountability, then we’re externalising costs just as the corporations do.
   If we’re adversarial, if our self-definition as a group depends even in part on the existence of an out-group - corporations or loggers or the gun lobby - are we not well on the way to the Pentagon?
Laurens van der Post once wrote that what the ‘isms’ – racism, sexism, ageism – have in common is that they deprive their objects of oxygen. I live in a way that deprives lifekind of oxygen, so I am earthist. Our culture is overwhelmingly earthist. As we have learnt to name and arbitrate sexism and racism, how do we measure earthism? How much is tolerable? Where are the lines, the boundaries? Is mine the straw that is breaking the planet’s back?

‘An ecological footprint is the amount of productive land area required to sustain one human being. Globally, there are about 1.9 hectares of productive area per person, but the average ecological footprint is already 2.3 hectares. So we would need 1.5 Earths to support humankind. The largest footprint belongs to citizens of the US, at 9.57m hectares. Five Earths would be needed if everyone consumed at that rate. People in Bangladesh, on the other hand, need just 0.5 hectares.’ Adbusters.
   If I consistently overspend my income or choose to flout a high cholesterol reading by living on chips and chocolate, I will reap the consequences. What’s much harder to grasp, because it’s still in the distance, is the inevitable fallout from humankind’s gross overspending of planetary capital. We are currently living at 30% above Earth’s capacity to restore itself. That’s embezzlement on a massive scale.
   I’ve practised living lightly for years. I pride myself on it. I don’t own a car, though I have a taxi budget. I won’t fly, except in the kind of family emergency I hope never happens. I live on $A13, 000 a year, slightly more than my fair share of the global commons. I’m vegetarian, though I eat fish sometimes and meat occasionally. I try and eat local organic produce, and grow quite a lot of it myself. I can be fascist about plastic bags. Nearly everything I own is second-hand, recycled or a gift. The wool I love to knit with comes from a company that disclaims any responsibility for mulesing sheep; I’ve not asked about the dyeing practises behind their stained-glass colours. How can something be beautiful if there is ugliness or suffering in its making? For a year I tried to survive as a writer using public access computers for final drafts. It was a great relief to inherit a laptop, though I still go to my favourite internet café to print or email. Since many of my beloved others live interstate and overseas, and because it gives me endless pleasure, I’m a voluminous letter-writer. I must have sent and received at least my own body-weight in mail from Europe over the years. Bang goes my carbon quota. I don’t have solar hot-water or a compost loo. Grey water gets randomly recycled. I’ve dug out my worst environmental weed, a banana passion-fruit, and am working on the ivy and the agapanthus. If I put in three more energy efficient light-bulbs can I keep the cat?
   Yet the first time I calculated my ecological footprint, the result was galling. ‘If everyone lived as you do, it would require the resources of one and a half planets to sustain humankind.’ Since then I’ve become a WWOOFing (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) host, which means I share my house a lot of the time and my footprint has scraped into credit

‘If you had an hour to live, who would you ring, what would you say and why are you waiting?’ Stephen Levine
   How much leeway do we have? Am I overreacting? Is Earth’s well-being negotiable or is it as adamant as truth? If I don’t balance my ecological footprint as scrupulously as I balance my budget, am I just paltering with that truth?
Are we still justifying the destruction of the world even as we claim to save it? Is ignorance an excuse? What are the ecological footprints of our conservation groups and Green parliamentary offices and election campaigns? If they’re too big, how do we respond? Must we wait for the infrastructure – sane accessible transport, community supported agriculture, convivial streets – before we change our behaviour? If even half of those of us who so passionately voted Green at the last election were to change our lifestyles now – all the ways we work, recreate, travel, make art, build and particularly eat – would the infrastructure not organically follow?

‘I will not violate you. I will not be violated by you.’ Gandhi
   When I first worked for the conservation movement in the early seventies, it was a haven. It reflected and affirmed a way of thinking and being that was radically different from the mainstream. I could continue to operate in the mainstream because I had my tribe to come home to. I learnt to straddle the dysjunction, to live in both worlds. Since then, what Keith Suter calls ‘the fifth world of the NGOs’ has grown exponentially. In Tasmania, if I choose, I can live almost entirely within a Green culture. Yet I feel more and more troubled by this. It seems to me that the dysjunction, the incongruence has now taken root in ‘the fifth world’.
   I had dinner recently with a group of people, friends of twenty years standing, who’ve passionately, compassionately committed their lives to social change. We drank beautifully packaged tea picked by child slaves and ate delicious industrial food. There was an account of an overseas holiday ‘to places where tourists don’t go’, and a funny story about the woes of installing an expensive and of course essential upgrade to a home computer system. The latest mobile was put through its paces. Cars and planes were an unquestioned and integral part of everyone’s lives. I accepted a lift home.
   It was all so much the norm – the Green norm? – that questioning it didn’t seem possible. Instead we joked about drinking baby-killer coffee and eating at a dubious rainforest table. We joked about abusing the Earth. When do tolerance and respect become collusion?
   Have we sold out? Have we been co-opted? Or am I sailing too close to eco-fascism and the apartheid of what I perceive as good?
   How, where do I keep lovingly standing and dancing my ground?

‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.’ Arundhati Roy
   Gandhi suggests we make every choice in the light of its consequences for the poorest person on earth. I have three cross-bearings to keep me honest and pointing in what I hope is the right direction.
   The first is a postcard of a snow leopard in her austere, fragile, eroding habitat.
   The second is a man whose name I will never know, a refugee from Afghanistan working as a tailor in Peshawar, north-west Pakistan. He spent the afternoon of September 11 2001 with my son and his friend, making them cups of tea and talking while he mended their travel-stained clothes.
   Finally there are my great-great-grandchildren. All of them. Snow-gums and wallabies, diatoms and dandelions.  May the places where they sweetly, safely dwell be as beautiful as the wilderness. May their restored oceans be a glory of tall ships with photo-voltaic sails. May they forgive us.

Annie March
annamorag@hotmail.com

(Annie March is a writer and conservationist. She lives in Hobart.)

Copyright Annie March 2007