Fear Within our Anthropocence and How We Can Over Come It

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My biggest takeaway about the political ecology of death in the Anthropocene is that people are ruled by fear. Political leaders, religious leaders, everyday people, and everyone in between has some amount of fear in their lives. Fear of our death, fear of failure, fand ear of how our world is being run.

This poem by Shakespeare speaks of fear:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50428/song-fear-no-more-the-heat-o-the-sun-

Fear does not have to be a negative influence. Letting fear control you allows for it to have power over you. But, acknowledging this fear creates a new opportunity. An opportunity for love, desire, hope, and a life full of adventure.

The Worm at the Core states “Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast” (Solomon) and I agree. Why not take our life for everything it has to offer. Living in the depths of despair does nothing for for anyone. This class has shown me that yes, our world is dark, has several demoralizing issues, and needs some fixing-but the beautiful thing is that we have the power to change this. We can be the light in our own world.

My action project was built around WashPirg’s Save the Orca Campaign with the goal of breaching the Lower Snake River Dam to allow more salmon to be available for the Orca’s to feed on. This is a passion project, and as I reference in my paper all passion projects are a way of coping with death anxiety. Passion projects to me are a positive way of working through personal death anxiety on some level. Being a part of something greater than oneself is an incredible feeling, and to me gives the feeling of hope.

Hope is stronger than fear, but when paired together can create opportunities to better our world

Shakespeare’s poem talks about how we will all come to rest as dust eventually (Shakespeare), and The Worm at the Core talks about how we are no more valuable to this Earth than a lizard or a potato from a biological perspective (Solomon), so then what is the point of being riddled with anxiety. This ay be a blindly optimistic point of view, but with how things are currently going… What do we have to lose by giving our best effort to enact change?

“I thought death would smell worse”: How Death has Crawled into Every Crevice of Society… and my Attic

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One of the main takeaways I got from this course is that death lives everywhere in society; if we take Terror Management Theory and Ernest Becker at face-value, everything we do, whether directly or indirectly, is to manage our own death anxiety. When I first heard that, it seemed a little convenient. Of course something that all humans experience was at the root of all our social, political, and environmental problems.

However, upon reflecting more upon the ways that death has influenced my own life—from trying to be remembered, to “doing good,” and more—I recognize that, in someways, it makes a lot of sense. Death has invaded pretty much every aspect of human life. And then, it invaded my attic.

I always thought I’d be able to tell if something had died in my house; if not by sight, then by smell. I never thought I’d spend more than three months living under death—and before you freak out and think there’s a dead body in the attic, there’s not—but, it seems like, similar to the way death operates in our society, it’s actually pretty easy to live under death if you have no idea it’s there. Until, of course, things start going wrong.

My roommate got severely ill almost a month ago, and it became clear that something in the house was causing it. She hired a mold inspector and, upon our exploring our attic, he found something that was admittedly much worse than mold. The wet spot on her ceiling wasn’t a water leak, and he didn’t think it was mold, either. No, he thought it was rodent urine. There were rat and squirrel nests in the attic. And carcasses. So. Many. Carcasses.

Immediately, he told us to be on the lookout for any kind of symptoms for illnesses we struggled to say and/or spell—oh, and ammonia poisoning. Leave the house if you get a headache. With one trip to the attic, it felt like our house had crumbled around us. We realized that this space that we had started to make a home could be killing us.

In the same ways that talking about death anxiety altered the way I view the world and those around me, the rat carcasses altered the way my roommates and I saw our home. We were no longer safe, and everywhere we looked we saw death.

Manhattan Wildlife Stock Illustration - Download Image Now - Rat, Cartoon, Death - iStock

“I am not my body. My body is not me”

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CW: Sickness/illness

I refuse to be the sum of my parts.

Monday, November 13th was a day like any other. I went to class, drank one too many coffees, procrastinated my homework. I fell asleep curled around a book.

Tuesday, November 14th, I woke feverish, teary-eyed, shaking. I fell asleep clutching a thermometer that read 103 degrees. 

I can’t remember November 15th, or 16th, or 17th, or 18th. I know my partner helped me write emails to my Professors explaining absences. I know my fever did not break 103 degrees until Friday night. I know I received three rounds of treatment. I know, almost a month later, I am still recovering.

It’s in moments like these, I find myself aligned with death apathy. In the obliterating pain and sadness, I become resigned to the prospect of death, probably because it feels so intimately close. In moments like these, it is extremely hard to remind myself I am more than the body that is making me feel this way. 

The awareness icon for my disease.

Our conversation last week regarding what we conceptualized as our “I” continues to resonate with me. My classmate, Ryan’s, comment about the view of their body and mind being inherently linked struck me. Why did my body so viscerally reject this statement? Why did I feel so disconnected from so many of my peers? Why didn’t I feel the connection between my body and my Self? 

Because my disability lives in my body, whatever form it chooses to manifest in is physical. While it continues to facilitate the degeneration of my body, it cannot touch my mind, my spirit, my soul. These aspects of me – despite feeling physically exhausted – feel so alive. If we were truly just our bodies, this would be incompatible – at least, to me it would be. 

Despite the yearly, monthly, weekly breakdown of my body, I feel stronger than ever. I frequently combat anger, frustration, and feelings of unfairness due to my disability, but that does not hinder my ability to feel generative, creative, and as I said before, alive. I don’t write this post to try to change anyone’s mind, but write it to explore how our lived experiences and identities shape how we talk about ourselves and relatedly, our future deaths. How do you think our  conceptualization of our “I” fosters death anxiety/death apathy? Do our personal identities and experiences help us create our conceptualization of our “I”? 

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November 30 – When we were assigned to read an opinion piece today from Crisis Magazine (Human Composting: The Ultimate Denial of the Soul), I was stunned. I thought, “How could our professor ask us to read an article, however thought-provoking, from such a bigoted source?” I know our professor vehemently condemns the queerphobia, misogyny, and racism spouted by the opinion writers for this website, which is why I have such a tough time understanding her purpose for assigning the article.

Perhaps, though, it should be me who is at fault for avoiding far-right viewpoints, and this was an attempt to encourage us to leave our comfort zones and echo chambers. After all, this article wasn’t necessarily spreading bigoted views about marginalized groups, it just happened to be featured on a website that did. Of course, that is an incredibly low bar to clear, and the article does spread harmful (and objectively false) statements about how the Church is the cure for depression, how America is a socialist state, and how abortion providers treat human life as disposable. Still, this begs the question: Is it right to completely devalue all the other valid criticisms of human composting that this article makes?

I imagine this article was placed on our reading list to provide a religious perspective on the “radical” practice of recomposition, and I do appreciate having that. I just cannot help but wonder if there might have been another article we could have been assigned instead, without the conservative nonsense. Yet asking that brings me back to whether it is wrong to avoid these viewpoints, since it is our unfortunate reality that they are held by a vast number of people in our country.

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December 2 – As I wrote the above, unfinished post a few days ago, I found no resolution to my feelings about reading the human composting article. However, when I happened to check the Crisis Magazine website today, I saw that a new article was uploaded: Dysconnected: An Excarnational Reckoning Is Coming.

Briefly reviewing this piece has given me some clarity about the quandaries I have been struggling with. While I admit that the human composting article had some value, I believe that it is completely lost when an article about “the insanity of the transgender movement” is one click away.

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Support Resources for LGBTQ Individuals: https://www.ncfr.org/resources/resource-collections/support-resources-lgbtq-individuals-and-families

Parallel to Climate Politics

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Walking around a room with 18 other people, eyes on the floor, lights off, mind adrift in thoughts of death, climate change, and politics, was a confounding experience.

My takeaways from this strange contemplative practice did not become clear until days later. In the moment, the practice seemed somehow ironic and meaningful, yet I could not understand why. I now see my experiences in this practice as almost representing or paralleling the politics of climate change.

Mindfulness among the masses. Image Credit: Unknown

With our eyes on the ground, I felt overwhelmed. Listening to Karen’s descriptions of the world, I felt helpless in the face our extensive problems. There is so much to unpack, not enough time, and I don’t even know where to start. Amongst all these other shoes walking around the floor, how can anything I do be significant? How can I sway people to my side if we all come from different backgrounds, have different priorities, and live in a polarized playground where everything is black and white, or so gray in between that it is unintelligible? This overwhelming feeling is matched in the politics of climate change. It is such an extensive issue that leaders and individuals have no idea where to start or how to help. This overwhelmingness is dangerous because it can lead to stalling on solutions, and inaction which could effectively cause voluntary human extinction.

When we lifted our eyes to acknowledge each other I struggled to remain serious. I found the reality of 19 of us aimlessly wandering the tiny classroom, trying not to hit each other, while listening to poems about death funny. Sort of a “laugh because otherwise you’ll cry” response. This reaction is similar to how many people handle the climate crisis—they don’t take it seriously. They laugh because it is a wild idea that humans could unintentionally cause so much destruction and death while wandering the earth industrializing. They ignore it, because if they believe that there is nothing they can do, then it is better to laugh and cherish what they have while they are alive, rather than to get lost in a spiral of despair waiting to die.

In this practice I felt myself putting on a face for my peers. I couldn’t just acknowledge them with an honest expression of my feelings because that would have been too vulnerable. I felt like I had to smile, exaggerate my expressions, and communicate a false narrative. This, too, is similar to the politics of climate change. World leaders go to climate conferences and exaggerate their actions and intentions, project their virtue and strength, and hide their vulnerability and honest reality of confusion and disaster. We want to die with pride, and for our largely old politicians, acknowledging a problem would mean dying guilty.

Bonn, Germany Climate Conference. Image Credit: UNFCC

Why Won’t My Brain Shut Up?

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When we first started contemplative practices, I couldn’t focus. My mind has a habit of wandering. I find myself lost in streams of consciousness, daydreaming, dissociating – whatever you want to call it, I cannot focus on a thought. When told to close my eyes in a dark room in the morning, my brain rushes – when told to think of one thing, it tries even harder to think of something else. Specifically, when asked to think about my death and mortality, I want to think about it and try to, but I struggle to produce fluid thoughts. What comes out is fragmented notions of what I think I should think about death rather than anything connected to an actual feeling.

I constantly feel distracted, and the contemplative practices have often only exacerbated it. So, why won’t my brain shut up? Why is it continually running from something, like it is afraid to take a break like it is afraid it won’t come back on again? I can tie my fear of death to

‘Busy Brain’ stock image represents the way capitalist productivity infiltrates the human mind.

my experiences with contemplative practices. I am constantly distracted as if my brain is allowed to settle for a second, and I just do nothing, my mind no longer feels as if I am living a fulfilling life. In Western capitalist society specifically, it is not common to just do nothing. The way society functions are through extreme productivity, individualism and competition, meaning you cannot sit and think, you cannot do nothing, and you cannot contemplate. Once you do, you are no longer a meaningful part of society.

In The Worm at the Core, Terror Management Theory explains that people are constantly craving distraction, either consciously or subconsciously, from their looming mortality. To subscribe to this, they chase a cultural worldview that fills them with a sense of self-worth. Western capitalism plays into this model extremely easily. Using contemplative practices to face this, therefore, seems beneficial, so why has it still been extremely difficult for me? Am I too caught up in the cycle of productivity that my mind will not contemplate? Is my mind too indoctrinated with the Western capitalist system? Or is it rather the contemplative practice itself that will not work in a classroom, in a university, that is entirely orientated around productivity and capitalist prosperity?

Living Statues

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As an athlete, I have had the opportunity to do contemplative practices all the time. In my “athletic world”, a lot of the times, these practices have the name of race visualizations. Me and my boat would gather the night before the race, close our eyes relax and have our coxswain (the person that give the directions in the boat) “walk” us through the whole process of getting to the start line, race and finishing the race. The say that for the brain it is like you are actually doing the race. That practice prepares you in a mental way so you can keep your emotions in control the day of the race. “Your body will do whatever you command, it is the brain you need to convince”, that is a phrase that we hear all the time in my sport and it is said so when we start experiencing severe pain from how hard we are pushing, we keep pushing harder. We push so hard that a lot of rowers pass out after races. That keeps reminding me how powerful the brain is. I am glad that we get the opportunity to reflect on the contemplative practices we do in class. I really feel more connected to the present in every practice but there was one that really got my attention. Some weeks go, we did a standing practice. After standing we had to walk but only looking down, making zero eye contact for some minutes, just us and our thoughts, so alone in a room full of people. It was just like everyday life, walking around the campus while looking on our phones, taking for granted the moments and the people that walk past us. After walking around in the class looking down, we were told to start making eye contact. After so many weeks of class with these people, iIt was like I was meeting everyone for the first time. We would look each other and giggle for no reason, something so pure that almost made me feel like a kid again. I saw the smiles of some people in the class for the first time. On the documentary we saw last week, “Journey of the Universe”, there was a part that it was talking about living among statues and how it changes our self perception. And that go me wondering, if we take a moment to actually notice the world, by seeing all people running through their lives and be these moving “statues” what can change in our consciousness and self conception?

Chocolate and Chip

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During our most recent contemplative practice, which Professor Litfin recorded for us to listen to over Thanksgiving break, I took some time to reflect on where my holiday meal came from.

My aunt hosted our annual family dinner this year, so we were incredibly lucky to enjoy potatoes, green beans, eggs, and various fruits straight from her farm. But some of our food, like the turkey, needed to be bought from the grocery store. That turkey is what (or who) I thought most about during the contemplation exercise. Specifically, I considered what that turkey’s life must have been like before it ended up on our table. The article we read last month about slaughterhouses (Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse: an interview with Timothy Pachirat) had a profound impact on my thought process.

As the article points out, death is widely normalized in our culture, but, at the same time, we all take great care to willingly ignore it. Deep down, I’m sure my family and I all understood that the turkey on our table had suffered for most of its life. It probably lived in awful conditions in a factory farm, where it was forcefully fattened up and bludgeoned to death, all for some family to eat in celebration of a holiday whose origins are rife with much of the same exploitation and violence. This reality is not one that many of us want to think about, but it’s one I forced myself to confront to help me be more appreciative of the (unwilling) sacrifice that animal made.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

After gaining this clarity, I found myself thinking back to Thanksgiving morning, when President Biden officially pardoned Chocolate and Chip at the White House (pictured right). When I was watching this event, I felt joy that these turkeys would go on to live happily and healthily for many more years. However, I’ve realized instead that our country has this tradition of sparing the life of one or two turkeys every Thanksgiving merely to obfuscate those we’d rather not see.

In closing, I am thankful for the many insights I have gained throughout this quarter from our weekly contemplative practices, and as this class comes to an end, I am beginning to realize the positive impact they have had on me. Setting aside some time to just sit with my thoughts is something I plan to do more of in the future.