The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

 and I wake in the night at the least sound

 in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

 I go and lie down where the wood drake

 rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

 who do not tax their lives with forethought

 of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

 And I feel above me the day-blind stars

 waiting with their light. For a time

 I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

--Wendell Berry

Related to but not identical with the climate distortion crisis is the mass extinction of nonhuman life currently underway and accelerating nearly everywhere on planet Earth.  According to new surveys, half of the bird species in the world are threatened, and one in eight face imminent extinction.  North American forests have already lost 1 billion birds from populations in 1970.  Altogether North America has lost 3 billion birds, a reduction of 30%.  Losses are steepest among familiar backyard species such as sparrows, warblers, finches and blackbirds.

 Loss of habitat, polluted water and air as well as the direct effects of climate distortion such as fires and higher temperatures affecting migrations and habitat are major factors.  Climate distortion is fostering diseases, not only among human populations.  Currently a set of diseases are killing North American birds by the millions--threatening poultry supplies while further devastating wild bird populations, taking several prominent species to the brink of extinction.

Because human civilization cannot survive without the support of other life, the biodiversity crisis is the focus of the next UN COP climate meeting in December.  In advance of this, the U.S. State Department has for the first time appointed a special envoy for biodiversity and water resources: the Washington Post calls Monica Medina "a diplomat for plants and animals."

We deal with the diminution of other life in our own lives.  As birds disappear from the air, younger people cease to expect to see them.  But poets for at least a couple of generations now have been lamenting the losses, and decrying the blindness and money machine willfulness of society's relentless destruction of our most basic companions.  

What we're seeing so far (except for some of these tree and bird epidemics) is a gradual diminution.  However, it is as true of extinctions as it is of climate distortion: there can come a moment when the interconnections are broken, and failures cascade, relentlessly and irretrievably.  We're are nearing those in both categories, or so the scientists say.

Poets have known this.  Apart from anger and despair, they enact the moment of apprehending and appreciating what is still there.  W.S. Merwin and William Stafford, the poets who appear the most on this blog, have been among the most forthright in saying this.  These poems are ceaselessly sad for the moments that future generations may not have, and in fact that many people now will not and cannot have.  Besides whatever political activity or direct action one can take, the best we can do is be in these moments as fully as we can, even if through images and the conjuring of words only, which are never enough.  “There is  a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now," Merwin said in an interview in the 1980s. "One really wants, hopelessly, to save the world, and one tries to say everything that can’t be said for the things that one loves, while there’s still time.” 

 Among what "can't be said" is the physical experience of presence, of relationship with other beings in the whole of the embracing world.  In this poem, Berry draws a lesson from this presence, this relationship, which is precisely the value of that moment in the present-ness of the drake and heron, apparently free from "the forethought of grief." 

For now, we may still have moments to rest in the grace of the world, or to approach them in these words.  Best not to miss too many of them.