The Mother of All Pragmatism

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, May 5, 2010)

"We love the earth and the earth loves us." – a performer at the Earth Day festival on April 24 to raise funds for the Ubud Community Playground

If the earth loves us, then the old gal has got to be one tough mother. I mean, she tries to do us in all the time. At the end of April, a tornado in Mississippi in the southern United States killed 10; earlier last month an earthquake in China killed more than 2,000, with the death toll still rising; and sometime between now and the end of the year, almost surely some natural disaster or other will kill dozens in Indonesia.

Those are the kinds of things I think about whenever I hear our planet personified as a sweet, doting entity – a sentiment often heard here in Ubud, even when it’s not Earth Day.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for the earth. By all means, use solar power; limit water use; walk or cycle instead of ride; conserve electricity through the moderate use of energy-sucking appliances; dispose of household waste properly; and encourage responsible farming by going to town on organic groceries.

But I don’t see any added value in thinking of the earth as a conscious being, unless it is as some fickle fertility goddess from whom we are never sure what to expect -- gentle falling rain and soft breezes or rampaging typhoons and shaky ground. It just doesn’t fly that Gaia or Mother Earth has any caring concern for the creatures meandering around on her surface or that she thinks about any of us at all.

Look at it like this: If our world has some infusion of a divine spark, it probably gives about as much thought to us as we do for the dust mites that feed off the skin cells we all shed. And why should any earth god or goddess be necessarily benevolent? Does it make any more sense to believe in a soft-voiced, gently tripping Earth Mother wearing a white flowing dress and with flowers in her hair than it does to believe in a white-haired, long-bearded patriarch of a god sitting on a golden throne?

Now some of you are probably asking why I should care what sorts of gods other people choose to believe in. Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t, except for this: whenever gods start getting involved as being the reason we do or don’t do things, it just makes for a big old mess. People get distracted from the tasks at hand and get to arguing theology. People start not only wanting you to do certain things, but to do them for the “right” reasons – to appease their god or to keep some anti-god demon at bay.

A lot of people would agree with limiting the use of plastics, a moderate and sustainable use of resources, and a simpler, less frenetic lifestyle, but as soon as you say, “for the good of the goddess/Gaia/Earth Mother, etc,” there will be rolling of the eyes and a turning away.

Neither is it fair to assume that all followers of a male deity are inherently ruthless exploiters of the earth, mother or not. The various groupings of the Dutch Amish scattered across the U.S., for example, have a fairly harsh interpretation of one of the most successful male-oriented religions ever, and they for the most part practice a lifestyle – in terms of subsistence – that the greeniest greenie could appreciate. Don’t want motor cars fouling the air and over-sized tractors tearing up and compressing the land? Then let’s all join the Pennsylvania Dutch in living the way our forefathers were doing in the 1800s, with only a limited use of modern technology.

If everyone were as cautious about accepting the “next new thing,” we’d have a lot fewer problems to deal with in terms of over exploitation of the earth’s dwindling resources.

What we need really is the sort of pragmatic, philosophically neutral approach to living taken by recently deceased Richard Zimmerman, also known as “Dugout Dick,” an Idaho recluse who lived 60 years in a home carved out of rocky outcropping along the Salmon River before dying on April 14 at the age of 94.

“I got lots of rocks and rubber tires. I have plenty of straw and fruit and vegetables, my dog and my cats and my guitars. … There’s nothing I really need,” he said in an interview 17 years ago with the Idaho Statesman newspaper.

Hard to think of a man who could be satisfied with those few things ever worrying about whether he was doing enough to make some old earth biddy love him. But I guarantee that if the old gal exists and has any regard for us mortals, she fell for him years ago and never had to go pining.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi