This article struck me particularly as Bill McKibbin who wrote the classic "The End of Nature" aggregates stories of destruction and decline.
Floods, earthquakes, landslides: 2011 is a year of disasters. Ecopsychologist Bill McKibben asks: are we to blame?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/02/natural-disasters-floods-earthquakes-landslides
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After the apocalypse: Twenty-five years after the meltdown at Chernobyl, says Henry Shukman, an irradiated Eden is coming to life: http://theweek.com/article/index/213498/after-the-apocalypse
Bonnie - this is very interesting indeed. Fish populations have rebounded in the Gulf, too...a positive thing.
In this story, A garden scene has grown over Chernobyl, complete with 'dense forests'!
In the "Atomic safari", Shukman writes: "The most contaminated of the villages were bulldozed and buried soon after the explosion, with only a few mounds and ridges left to show they were ever there. The meadows are mostly gone, replaced by forest. Russia is a land of forests, but the true forest, the primeval untouched forest that human eyes may never even have seen, is called pushcha—which roughly translates as “dense forest.” This is what has been reestablishing itself at Chernobyl, regenerating at an unprecedented rate."
What depth psychological aspects do these dense forests reveal, I wonder?
Nice images are forming in my mind. But then Shukman continues:
"Out of the disaster comes a paradise of wildlife. The Garden of Eden is regenerating.But it’s not so straightforward.....
Covered in radioactive particles after the disaster, one large pine forest turned from green to red. Some birch trees have grown in the shape of large, bushy feathers, without a recognizable trunk at all.
“Genomes, er, unpredictable,” says Igor. “Genome not exactly same from generation to generation. They change.”
No one knows what these changes could result in. “Soon or late,” Igor says, “new species will evolve.”
In other words, new animals could actually be in the making here. The area has become a laboratory of microevolution—“very rapid evolution,” says Igor—but no one knows what will emerge or when."
Now I am seeing Star Trek episode of Spock's regeneration, on planet Genesis gone amuck. Humnnn....
Julie: Thanks so much for your precious words. In the midst of it all, you wrote: "Deeply saddened, I am wondering how we got to this tragic crossroads as a civilization, and what we can learn from the suffering of so many. What road might we choose now?".
This struck me at the heart--and AS the heart--of this issue. Two minutes before reading your post, I posted a new blog that very much matches the tone and content of your post here, and I don't have answers either. We seem headed on such an irreversible trajectory of decline---and what, I wonder, is the purpose? What was the "purpose"--if any, if Icarus plummeting to his demise when his wings of wax disintegrated?
It seems a cop-out to only hope it's because there will be a rebirth, as I was alluding to--and I remember reading Hillman recently where he said that is the very problem (with Americans specifically, I think)--that we think there will be some sort of "bail-out" and we can all start anew (my words, not his" And yet--how can true transformation occur if something old doesn't die to make space for it?
The dream image of your father's head in the garden is haunting--but I wonder, at the risk of offending...Can it be hopeful, too? It was your mother that put him there "because he was ill". If the divine feminine is once again emerging from the chtonic depths, is not the exact right thing to place the head-centric rational thinking male archetypal energy IN THE GARDEN in the midst of nature and beauty where it can heal...? Just a thought in the moment--but feels powerful just now...
Bonnie- You are courageous for pointing out the tendency that many of us have of thinking that there will be some kind of "bail out" - great word choice you made. If there is no bail out, then we will all have to start relating to one another, and to the Garden we still live in. Right now, the flowers are still blooming and I suppose that the crops will come in...if they are not irradiated.
I appreciate your take on the dream. It has been really something to look at the images in the dream on a non-personal level as well as all the associations I make personally. Yes, knowing that Mother put Father's head in the Garden for healing brings me great relief though I was still disturbed to behold a cut-off head... "She" even mounted his head on a tongue-depressor!
I am interested in what I am calling Chthonic Sovereignty and am writing about it in the thesis...we'll see what the Dark Body brings!
Thanks, Bonnie. Certainly we have all contributed to the massive CO2 buildup and made our own pressure cooker.
What is just as bad is the hubris of building nuclear reactors and mines near fault zones. It is so disturbing to me that I am rewriting my long overdue thesis with Japan and a dream image from childhood:
"...As the death toll from the tsunami rises, the effects of the radiation leaks will render much farmland permanently unusable and may cause mutations in aquatic life, if not human life, for generations to come (Dell'Amore, 2011).
The unfolding tragedy not only tugs at my heart, it provokes a deep sense of anxiety over the radically unnatural human-made disaster of lethal nuclear fission by-products, the waste materials of our nuclear power plants at loose in the environment, uncontrollable and uncontainable. Engineers and corporate boards did not fully consider the effects of nature, the movement of the Earth, in our equations to create ‘safe nuclear energy’. Seen through a mythological lens, we seem to be re-enacting the myth of Icarus, whose attitude of throwing caution to the wind as his man-made wings took him to stratospheric heights, brought on catastrophe. As Icarus flew ever higher, propelled by his desire for greater glory, his wings were burned to wisps by the solar power of the Sun. There, so close to the Sun, a vulnerable human body and soul, fell headlong to his death in the sea below. Now we have taken solar power ‘from the sky’ with the same hubris in an attempt to manipulate solar energy to fuel our ever expanding industrial and technological needs without regard to the realities and constraints of natural forces. As our nuclear effort ‘falls to earth’ the highly concentrated, uncontainable nuclear radiation burns humans and animals alike and rending the very soils and waters it touches poisoned for generations. Deeply saddened, I am wondering how we got to this tragic crossroads as a civilization, and what we can learn from the suffering of so many. What road might we choose now?
Quite recently a dream image from my childhood has reappeared:
I am walking up the cement driveway of our home after elementary school, as usual, toward the kitchen door on side of the house. As I approach the steps, I see my father’s head, cut off, down in the small garden area to the right of the steps. There is my daddy’s head, alive, placed on a wooden tongue depressor and stuck in the dirt. Shocked and horrified, my eyes riveted on his face, I am wondering what to do to help him when he says: “Your mother put me out here because I am ill.” I see the thermometer dangling in his mouth. Then he is silent, looking forward.
This image, which is still so vivid, holds the graphic key to my thesis work and is linked to the massive environmental poisonings that we are witnessing with increasing frequency as we seem to grow ever more disconnected from our own bodies, and from the Earth itself. Apparently the need for integration of my own mind and body was being brought to my attention through this dream, decades ago, as the very powers of reason and relatedness were being schooled right out of me, by custom and culture." Julie Perkins MA thesis for depth psych program at SSU
My friend just sent me this video of Helen Caldicott on March 18th, 2011 in Canada. Caldicott opens with the new report on Chernobyl and then addresses the situation in Japan - not for the faint-hearted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMXvpWoHzeE