The Roots of Our Ruin: We Fell Apart
David R. Weiss – November 6, 2023

NOTE: You can open a PDF of this essay HERE.

The fabric of our lives has frayed. Indeed, the fabric of life itself on this fragile planet has frayed. Globally, multiple societies and ecosystems are in peril. Countless humans, as well as flora and fauna, are at risk. But all these statements are deceptively … passive. Although change, even peril, is the way of the world, this change, this peril, is not the result of some evolutionary whim or random cosmic rancor. No, this rising ruin has roots … elsewhere. In us.

Welcome to the Anthropocene, that geologic epoch that echoes our name (anthropos: humanity) because, at last, in this epoch human activity has come to assert itself as a force of planetary scale. (Think “fossil fuel and friends”: soaring CO2, clear cut forests, melting icecaps, polluted waterways, ecosystems fractured and destroyed, and species seemingly racing—being run—toward extinction.) This is change and peril on steroids. But worse: it is unmistakably ecocidal in aim. It is change for the sake of destruction. Peril for the rapacious rush of adrenaline. It is madness. And ruin. Ours. Earth’s.

Indeed, the passive tense of that opening paragraph is dishonest. Human activity writ large is on a murderous assault across Earth. From at least the industrial age onward we have ripped that fabric ourselves—and done so with glee. We have pursued the peril of societies and ecosystems as though it were our life’s purpose. We have razed flora and fauna in a killing frenzy we call “progress.” How quaint.

“We” is loaded language, of course. It means mostly those members of the “developed” world, “developed” itself a misnomer, since that very development is bringing about the death of the planetary systems that support life. And even among this “developed” world, most of us are more accurately described as entangled actors trapped in the systems at the heart of the Anthropocene. Undeniable accomplices in an ecocidal assault that nevertheless profits us very little and over which we have no real power. And yet, this ruin will wreck us all. What irony: the Anthropocene, flying our species’ flag in its name, may end up being the epoch that ushers us … out.

The exact onset of the Anthropocene remains up for debate. It’s most often dated to the 1940’s or 1950’s, tagged to the dawn of the nuclear age or the post-war boom of industrial growth and consumer consumption. Both events can lay legitimate claim to tilting Earth’s axis off center. But neither came out of nowhere, and there are those who argue for dating the Anthropocene from the invention of the steam engine (1712) or more broadly the advent of the Industrial Revolution (around 1780), both of which are direct if distant forebears of the atomic/consumer ages.

Still others suggest that humanity first ran afoul of Earth’s aspirations for a mutually beneficial relationship already some 12,000(!) years ago with the Agricultural Revolution: that this first step into settled life and toward what eventually became civilization is where the earliest roots of our now approaching ruin started out. That planting crops was the opening move in a cultural chess match with Earth, of which the Bomb and the Market are simply the moments when we cried “Check!” and “Check Mate!” (Without realizing that this joyful cry effectively … existentially … meant that we lost everything. Oops.)

I don’t doubt that these various external factors—cultivating crops, building machines, splitting the atom, and selling ourselves all manner of things we don’t need—have played a role in bringing us to this fraught moment. But as someone who specializes in the power of our inner worlds, I want to suggest that the true roots of our ruin lie within.

In short, we fell apart. Three short words, brimful—of catastrophe. Spilling out in multiple directions.

Where do I begin? That, right there, is THE question. Posed not rhetorically but evocatively. Where do any of us begin? The central lie that has taken up residence in our inner world is that we “begin” somewhere other than in nature. That we are somehow above and qualitatively different than “animals.” That we move through this world as conquerors-yet-aliens destined for eternal life in some realm other than this one. This is the lie in which we live. The lie that threatens to kill us all.

We fell apart. In one of Western culture’s defining origin myths (Judeo-Christian, but culturally omnipresent), Genesis 3 recounts the story we’ve come to know as The Fall in the Garden of Eden. There are many ways to interpret that tale, but today I’m mostly just borrowing that word: FALL. The story implies that once upon a time there was a perfect world in which there were perfect human beings who unfortunately, tragically, made a wrong choice—and fell.

I don’t believe there was such a past. I’m persuaded our origins unfolded much more slowly, as the life force in our genes inched slowly across eons toward greater complexity of cognition until humanity—homo sapiens—appeared. But the truth of the Genesis tale lies in its witness to the early recognition that things are not as we wish they might be. Whether or not a perfect world ever was (it wasn’t!), this world’s “imperfection” presses in on us. Inexorably and uncomfortably. Flood, famine, disease, tragedy, the hard labor of daily life, the pain of childbirth, and, ultimately, death. This is not the world we would’ve mapped had we been asked. But it is the world in which we find ourselves, nonetheless. It is a world that challenges us to make meaning.

And in that world, we chose to fall apart. That is, at some point, we chose to meet this beautiful but unpredictable, abundant but harrowing, life-giving but death-demanding world by choosing that our true home was elsewhere. That the flora and fauna around us were not family but fodder. Rather than seeking the wisdom to make ourselves at home here, we imagined we were ultimately not part of the cycle of life here on Earth, but merely biding time until we found our real home. Elsewhere. Apart. And there we fell.

We know better now. And yet by now we are so entangled in patterns of apart-ness that both our habits and our hearts resist the only truth that might guide us into and through the ruins ahead.

For instance, we know now that we are alive because we are ecosystems: interwoven with the world. Not apart. Primarily in our gut, but also in our mouths, lungs and on our skin, our daily vitality depends on over 1000 species of microbes whose lives are interwoven with ours. They number 100 trillion—in each of us. Altogether there are somewhere between seven and eight POUNDS of microbes living in me so that I can live. Whole metropolises of essential diversity. Because their cells are much smaller than mine, there are about ten times as many specifically nonhuman cells in my body as human cells. By this measure, I am, as it were, a minority presence in my own body.

Beyond this, we can trace elements on Earth and in our bodies to ancient stars. We realize that the oxygen we need to breathe and the food we need to eat is produced by other members of the Earth community. If we dare to think clearly about, we know that our very bodies are comprised of materials reused from those who came before us. My body might well contain matter that once walked as a dinosaur or towered as a tree or flitted as a bumble bee. I am … and you are … the living intersection of a cosmic, now Earth-bound, ecological saga. Far from “apart,” we are all more entirely together than we usually imagine.

But this knowing remains disconnected from our doing. From our speaking. Even from our dying.

We “know” (science tells us) we are consuming the planet at an unsustainable pace—a pace certain before long to crash the planet’s capacity to sustain human society in its present form. Yet we drill for more oil. We make more unnecessary stuff. We measure our success and satisfaction by standards that are scientifically and mathematically ecocidal. Because we fell apart. Because we found ourselves folded into a Giant Lie that told us we were somehow exempt from the laws of nature that govern everything else on this pale blue dot.

We “know” (science tells us) that ecosystems are comprised of subjects not objects. Of countless creatures and plants each pursuing their unique life—and each contributing to a larger communal life—with an agency that is no less real simply because it boggles our minds. The world teems with life; it vibrates with the energy of relatedness. From the quantum level to the macro level, life is less a matter of individual lives than a symphony of notes sounding in concert with one another. Bees are bee-ing; frogs are frog-ing; flowers are flower-ing; marshes are marsh-ing. And altogether everything is being its interwoven self. Nothing—least of all us, exists on its own. Subjects, every one of us, but held, cradled, caressed, “caught,” as MLK said, “in an escapable network of mutuality.”

But the very syntax of our language largely erases the subjectivity of our companion creatures. Almost as though it was designed to be complicit in colonization and exploitation—to shape our patterns of world-making at a subconscious level that sets us apart from the rest of our world. English (and most Western-rooted languages) prizes nouns over verbs. Linguistically, this provides us with a multitude of objects to manipulate rather than a community of subjects with which to relate. But wait, isn’t this just the very nature of languages? How could it possibly be otherwise? Well, most indigenous languages, reflecting a wisdom of with-ness rather than a “falling apart,” are verb-centric. They “require” of their speakers as they speak that they name the subjectivity of the world around them—an admission of the agency in every other being, a recognition of kinship with the whole of nature.

In describing “the grammar of animacy,” Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts her frustration-turned-to-insight as she struggled to learn Ojibwe words (Ojibwe being closely related to the Potawatomi language stolen from her ancestors). “Then my finger rested on wiitkwegamaa: ‘to be a bay.’ ‘Ridiculous,’ I ranted in my head. ‘A bay is most definitely a person, place, or thing—a noun and not a verb.’” And then her moment of revelation: “Suddenly, I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if the water is dead. But the verb wiitkwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with the cedar roots and a flock of ducklings. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too.” (Braiding Sweetgrass, pp. 54-55) From water to rocks, from places to drums, Native languages acknowledge the animacy—and the agency—of those beings that fill out the community around us.

Words enable us to weave meaning into the world in which we live. But most Western languages encourage (dare I say, they syntactically force us?) us to make meaning by rendering the world as other. They set human beings as the default subject and set every other “card-carrying” member of the natural world … as mere object. Our language fell apart. And that has played a role in the present wreckage of the world. It becomes so much easier to mistreat those creatures we objectify, those ecosystems we fail to recognize as thriving communities.

This is depth of our entanglement. How do we even discuss this in a language that is structured to hide the apart-ness that imperils us, to prevent it from even being named?!

Is it possible to “rehabilitate” English so that it allows the living world breath? Here is an analogy that captures the scale of the challenge. When the Hebrews wandered in the desert after the Exodus they fashioned a tabernacle—a great tent with walls of woven cloth and animal skins—to “house” the presence of the living God. The material structure of the tabernacle meant that its sides could swell with the movement of the air; it could, you might say, billow with the breath of the living God. The tabernacle’s structure “confessed” God’s freedom. Years later when the people of Israel built a temple of stone (a project challenged by early prophetic voices) those stone walls tempted Israel to imagine a captive deity. I’m not suggesting they did this on the conscious level. I’m suggesting that the material structure of a temple with solid unmoving walls permitted the human imagination to meet the living God on terms that no longer allowed that God to breathe.

In a similar way, indigenous languages offer a tabernacle to the world, a syntax that can billow with the breath of bugs, animals, plants, trees, rocks, rivers, and more. English, unfortunately, has a syntax of stone that doesn’t allow the living world to breathe. The question of “rehabilitating” the English language is the question of how to renovate stone walls so they can billow. I won’t say it’s impossible, but it is surely an imposing challenge. Audre Lorde believed “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And in some ways English is BOTH: it is that tool by which we name-know the world and it becomes the house of meaning in which we live. So, I begin by admitting, I don’t know if our language can billow. And then I add, tentatively, what I have learned.

I do know it is possible to imagine, perceive, encounter the world as teeming with life. That truth actually announces itself on a wilderness hike, where the made-world recedes and the forest becomes again what, in truth, it always is: the living world. But even in the city it is possible to remind oneself relentlessly that the trees and grass, birds and bugs, rocks and squirrels, are beings in their own right. And that altogether they (and we!) are linked by an undulating—living—silver thread of relatedness. In my mind, I have seen-felt this at times. I am slowly teaching myself to acknowledge the woven flame of Life that joins all of us together. It is there, if we patiently and persistently invite ourselves to notice.

Yet that patience and persistence is anchored nonetheless in the uncomfortable awareness that the words of the English language which I have so loved all my life are, at best (at least at present?), ambiguous allies in the work of liberation. But perhaps they, too, are entangled in the service of an exploitation to which they never consented. So, I allow myself to wonder whether the words themselves are, like me, waiting for the opportunity to testify to life’s teeming vitality. Is it possible that English might be interested and able to become an accomplice in undoing our fall? I don’t know. But I dare to wonder.

Lastly, we die. Honestly, I suspect it was our dawning awareness of death that caused us to “fall apart.” So far as we can tell, animals near death—whether by injury, disease, or age—can sense in some nonverbal way that their end is near. Other animals in their group may sense this impending death as well. It seems likely that as the complexity of an animal’s cognition rises, so does its attentiveness to mortality. However, only humans seem to have a long-term anticipatory sense of death. Typically, from our teenage years onward we understand that everyone dies—including those we love, and ultimately including us.

As this awareness unfolded in the minds of our distant forebears, it proved a decisive evolutionary leap forward—at a precipitous cost. This awareness arguably amplified human creativity, technological drive, and social cohesion. If necessity is the mother of invention, then death is perhaps the mother of necessity. But there are legitimate ways to meet the challenge of death and illegitimate ones. “Falling apart” strikes me as illegitimate.

By wishing, imagining, declaring that we are more than animals—that we are somehow not really embedded in nature but somehow above nature and destined for eternal life, we may protect ourselves from the existential anxiety of death, but we do so by setting in motion a perceptual shift that fundamentally alters our relationship with the world. No longer regarding ourselves as PART of it (we “fell APART”!), we end up acting in ways that reinforce that notion of separateness. Even as science tells us from multiple vantage points that we are nature, to maintain our apartness we act in ways that deny what we know.

We know now how entirely cyclical nature is. From seasons to ecosystems, life moves forward in circles. Everything that arises in nature is fashioned from nature and returns (by death or other process) to nature to “birth” the next generation of life. As noted above, we carry in our bodies the “recycled”/”reborn” matter of earlier lives: from dinosaurs to daffodils; from redwoods to robins; from mammoths to microbes. We are the living past, the vital present, and the—

Oops. No. We ought also to be the “pledge of the future.” But when we die, we do everything possible to break the cycle. To insist, with our dying breath—and after that breath is gone—that we are NOT nature. We embalm our bodies, enclose them in caskets set inside concrete liners, to make damn sure that nature’s generosity ends with us.

Martin Luther defined sin as incurvatus se: the state of being turned inward upon oneself. To do so in life is regrettable. To be buried in ways that seek to place us incurvatus se in perpetuity is a monstrous denial of who we are: human beings wrought of humus. Sallie McFague defined sin as “being out of place.” Is there anywhere in the whole wide world that is more “out of place” than to be buried in a manner that preserves our rupture from the world for as long as possible?

My point here is NOT foremost to criticize burial practices. (Although you can bet, I intend to make plans for my body to be rejoined to the Earth community in all its parts and pieces upon my demise.) My point is to wake us up to the extent to which we have fallen apart. These practices are now deeply embedded in our culture, religion, and ritual. We are captive to them: it is far easier to bury a body APART from the very world that provided that body to us, than to bury a body in a way that returns it to the world in reverent gratitude.

Listen, this is personal. Barely a year ago the casket holding my mother’s body was set in a concrete vault alongside the vault that holds my brother’s casket from two decades earlier and next to the space that will one day hold the vault that will receive the casket bearing my father’s body. In the cemetery where many of the bodies of my extended family are similarly entombed. This is what it means to be captive to cultural practices dressed up in sacred ritual … that, in fact, betray us.

Even if we can’t practically alter this in the short term, we cannot afford to hide from this most uncomfortable truth: the way we bury our dead harnesses the energy of this most liminal moment and uses it to buttress the lie that is killing the planet that is our only source of life. The way we bury our dead reinforces a worldview that may well make life impossible for coming generations. What is holy about that?! I am asking less in anger than in anguish. Why do we—in this most sacred moment—continue to aid and abet the lie that will surely undermine life for those yet to come?

Ironically … insidiously is more accurate, the industrialization and commercialization of funeral practices have grown in their capacity to preserve our apartness almost in step with the science that has increasingly demonstrated our togetherness with nature.

So, what do we do?

Here is my overarching claim restating briefly and clearly. We are entangled in a grand lie. We did not invent it. It preceded us. It shaped us. We are not guilty for being entangled. But we are responsible for trying to disentangle ourselves (even if we fail). Because the lie has caused untold damage to beings past and present and poses an existential threat to all beings in the future. The lie claims that we are in some way “separate” from nature. Are we distinct, unique, diverse? Yes! But not separate. At all. We are interwoven with the rest of this world from before our birth until after our death. We fell apart. But that fall has festered into a mortal wound in our worldview. We need to live beyond the lie. We need to embrace our connectedness. But how?

One path is grief. As I suggested in Grief-stricken—and Grace, this is an essential path, because (in this present moment) any attempt to reclaim our connectedness while shielding ourselves from grief is doomed to fail. There is so much grief across this planet there is no avoiding it. If we aren’t grieving, we haven’t connected in any authentic way with the whole of life.

Nevertheless, as Rumi writes, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.” So, alongside grief there are a thousand ways to reconnect. Choose to live (far) more simply; start small; go slowly; go far. Learn the names of the trees on your property or on your street; they are, after all, your neighbors. Give up industrial-produced meat; few processes objectify animals more horrifically than this. Choose to buy only free-range eggs. Avoid plastic like the plague it is; the planet will be grateful. Plant a pollinator garden; learn the names of the plants and try to identify the pollinators that come to visit.

Dare to push back against all the nouns; as you walk through the woods or the city, imagine that silver thread of flame linking everything together, including you. Imagine it until it becomes true for you. (Believe me, it’s already true for the world.) Be intentional about pausing to star gaze now and then, and remember that the iron in your blood in close kin to those twinkling lights. After you finish a meal, take a moment and thank the microbes about to play out a flash mob in your gut. Educate yourself on a green burial and decide if you can make a plan to give your body back to the earth when you die. And any of these ideas—and more—are done with deeper joy when done with others. Find a community and get reconnected to Earth—together.

We fell apart. But “there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.” The entire Earth community is waiting. Look, they even left the light on.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.