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#106: Destruction & Resurrection
The developers in my town have torn down a strip of my childhood, the trees have been killed, as have the animals who called their canopies home. I reflect on this strange world we find ourselves inhabiting, where the natural is disregarded, plundered, exploited, and razed — and the artificial is worshipped, protected, and forever exalted.
When I was a child, I was particularly enchanted, and in quick succession horrified, by a VHS tape I found at my grandmother Gwendolyn’s home, containing a film you might recall, titled FernGully.
FernGully told the story of a group of peaceful tree dwellers — mythical faeries — exuberant beings, who existed in harmony, free of industry, noise, and pollution— until evil arrived in the form of capitalism and forced deforestation and death upon them.
The businessmen, gruff, unfeeling beings — or perhaps beings who had lost touch with the empathy with which I believe we are all born — saw in that beautiful oasis only the potential for personal gain and decided to destroy everything that lived among those trees in the pursuit of profit. It is no wonder I grew into such an ardent leftist given my early viewing materials in the late 1990s.
I remember FernGully now as a premonition, a warning of the world that has come and will continue coming for us all. It is now retold again and again in so many different forms — Pocahontas, Avatar, in the poems of W.S. Merwin, and the essays of Audre Lorde — and with good reason, as we continue to watch titans (too generous a word) of capitalism and business plunder and destroy every living thing, poisoning the air we breathe, making our beautiful blue-green planet increasingly unlivable.
“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”
