THE GREAT HEALING
Five Compassions That Can Save Our World
In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also reveals our singular solution.
Five Compassions are our path to that solution.
Something Is Very Seriously Wrong
For every species — even us humans — awareness of new threats entering our environment is essential. Understanding those threats and then adapting by finding and implementing solutions, enables us to survive.
It’s easy for us to become complacent as it appears we’ve done a thorough job taking control of our planet. There are over 7 billion humans alive today. We’ve done a pretty good job adapting.
Or so it would seem.
Say someone showed you a photo of this fish and you wanted to find out where she lives, what she does for fun, and what that weird thing is sticking out of her head:
You can easily find out.
She’s a triplewart sea devil who swims around in the deep ocean. By deep, I mean at depths down to 15,000 feet. In a swimming pool, the water pressure at a depth of 10 feet is .3 atmospheres (atm), which is about 4 pounds of force per square inch on your body. When you swim underwater along the bottom in the deep end you may feel a little pressure, especially in your ears. Oceanic water pressure at 15,000 feet is around 459 atm or 6,749 pounds of force per square inch.2 How is a creature built to withstand that kind of pressure? We have to submerge in a mini-submarine protected by a specially designed shell to visit her in order to avoid being instantly pancaked by the water pressure — and here she is looking at us.
With eyes. How do those eyes withstand this tremendous pressure? How are they made? Blue eyes straight from Game of Thrones…
Sunlight fades as you descend in the ocean. Aqua-blue water darkens as more and more water separates you from sunlight until, at around 650 feet down you leave the photic zone and descend into a depth where sunlight no longer penetrates.3 You find yourself immersed in ocean darkness. Complete wet blackness.
This triplewart sea devil — let’s call her Hazel — lives here. She will never see sunlight. She navigates in perennial darkness. So, she has a light sticking out of her head.
Is that to avoid bumping into rocks? Hazel’s face looks like she’s run into more than a few. Is it to illuminate her features to attract a potential mate? She’s swimming solo. Should she consider suspending it a bit further back to cast a more diffuse light on her facial features, perhaps creating a more sex-appealing allure for that chance encounter?
How did that light get there? Did it start as a growth that somehow lit up and elongated over several thousand generations until at last, arriving at the optimal hanging lantern position? Is it a tactile appendage, like ET’s finger?
It turns out that this light’s appendage is an evolution of the triplewart sea devil anglerfish’s dorsal fin. And Hazel keeps it suspended right where it is with good reason. Right in front of her mouth.
We’ve got the technology and we’ve got the skills. Whatever I want to know about triplewart sea devils like Hazel, if someone knows it, it’s not difficult to find out.
Hazel is indeed a female. Her ‘light’ is actually an aggregation of glowing bioluminescent bacteria that attracts other fish who mistake it for prey.5 They swim in to eat it, only to become Hazel’s meal in short order.
Now that I know a little bit about Hazel, I’m concerned about her and this is why.
It turns out that we humans can and do extend our reach, sinking into Hazel’s depths without a submersible. Plastic bags, as well as some of the other countless varieties of discarded plastic that we’re filling the oceans with, drift current-carried into her depths.6 7 Non-biodegradable translucent phantoms appear like jellyfish, a food staple of many fish. Other small, often brightly colored, plastic objects descend like food remnants, appearing like torn bits of fish that have fallen prey to and been partially devoured by surface dwellers above. These objects are consumed by fish like tuna and whales in the surface depths, and by the denizens of the lower depths, like Hazel.8 9
If during her wandering, a bit of baggie appears before Hazel’s glow and she eats it, it’ll coat her stomach like some horrible wallpaper or laminate that she can’t redecorate away. It’ll adhere, indigestible, covering her stomach lining or clogging her intestine like those of so many of the whales beaching themselves10 11 or the fish fishermen are catching, or sea birds like these on Midway atoll: youtube.com/watch?v=ozBE-ZPw18c 12
Hazel’s at risk because she’s not aware of this new threat. It took her countless generations to get her lantern light glowing bright and well. She’s eaten very little that was not food to sustain her. Will she and her fellow triplewart sea devils learn to distinguish prey from plastic? Or will they perish in silent agony having failed to figure it out?
For every species — even us humans — awareness of new threats entering our environment is essential. Understanding those threats and then adapting by finding and implementing solutions, enables us to survive.
It’s easy for us to become complacent as it appears we’ve done a thorough job taking control of our planet. There are over 7 billion humans alive today. We’ve done a pretty good job adapting.
Or so it would seem.
Animals. Why is it, then, that right now, thousands of species are in critical decline, either going extinct or facing extinction? The Living Planet Report 2018 from the World Wildlife Fund reveals “an astonishing 60% decline in the size of populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians in just over 40 years.”13 60%... We have the technology, a tremendous toolset the likes of which this world has never before seen. We can learn about — even visit and experience first-hand — fascinating creatures. So how is it we can’t seem to do something to stop their demise? Why is this happening?
Moreover, how is it that billions of other creatures — animals in human care — are enduring lives of incessant cruelty and suffering on factory farms? How have we come to this?
Self. Why is it that so many of our teenagers have grown so overweight that they are unable to run at a moderate pace for six minutes on a treadmill, or do a single push up, their bodies so bloated they hesitate to take their t-shirts off when swimming at a beach or public pool? Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and dementia, even adjusted per capita, are at record highs. Seventeen million people die each year from heart attack, stroke, or other cardiovascular diseases. Over 35% of adults in West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana are obese, and the rate is now 30% or higher in 25 states according to a 2017 State of Obesity report.14
In an era of unprecedented health awareness and nutritional understanding, why are so many of us in poor health? If you are a patient diagnosed with one or more of these conditions, why is it your doctor will treat your symptoms but probably not adequately inform you about the causes? And what are the causes? What’s really going on?
Land. When you fly over or drive across our country, you may notice the big farms that cover the prairie, and how vast their crop acreage is. Corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see. When the crops have been harvested, all you witness is brown, exposed soil baking in the sun. Topsoil, the soil that every plant grows from, takes millions of years to accumulate — millions of years. The most productive soil in the world is prairie soil. While 7% of the world’s land is prairie soil, when the United States looked at the cards it was dealt in the game of Soil Poker, we drew a winning hand — 22.5% of our landscape is prairie soil.15 Yet in just the last 100 years, we’ve managed to lose most of it. Soil degradation has intensified to the point where, over just the last 40 years, 30% of the world’s cropland — over one billion acres — has been abandoned as unusable.16
The Deputy Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations stated in December, 2017, that farming will end in 60 years given the current rate of soil degradation because the world’s topsoil will be gone.17 How is this happening?
Community. And what has happened to our communities? Passing through a rural small town, chances are it is not a tourist destination. Even if a highway runs through it or nearby, passersby tend to pass on by. But that town grew to town size because it once had a vibrant local economy which most probably included small farms and farming families. People’s needs supported an array of businesses, shops and stores, Main Street and all the streets branching out from it. It was a quiet, pleasant, attractive place to live. Until the decline.
There were 6.8 million farms in America in 1935. There are less than 2.1 million today.18 Many millions fewer American families now make their livelihood farming. Their loss forced most of the town’s businesses to shut their doors. The modern crop farms, which have expanded vastly in size and now dominate the landscape, need very few workers to operate. So, what has happened to American livelihoods? And not just in rural communities. Why are so many of our urban communities impoverished and blighted?
How is it that 55% of the zip codes across America are now defined as food deserts — areas where residents do not have local access to supermarkets, let alone healthy food?19 What are the real consequences of loss of livelihood and loss of community? What is preventing these rural towns and urban neighborhoods from reinvigorating themselves and making a comeback?
Democracy in America is in need of a comeback because it’s also under threat. In a sense, democracy — like animals, humans, soil and crops — is a living, fluid, evolving organism. It doesn’t exist everywhere, and where it does, it can be impermanent. It’s different in every country based on the interplay of the peoples and cultures and belief systems from which it spawned. Some countries have robust competitive democracies, while in others democracy has disappeared or exists in name only with the ruling party propagandizing its veneer, masking an underlying totalitarian or fascist state of affairs. Why, in the Internet era with so much information available to us and flowing so freely, has democracy fallen so short and failed so many?
Why are so many citizen majorities in democracies underrepresented, their voices muted — the promise of the issues they support suppressed and unrealized? What has happened to majority rule in America?
Each of these questions, on its own, calls out a significant problem. The questions, and their underlying problems, may seem unrelated — but they’re not. They are all interrelated. The problems they call into question are each in turn just a symptom, an aspect, of something larger still.
Something is very seriously wrong.
Excerpt from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, August 2019. Copyright ©2019 by Stephen Erickson.
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Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.
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1 © Solvin Zankl
2 Ocean Pressure Calculator http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/gallery/view.jsp?id=f5c3dd7514bf620a1b85450d2ae374b1
3 Allowing photosynthesis.
4 © Solvin Zankl
5 Solvin Zankl and Biographic, See the Weird and Fascinating Deep-Sea Creatures That Live in Constant Darkness, Biographic, Nov. 7, 2016
6 Harold Johnson, Plastics in the Ocean: How Dense Are We? Scientific American, Aug. 16, 2012 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/plastics-in-the-ocean-how-dense-are-we/
7 Sarah Zielinski, Your Garbage is Polluting Even the Deep, Remote Reaches of the Ocean Smithsonian.com Apr. 30, 2014 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/garbage-polluting-deep-remote-ocean-180951271/
8 Fiona Harvey, Fish Mistaking Plastic Debris in Ocean for Food, Study Finds, The Guardian, Marine Life, Aug. 16, 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/16/fish-confusing-plastic-debris-in-ocean-for-food-study-finds#comments
“Matthew Savoca, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and lead author of the study, told the Guardian: ‘When plastic floats at sea its surface gets colonised by algae within days or weeks, a process known as biofouling. Previous research has shown that this algae produces and emits DMS, an algal based compound that certain marine animals use to find food. [The research shows] plastic may be more deceptive to fish than previously thought. If plastic both looks and smells like food, it is more difficult for animals like fish to distinguish it as not food.’”
9 Alina M. Wieczorek, Liam Morrison, Peter L. Croot, et al. Frequency of Microplastics in Mesopelagic Fishes from the Northwest Atlantic, Frontiers in Marine Science, Feb. 19, 2018 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.00039/full
10 Matthew Robinson, Dead Whale Found with 40 Kilograms of Plastic Bags in Its Stomach, CNN, Mar. 18, 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/18/asia/dead-whale-philippines-40kg-plastic-stomach-intl-scli/
11 Lee Moran. This Sperm Whale was Found Dead with 64 Pounds of Trash in its Digestive System, Huffington Post, Apr. 7, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dead-sperm-whale-plastic-spain_us_5ac8b736e4b09d0a11942cd4
12 Please watch Midway, a 4-minute documentary film by Chris Jordan.
Chris asks each of us, "Do we have the courage to face the realities of our time? And allow ourselves to feel deeply enough that it transforms us and our future?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozBE-ZPw18c
13 World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report 2018, https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2018
14 The State of Obesity 2017, Trust For America’s Health, Reports, August 2017 http://healthyamericans.org/reports/stateofobesity2017/
15 Dr. John Reganold, Regents Professor of Soil Science, Washington State University. Quoted from his appearance in the documentary film Symphony of the Soil, Directed, Written and Produced by Deborah Koons Garcia, Lily Films, 2012
16 David Pimental, Michael Burgess, Soil Erosion Threatens Food Production, Agriculture 2013, 3, 443-463; doi:10.3390 Aug. 8, 2013 https://www.bmbf.de/files/agriculture-03-00443.pdf
17 Chris Arsenault, Only 60 Years of Farming Left if Soil Degradation Continues, Reuters, as reported in Scientific American, Dec. 9, 2017 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/#
18 Farming and Farm Income, USDA, Economic Research Service using data from USDA, National Agriculture Statistics Service, Censuses of Agriculture (through 2012) and Farms and Land in farms: 2016 Summary. 2016 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income/
19 Richard Florida, It’s Not the Food Deserts: It’s the Inequality, CityLab, Jan. 18, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/its-not-the-food-deserts-its-the-inequality/550793/