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by
James P.Ricker
Political, & fr.
Gk. Politiea, fr. Poilit†s citizen, fr. Polis
city, state, akin to Skt. Pur rampart, Lith. Pilis castle.
from Merriam Webster’s 10th Collegiate Dictionary.
The California Desert Tortoise,
Gopherus aggassizii, makes its home in mid-size burrows, up
to twenty feet deep depending on soil conditions, one to a tortoise,
well away from any near (tortoise) neighbors. He or she will spend
most of her life, up to 90% of it, just hanging out inside her burrow,
waiting for the temperature to rise or the cactus to bloom, or for
those occasional springtime urges. It is a solitary but not a lonely
life. A tortoise has neighbors, relatives, rivals, and mates. A tortoise
habitat is a quiet place, but the local population, while not overly
demonstrative, is quite enough tortoises for the local available resources
and the thing is, they don’t go far from their homes, so the
population density of an area where tortoises live is the highest
it can be for a tortoise, and for the land he or she lives upon. But
not enough for us.
California’s state reptile
is in danger of becoming like California’s flag totem animal,
the grizzly bear: an extinct species. Drivers of off-road vehicles
run over the tortoises and their burrows in pursuit of recreation.
Tanks run over them in pursuit of national defense. Ravens from the
new landfills, new because the people of California have to throw
their trash somewhere, prey on the tortoises’ young. Tortoises
get smashed by cars traveling on the newer, wider roads because we
all are rushing off to important places where people have to go and
we don’t have time to stop for another living being just trying
to cross the street. We think that where we have to go is more important
than where the tortoise has to go. We think our polis is so important
that the tortoise polis, the city of sand and rock, the underground
city safe from the hot sun, is subject to the politics of our community,
the human polis of traffic management and national security. We decide
where the tortoise will be saved and how we will save the tortoise-opolis
for our own metropolis because we have some mistily perceived idea
that if the tortoise becomes extinct, our lives will be poorer somehow.
We do it with other animals,
too, and whole ecosystems now: wetlands and their avian fauna and
life-enhancing water purification systems; forests and their thirsty
soils which protect us from floods; jungle biodiversity which just
might contain the cancer cure in one of its plants or molds; wildernesses
which give us the natural spiritual sustenance we crave in what Lawrence
Hogue calls the “wild and lonely places;” all of these natural
places, plants, and animals which enhance our quality of life, which
indeed might be absolutely necessary for human life to sustain itself
at all. Bottom line for even the most ardent environmentalist, no
matter what they might say about the value of life or the spiritual
connection with the natural world, is that if we don’t have all
these cute little creatures which are not human around, it won’t
be as cool to be a human being.
My major political concern
today is that we are severely limiting our polis, the basic unit of
political life. The only political species in the habitat at present
is the human being. I’m not talking about animal rights. Rights
are granted to animals as part of the human political process. We
set humane standards for animal husbandry, or for experimentation
with animals, for example. There is a word, biocentrism, that
begins to approach the idea I am trying to get across, but that word
implies a center, albeit a more inclusive one; like the word anthropocentrism,
the word biocentrism is not an ecological term. An ecosystem
has no center; it is a constantly changing, interrelated, dynamic
whole - any center is merely a point of reference. Which brings us
to another question. Why should we change the polis?
The answer is pretty
dreary, but it’s all we got. The facts are that we are incapable
as a species of solving our problems of greed, cruelty, murder, rape,
genocide, discourtesy and ill health. Look at today’s newspaper
and pick a few. Our political life, whether it is centered on either
human instincts or higher human values like the ones found in cheap
bibles, is an utter failure on the personal or ecosystem level. Once
again, the reason we would even try the revolutionary, altruistic
outlook embedded in a multi-species polity is that it might make life
more bearable for us. It might even get us to heaven after we die.
Me, me, me.
The fun starts when we start
to think about crafting a polity that more closely resembles reality.
Shaping a political life which includes other species of life and
ecosystem processes (like the water cycle) as equal partners in our
political life need not involve anything other than shifting our point
of view; or to put it another way, decentralizing our point of view
where it concerns policy decisions, which are those decisions on our
polis -a city-state which, by including things other than human, becomes
everything. Here’s how:
Sadly, drearily, we will
have to give constitutional rights to other species and the earth
just like we gave rights to other human beings such as women and people
of color, but we should make the effort. We sould work to pass a constitutional
amendment and a declaration from the United Nations that emancipates
the natural world. Full rights for every creature on the planet and
the planet itself. Such a point of view, for that is all it is, probably
will not immediately change the way we do business. Look at the situation
today in the world for most women, and most people of color, and you
get the picture. But moving toward a decentralized, biologically diverse
policy point of view—expanding the polis—might make the
world a place where the newspaper is not something to be avoided.
In the hot sun, in the springtime,
in the dry wind, the tortoise looks straight ahead as she crosses
the road. Stop. Get out of your car and ask her where she is going.
Listen (this will take time). Get to the other side together. Don’t
ask why.
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Jim Ricker is a graduate student
at San Diego State University.
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