What I am about to confess may sound controversial or inappropriate, some readers might consider it even immoral. When I saw the photographs of the animals burnt to death and the helpless inhabitants fleeing their homes in Australia’s raging bushfires at the same time reading eyewitness accounts of the amount of devastation, my heart grieved more for the animals than for the people.
I struggle to justify this overwhelming emotion of deepest sympathy for the senseless death of animals while my affection for the people who are unmistakably victims too is hardly aroused. I can only say these things of course with unfairness and a disappointing lack of profounder understanding.
Is it because, in a world that is chiefly swayed by human hubris and commercial instinct, the utter innocence of animals, their guiltlessness weighs more on the conscience than the catastrophes that befall us on account of our inadvertent complicity and irresponsibility?
These severe qualms of conscience perhaps can be attributed to one’s having a pet. However unceremonious and casual keeping a pet in one’s house it does alter in some fashion one’s perception of and feeling for the non-human species. I have now an incurable tendency to see in other animals the likeness of my cat and my sister’s dog who’s very close to me that any visible pain inflicted on other sentient beings seems to be somehow inflicted on my own pets.
The tragedy of all this man-induced climate change which encompasses other living beings is analogous to the experiences of early colonialism: the first encounters between European colonialists and indigenous peoples which resulted in the extermination of the latter. But this time the so-called civilized world is the colonialist and the destruction is far more ruthless and wide-ranging which includes not only the slayed but also the slayer. Although global governments and multinational corporations carry the greater responsibility for this on-going sacrilegious slaughter, we the people are not exempted from complicity, as we gain, directly and indirectly, duplicitous privileges and depraved values from this present soulless system (neoliberalism, corporate capitalism, however you want to call it) which contribute largely to this situation.
A “conservative estimate” of the animals killed numbers at around a billion and a half while the land consumed by the blazes measures more than five million hectares. It’s difficult to contemplate such tremendous proportions without a feeling of dizziness and dread. If this is not a nightmare, I don’t know what it is.
The Sydney section of the non-violent resistance movement Extinction Rebellion posted heartbreaking photographs of animals that barely survived the blazes. A baby Koala hugging its half-conscious mother, a burnt kangaroo seemingly asking a man for help, another kangaroo escaping the wildfires…
If animals could articulate their pain, if animals were gifted with thought and language, they would express their feelings in these words of an old Yuma Indian, Chiparopai, in the beginning of the twentieth century, speaking of the ravages done by the white colonialists:
“Yes—we know that when you come, we die.”
If forgiveness is applicable only in the human world; if it is exclusive only between humans, then forgiveness is a conceit; and the unhappy natural background will be beyond redemption. But if we can outgrow a little our pride, pay attention to outside ourselves, maybe a slender chance is possible. If we beg forgiveness of the animals, plants, and trees. It may sound preposterous. It is only through forgiveness that we can save ourselves from ourselves.
“My brother asked the birds to forgive him: that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side –a little happier, anyway– and children and all animals, if you yourself were nobler than you are now. It’s all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
To ask forgiveness is to admit our guilt. It consists in not merely confessing our inflictions but in allowing ourselves to be humbled in recognizing that we need the animals, the plants, and the trees more than they need us.