Modern Americans: Detached From Life & Living In Hell

I feel like I have been fully awake in nature, but that someone or some group behind the scenes is stealing the best of my dreams. I was born after nuclear power was created. I was born after Edward Abbey recommended subversive violence to restore the balance between society and nature. I was born after Rachel Carson used her broad scientific knowledge to criticize the commercialization of science by pesticide and chemical companies. I was born to an Earth already well on its way to being despoiled. I have awakened into a nightmare, a post-nature existence of GMO seeds, chemtrails, weather modification, animal genetic engineering, large-scale oil spills, nuclear power plant meltdowns, nanotechnology imitating life, transhumanists featured in Time magazine, dried-up rivers, nuclear waste dumped into the oceans, human overconsumption and millions of cars that still burn gasoline. I could go on in a hundred directions with a hundred more examples of how humans are the conspiracy theory that is driving humanity to the brink of extinction again and again.

This nightmare is about to get worse for nature lovers who want to get away from society and into nature like Thoreau once did: The FCC has been selling low frequency access to super wifi companies that want to broadcast low-level microwave radiation for hundreds of miles into remote rural areas. This technology is already known to harm plants, disperse entire colonies of bees and make some people sick. Eventually, the plan is to blanket the entire Earth with wireless signal from space, so that everybody has access to the internet, so that every human can be identified, so that every inch of this planet can be logged, charted, analyzed and stored as data. For what? To unify the world and make it a better place? No. The push to turn all life on Earth into numbers stored in computers is only the logical continuation of what scientists in Thoreau's time were doing: Recording every bug, every bird, every type of animal. Dissecting, testing, experimenting, analyzing – that's what scientists do. This electronic monitoring and subsequent oppression of all life is only the latest and perhaps final step in the mad march of humans to subdue nature.

Will nature writing make a difference as the war between technologists and nature amplifies, expands, blows up and continues to an inevitable dead end? Well it could, but nature writing has to honestly assess humanity's parasitic activities on the Earth. We are an ungrateful species hell-bent on extracting and not replenishing. Humans have become the enemies of nature by backing science and thousands of corporations that produce thousands of toxic chemicals and materials for our desperate lives of shallow consumerism. We are assaulting nature by thirsting for more synthetic consumer products while using media and electronics to keep us insulated from the reality that we are driving our own species from this planet.

I feel that honest nature writing has to ask the following question: Do humans even know how to get out of this self-inflicted mess? If we haven't stopped ourselves yet from the behaviors causing widespread natural destruction across the planet, what is going to make us reform? Modern humans are addicted to the notion that science can save us, but science brought us to the brink. Either acts of God or non-human assistance are going to be necessary to restore the balance between humanity and nature. Modern humans are too self-absorbed, flattered when liked on Facebook and detached from a deep connection to nature to even notice how far over the edge modern society has gone. More and more, modern people are less and less in touch with reality: Put down the “Dumbphone,” stop texting, go outside and play and plant a tree! Shut down the nuclear power plants, the chemical sprayers, the cell phone towers, the wireless networks, the GMO and cloning labs and just look at what we have done to the Earth! We need a reset. Heaven help us.