In section XVI of “The Ridge,” a long narrative sequence that serves as bookend to his 2018 essay, “The Mind of the Wild,” in the slim volume Learning to Die (University of Regina Press), Robert Bringhurst writes: “…You, / like the rest of us, are condemned / to be what we are, whatever that is: / the plastic and devious species / we’re born as. / So it might be time to ask: / How many ways could there be, / after all, to be human?” At a fundamental level, he distinguishes between “you,” the individual, the reader, and “the plastic and devious species,” which he characterizes throughout the sequence as what artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun has called “colonial super predator.” Bringhurst continues, “How many ways can any one human / juggle being both the things a human is: / a person and a species—this three-faced, / or thirty-faced, smart-ass, dumb-shit, / runaway species, loving and gang-raping, / fleecing and eulogizing the world?” As a species we are plastic, devious, gang-raping, fleecing while simultaneously mourning the world we have destroyed. And we seem incapable of resolving this paradox. Many of us who love the natural world and have been long-time committed activists, have inevitably had such dark moments of reflection, a deep misanthropic surge of anger and despair against our own species. This anger is captured in Bringhurst’s two-syllable compound Anglo-Saxon epithets—”smart-ass,” “dumb-shit”—and the slapped, shifting quality of the alternating vowels, the long a’s and e’s.
As in Learning to Die, his analogies and examples drawn from our more than human kin are striking and apt. In “The Mind of the Wild,” he describes the Oriental wasp, Vespa orientalis, which has pigmented stripes on its body that allow it to harvest sunlight like tiny organic solar panels; he then uses this as an example of how other species will be able to adapt to a rapidly heating planet, unlike us, who, as a species, seem headed for extinction. In “The Ridge” for example, Bringhurst asks why we “ordinary murderers” who “slaughter other beings daily / and cut them up and eat them,” “shiver” when learning of the spider wasps, which colonize the bodies of spiders to incubate their young. Yet he points out that “The advantage that all of them – cowbirds / and spider wasps, rusts, and the rest of them — / have that we’ve lost is what you didn’t / learn but should have learned / in school to call economy of scale.”
Here emerges a somewhat didactic, avuncular tone which comes and goes throughout the collection, which I resist: I suspect many of Bringhurst’s readers are familiar with the concept of scale in an environmental context: to reference another of his wonderful analogies, one human burning four cords of wood is not going to damage the planet; but scaled up to eight billion humans, this burning has led us to global heating, with parts per million of CO 2 in the atmosphere currently at 421.42 (as of 7 June 2023). This then leads Bringhurst to the reflection that we burn too much because “we are / that much too many. / This means killing a few million will not help, no matter which few million you might choose. Killing / six billion would help quite a lot— / but which six billion will it be? There are / no answers to this question” (“The Ridge”). Throughout, humans are presented as “errant,” “metastasizing,” cancerous, parasitic growth while a future earth without humans is celebrated; as in Learning to Die, we are encouraged to be stoic, to recognize that we, as a human species, will die, but the earth and life will continue, better off without us.
Bios
Kim Trainor
Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. A thin fire runs through me appeared with icehouse poetry in 2023. Her poems have appeared in Anthropocenes (AHIP), Ecocene, ISLE, Ecozon@, Dark Mountain (UK) and Fire Season I and II (Vancouver). Her poetry films have screened in Berlin, Athens, and Seattle. Her current project is “walk quietly / ts’ekw’unshun kws qututhun,” a guided walk at Hwlhits’um (Canoe Pass) in Delta, BC, featuring contributions from artists, scientists, and Hwlitsum and Cowichan knowledge holders. [updated in 2023]