Pat Hynes, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, wrote an op-ed piece in the Greenfield Recorder about work to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons and looked to the way a forest of trees cooperates as a model for human behavior.
In that same issue of the Recorder was an article about a couple with a prominent BLM sign that keeps getting defaced. Previous issues had articles about John Turner’s massacre of a Native American village as people wonder if Turner’s Falls is really such a good name for that local town.
This is the op-ed piece I wrote referring to all that.
I share Pat Hynes’s horror at the current state of global nuclear arsenals. I also share her wonder at the ways the trees in the forest communicate. I mean even the tomato plants in my garden are talking to each other for their mutual benefit by sending chemical messages through the soil.
But I think the forests also illustrate the real problem with nuclear proliferation. Those amazing technologies employed by the trees to help each other is also used to wage war amongst the different species. The evergreens and the deciduous trees are fighting for control of the forest, just as my tomatoes are battling the weeds for my garden. The forest pines have no problem using their needles to create a soil inhospitable to oaks.
The lush variety and wonder of our local woods has come about due to a balance of power, as each species uses its own weapons and networks to compete with the others.
In much the same ways different cultures have both lived and fought through human history. In much the same way the nuclear powers co-exist today. But, as Pat Hynes points out, it really has gone too far, it really is very scary.
Let’s go back to the Japanese and Americans in WW II. Comparing us to trees, the question then is, were we just common members of the same species who should work for a common good? Or members of different species who see each other as threats?
Clearly at that time we saw each other as threats and used our technologies accordingly. Them at Pearl Harbor, us at Hiroshima.
Clearly if we want to save the planet as being fit for human habitation we need to do the equivalent of having oaks and pines agree to work together. This will not be easy.
The problem with Japan and America at the end of WW II is we didn’t understand each other. A Japanese friend of mine once recommended a book to better understand Japanese culture and thinking. It was called the “Chrysanthemum and the Sword” by Ruth Benedict. The book itself is interesting and informative, but what I found even more interesting is how it came to be written.
It was written by an anthropologist who was hired by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1946. We really were looking for answers, for clues to understand the “them.” Did it work?
Well I believe it did, for it shaped the thinking of American – Japanese relations after the war. Unlike my father who witnessed the death and destruction in the Pacific caused by the clash of our nations, I only knew a World where the Japanese were our friends. It’s actually hard for me to imagine the Japan that my father knew.
I believe it is this sort of cross-cultural understanding that will be vital in curing our global ills.
I just finished reading “Mayflower” by Nathaniel Philbrick. It is all about understanding the cultural clashes between the Puritans and the Native Americans. And just as Pat Hynes points out about WW II days, there were those then that understood and tried to reach less deadly solutions to the conflicts. But the majority simply didn’t understand, or even care to understand. The atrocities of King Phillip’s War, on both sides, were the result of that. What John Turner did to the Native Americans at what is now Turner’s Falls was exactly the same as what we did at Hiroshima. And for the exact same reasons.
Sigh, it goes on and on. Robert McNamara, a main architect of the Viet Nam War, later went to North Vietnam to try to better understand his counterpart there. Guess what? There was a big misunderstanding. We didn’t understand that it really was just a civil war in a small country. They didn’t understand why giant America cared so much about their small civil war. They didn’t grasp the weight of the Cold War on our psyche.
We were worried about nuclear Armageddon and saw Viet Nam as part of that. I grew up practicing hiding under my Long Island desk in case a nuke was dropped on NYC, which seemed a real possibility at the time.
Can we learn to understand each other on a global scale? Bringing it closer to home, can the left-leaning people of Massachusetts learn to understand why the right-leaning people hate us so? Can the owners of the BLM sign in Orange understand the person who keeps defacing it?
