There are curious patterns of thought and feeling in our society in which we develop intense affinities for very limited natural phenomena. Say someone really likes a certain beautiful flower or shrub, and then acts to preserve or reproduce that plant, protecting it and nurturing it, often to the exclusion of other plants. Or someone's parent has an intense affinity for a certain plant, and then that someone acts to preserve that plant out of a tenderness for the parent, as it becomes an extension of the parent that even outlasts the parent's lifetime. Where did that sensitivity for all of life go?
These patterns on their own are one thing, but then they can combine and over constant repetition and longer timeframes, lead to quite profound and efficacious accumulations. It is very easy to influence and effect nature, for example merely maintaining a compost pile, or piling up a mound of rocks can create a new habitat for snakes and spiders, whose population in the area take off, and these effects grow more profound the greater the mass and breadth of them are involved. Take for example the desire for a certain vegetable, which places it upon a pedestal in a certain form, with a preferred appearance and taste and so on.
And then couple that desire with a desire for a mass society to continuously expand, and with a desire to engage in commerce and encourage and exploit that expansion, and soon enough you are moving the entire earth and accumulating vast fields of this specific vegetable, which affects the soil in its own specific way, and provides the desire and sustenance for its own set of insects or rodents or any other kind of "pest," which then proliferate in turn.
And the depletion of the soil and the proliferation of "pests" pulls together their own desires for mass quantities of fertilizer and pesticide and fencing and infrastructure, which itself is pulling desires for manufacturing and fossil fuels and all the rest, which are pulling their own desires together for transportation and heavy machinery, and all the like, and then the sum of all of these things is encouraging the desire to accelerate reproduction and expand and attend to their maintenance and reproduction.
The specificity and mass that is involved in encouraging a limited swathe of this limited life field tends to produce a wave effect, in which desire and needs set huge and complicated chains of manipulation into motion, and this motion pulls everything into it and transforms the earth with it. And soon enough, these waves grow larger and larger, until their forces are overwhelming and have the potential to topple whole societies, as we see with that great wave, climate change, which with the mass movement of carbon, and the heat that it generates, can theoretically wipe out the vast web of life persisting in the current chunk of geological time.
If we really did have a mass sensitivity for all of life, the negative feedback would have kicked in long ago in a great enough amount, and we would have relaxed our limited desires in favor of the desire for balance and stability. So it is worth repeating the question: where did that sensitivity go?
