When it occurred to me that the animals are swimming
around in the water in the oceans in our bodies.
And another had been found, another ocean on the planet,
given that our blood is just like the Atlantic.
- Modest Mouse
, "3rd Planet"
Everybody knows we're mostly water. But I remember the kind of mystic revelation that hit me the first time I read that scene in J.D. Salinger's short story "Teddy" where the ten-year-old describes watching his little sister drinking milk, how he suddenly saw that she was God and the milk was God, and "all she was doing was pouring God into God." David Suzuki echoes this startling but simple truth when he writes in his book, The Sacred Balance
, that "we are intimately fused to our surroundings and the notion of separateness or isolation is an illusion." Our physical being weaves us intimately into the world of air, water, soil and sun, and as Suzuki says, "these four 'sacred elements' are created, cleansed and renewed by the web of life itself."When we eat, we participate with Spirit and the gods in a dance of growth, death, decay and rebirth, as even our waste returns eventually to the land to nourish and enrich the soil from which our food grows. Plants transform the energy gifted to them by the sun into forms that can be absorbed and exchanged, and when we work, we release that energy again through the efforts of our hands, legs, mouths and minds to shape the world. Our breath is the breath of our ancestors, but also of the atmosphere and the weather, the winds and storms that encircle the planet and rustle the leaves of the tree just outside the window. And when we drink of those waters that well up from the earth, blessed, guarded and sustained by the gods and goddesses of the oceans and the holy springs and the caves of the underworld, all we are doing is pouring god into god.
Because if it's fair to characterize environmentalism as a kind of spiritual commitment (one might even use the word "faith"), then we must also remember the long-unspoken religion of consumer capitalism against which it struggles. In the face of our own arrogance, I can't hold out much hope that we will somehow be the saviors of the world. Instead, all I can do is seek humility, and do every single little thing I can to step out of the cycle of harm and abuse and ignorance and greed that spins and spins off in every direction. As for the rest, I can only sigh deeply in my grief and say to myself, Let go, and let Gaia. If humanity's salvation as a species doesn't lie in the hands of our Mother, then at least I can go out singing and dancing and making love in the grass under her arched blue skies. 
"Let me get this straight," this Other Ali would say. "You're telling me that our government, the government of the United States of America, invented an elaborate lie about global warming as early as the 1970s, then conspired to spread this lie all across the world, convincing scientists from every industrialized nation to 'independently verify' such a concept through hundreds of studies, all conducted independently. Then, when the rest of the world has completely fallen for this thoroughly convincing lie and everyone begins signing silly Kyoto Protocols and such nonsense, you know, cutting emissions, designing more energy-efficient vehicles, the U.S. government--the same government that supposedly conspired to tell this Lie of Global Warming in the first place--refuses to play along and instead decides to reject the whole idea, to reduce regulations and to encourage hugely wasteful and backwards industry models that only serve to put our manufacturing and technology industries far behind foreign competition. Despite this, our government persists, cleverly, in being very vocal in the fake denial of the lie they conspired to create and disseminate, and this goes on for decades and decades (meanwhile, the country's weathermen and meteorologists are in on it, too, reporting on the ever-increasing number of 'record-breaking heat waves' and extreme weather conditions all over the world). All of this, so that now, when even fellow American citizens have finally come to believe the lie the government has been telling them by way of everyone-except-the-government, they can make a little money off the fad of shopping for organic tomatoes and driving foreign-built hybrid cars. This is the story you want me to believe?
This idea of story-shaping came up again for me recently while reading Daniel Quinn's novel, Ishmael, in which the narrator engages in a kind of Socratic dialogue with a telepathic gorilla, exploring concepts of identity, captivity, mythology, history, culture and progress in the modern mind. Over the course of the novel, Ishmael and the narrator deconstruct vast assumptions inherent in "Taker" mythology--about how things came to be this way, about man's rightful possession of the world, about his cultural amnesia and dismissal of the past, about his ability to know definitively the one right way to live while also professing a fundamental ignorance that leads him to destroy the very world he would transform into a utopia... And while all of this is interesting, most of it was also very familiar to me already. I'd already wondered at the oddness of the Genesis story about the Tree of Knowledge and the Fall of Man. I'd already questioned the paradox of asserting man's unconditional and rightful control over the world, while mourning his apparent incompetence at fulfilling what was supposedly his destiny. I'd already learned, by watching nature all my young life, about the very simple "peace-keeping law" of live-and-let-live, of belonging to the world rather than trying to claim it for your own. (In fact, I'd even written a sonnet in high school that began: "I know I cannot claim this world as mine...")