There’s something about self-immolation that strikes one as holy, as negating one’s presence on the earth, retracting the sin of living.
RIP David Buckel, gay rights attorney found dead in New York City, leaving behind a note decrying the “pollution ravag[ing] our planet,” and noting “my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
There’s been a good amount of study recently on the effects of climate change on mental health, finding symptoms akin to PTSD in some cases. If the science is to be believed, it is the appropriate scale of reaction, if not the type. Would that there were more people living with the kind of purpose that Buckel is trying to die with.
There’s the threat that as we live increasingly in a world of media, we will lose our grip on what remains decent in reality. There’s the inverse threat that as we live increasingly in a world of media, we become blind to what we are rendering indecent in reality. A perverse conflict cycle. As changes in climate are necessarily planetary-scale, we have no choice but to absorb the preponderance of these impacts through media, and that can be a passive, debilitating experience. It can become unhealthy in the mind to the same degree as society’s blindnesses become unhealthy to the planet.
The world seems too vast and hostile to determine, one can only determine oneself. A man goes up in smoke in a major metropolis and asks to be remembered as a warning. He negates himself, he retracts. He leaves a negative space where he would like something better to emerge. And the world goes on, will retract everything for us eventually. Every time something dies, something different gets born where it was.