DEATH OF A DUCKLING

At dawn, some kind of commotion was going on in the duck pen, the Muscovies bowing, hissing and raising their crests they way they do when disturbed. The cause was easy to see: An old drake held the head of a two-day-old duckling in his beak, shaking the poor thing's body back and forth as if determined to break its neck. He must have done so, for later one of the workers found the body.

I averted my eyes and walked on. For one thing, by the time I'd seen what was going on, the duckling already looked mortally injured; for another, in Nature, infanticide often occurs when population numbers are too high relative to the local environment's resources. Adults can always produce more babies, while having more mouths to feed can weaken or endanger the whole community.

And this duck pen was indeed overcrowded, the new family of wide-eyed, yellow-fuzzed, funnily waddling ducklings having been greeted with a groan by the owner. The order had been "no more Muscovies," but this mama had hidden her nest well.

The next day, all the new ducklings were missing, and there seemed even fewer adults in the pen. I didn't ask questions, thinking that probably a worker who liked duck stew recognized the overcrowding and did something about it. I felt bad about the whole thing, and still do.

At this time my daily mood also was affected by a current article in England's online The Guardian. It was an interview with an 86-year-old senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, the article entitled, "'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention", by Patrick Barkham.

I linked the duckling incident with the Hillman interview because Hillman is a social scientist, not a climate expert. He studies how environmental stresses affect human communities. Overcrowding in the duck pen induced infanticide, so what changes in human society will global warming produce? When Hillman says "We're doomed," he's not saying that Homo sapiens will perish, but rather that humanity will be transformed in ways that we today might find hard to accept. You might be interested in an article on one aspect of the matter at the PsychologicalScience.Org website, entitled Global Warming and Violent Behavior.

Already social stresses are causing big changes in many societies. Certain nations that in the past welcomed international refugees now make it harder to enter their countries. "Let them drown," some officials urge. Once the land of "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses... " now the US has democratically elected Trump with his wall, his vulgarity and narcissism .., an old drake having his way in a population only slightly stressed, relative to what's coming with Hillman's "doom."

And yet, that morning of the duckling's death conjuring thoughts of "doom" turned out to be a fine one for me personally. The early rainy season was greening the landscape day by day, frisky songbirds were building nests and singing, and yellow butterflies darted across the green garden. At noon, over the campfire I cooked a good-tasting, nutritious meal, and during the hottest part of the day on my Kindle I read from books I've wanted to look at for years. In the afternoon I wrote, and read some more, and when the sun went down I enjoyed a solid night of uninterrupted sleep.

So, here's a comforting thought as human society faces Mayer Hillman's "doom": The growing societal stress and dysfunction is all human doings, but the Universe as a whole continues as mysteriously, perfectly and beautifully as always. In that context, certain individual people always will be able to find peace and fulfillment by focusing on their spiritual growth -- their "passage from a less to a greater perfection," as Spinoza framed it.

This doesn't mean that as "doom" approaches we need to disengage from humanity, because humanity's doings -- including Trumpism and species going extinct -- are part of the Nature/God Unity as much as everything else in the Universe. What's necessary is to bring one's dealings with other people into balance with one's spiritual quest, the "passage from a less to a greater perfection."

And it's been my experience that making this passage isn't hard, except that it needs to be attended to constantly. To make the passage, we simply must pay attention to the world around us, including humanity, by trying to understand what we ourselves feel needs to be understood better, by meditating on the meaning of what we come to know, and -- here Spinoza and Aristotle came to the same conclusion -- to "know thyself."