We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us was good for the world.
We have been wrong.
We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us.
And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
Wendell Berry
"Interbeing" is an awkward coinage but an essential concept, rebalancing our lives in ways suggested by Wendell Berry. In the words of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, "Not only is no man an island, but rather his interbeing is shared with the plants and animals he eats, the people who make his clothes and food, the people who populate his home, country and the very world he percieves, the insects that pollinate the trees that yeild his fruit, shade him from the sun, and provide lumber for his house."
Bill Moyers's program this week offered responses to the conceptual challenge Wendell Berry and Thich Nhat Hanh describe. Moyers includes a short film, "The Dance of the Honeybee," because honeybees are a kind of exemplary species for us. If they're in trouble, so are we.
Interbeing compels us to shape those words into a circle of interdependence: If we're in trouble, so are they. Their trouble is ours, and ours is theirs. Their lives and ours are interactive. We are among their others, they are among our others.
Moyers introduces the film,
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture says a quarter of the American diet, many of our fruits and vegetables especially, rely on pollination by honeybees. But something is killing them at an accelerated pace and it’s getting worse. Forty to fifty percent of the hives have been wiped out.
"More and more, the leading suspect is certain pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, singly or in combination, that appear to be slaughtering bees outright or affecting brain and nerve functions. Beekeepers and activist groups are suing the Environmental Protection Agency to ban a kind of pesticide known as neonicotinoids.
"Not only are we dependent on the honeybee for much of what we eat. There is a grace and elegance they bring to the natural world that would diminish us all were they to disappear."