I very much enjoy listening to a BBC Radio 3 progamme called ‘Private Passions’ presented by the composer Michael Berkeley. It’s a sort of upmarket Desert Island Discs which you can find via the wonderful BBC Sounds App. A few weeks ago, it featured Patricia Wiltshire, who turned out to be a rather engaging forensic ecologist. I was struck by what she had to say about her beliefs, which were emphatically not religious.
“The only life after death is what you leave behind, which becomes incorporated into life. So you are decomposed, you break down into your constituent little bits. The energy all drains away because it dissipates. You can’t do much about that. But the bits of you that are left, and all the molecules that make up your body are dissipated and then they are recycled. So you will be recycled. So that’s the only life after death that I can imagine. I don’t have any spiritual feelings. (…) This is the natural cycle and of course there is only so much matter, so if it weren’t recycled we couldn’t have birth at all.”
It was the throwaway phrase ‘There’s only so much matter,’ which set me wondering, as it seemed to resonate with the words in ‘The Scripture of Great Wisdom’. The matter which makes up this planet must indeed be ‘Increasing not, decreasing not’. And all things (being pure or empty) ‘are neither born nor do they wholly die.’
And so we talk of finite resources; we say that our planet is a ‘closed system.’. And, I wondered, with the ever increasing numbers of human beings (matter) does this inevitably mean fewer of other beings (also matter.) Thus as we watch animals, plants, birds, insects disappearing from the earth, is it because there isn’t enough matter left for them to be born and sustained? And as we convert resources into non-recyclable materials like plastics and burn fossil fuels and convert them into damaging gases, are we gradually and not so gradually reducing the amount of matter that can sustain life and putting it into forms which are effectively dead? Such that in the end there can be no birth?
Perhaps this is all obvious, but that little phrase somehow gave me a different sort of insight into what is happening. It didn’t really cheer me up.
