An antidote to the bucket list
The idea of doing a bucket list, or fulfilling all your dreams before you die, is a popular pursuit. The term gained popularity after the 2007 movie The Bucket List hit our movie screens. It stars Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, whose characters are dying of cancer and who create and fulfil a bucket list of things to do before they die.
You can live your life pursuing a bucket list. And in conventional terms, achieving these things might look and feel like success and richness. But there are profound consequences for your grandchildren and the planet that will reverberate for eons.
Moreover, the idea of a bucket list raises the question of whether it’s possible to live a full life without satisfying all of our desires. Do limits mean less?
Human history shows that humans treat the world as a need-gratification machine. We farm its plants and animals to fill our bellies. We mine its minerals and fossil fuels to drive industry. We’ve turned mountains into slag heaps in the name of jobs and growth and higher living standards. No forest or river or endangered species can stand in the way of profit and progress.
Some of us wring our hands at the desecration of the oceans and skies, but still we plunder and pollute like there’s no tomorrow. We tell ourselves we’re determined to shrink our footprint for the sake of our grandchildren. We say we’re committed to reducing fossil fuel emissions and the carbonisation of the atmosphere that is heating the Earth, but together we are unleashing untold damage to the biosphere and the ecological basis for life.
In 2015, it was calculated that 23,000 of the world’s 73,000 known assessed species were threatened with extinction.[i] In 2019, a global assessment reported that 25 per cent of assessed animal and plant groups were threatened, suggesting that about one million species face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reign in the drivers of biodiversity loss.[ii]
The combined effects of rising human population, global warming, uncontrolled poaching, invasive species and habitat destruction are accelerating species extinction and shrinking biodiversity at an unprecedented rate.[iii] Today, the average extinction rate is between 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the rate that prevailed over the past 60 million years.[iv]
One example. In 2015, the death of one of four remaining northern white rhinos caused headlines around the world. It’s a textbook case of our attack on nature and the blindness that shields us from knowing the cost of our actions.
It’s also a tale of how we’re using medical science to resurrect life from the ashes of destruction when, all the while, we’re hell bent on destroying it.
In November that year, media outlets reported the death of Nola, a 41-year-old female rhinoceros in San Diego Zoo Safari Park.[v] [vi] Zoo veterinarians euthanised Nola, though many reports omitted this detail, preferring to say she died after age-related health issues and a lingering infection ‘caught up with her’.
Captured in southern Sudan in 1975, she spent all but the first 18 months of her life in captivity, first at Dvůr KrálovéZoo in the Czech Republic and from 1989 at San Diego Zoo, California.
Nola never conceived and now the world’s three remaining rhinos (two females, one male) are considered too old to reproduce naturally.
Throughout her captivity, science was used to coax Nola into conceiving in the hope of averting the extinction of her species (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) whose numbers crashed from 2,000 to just three in the past 50 years. Population numbers have plunged mainly because of uncontrolled hunting and poaching.
In 1990, Nola was joined at San Diego Zoo by Angalifu, a 20-year-old male rhino. When she ‘resisted’ his advances, zoo staff dosed her food with prostaglandin and progesterone in a bid to make her more receptive. The two finally mated but she never conceived.
In death Nola has been pressed into service as a science marketing tool for defying the inevitable: species extinction. Scientists performed a post-mortem on her 4,000-pound carcass to remove tissue for use in a range of reproductive possibilities.
In theory, Nola might live on to ‘save’ her species through applications like artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilisation, embryo transfer, genetic engineering, or by hybridising her remains with a member of the more populous southern white rhino.[vii] All this will take decades and millions of dollars with no certainty of success.
To further her contribution to science, Nola’s body now resides at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution as part of its research collection.
Captured, caged, drugged, mated, euthanised, bio-banked and acquired for reproductive research — Nola is a symbol of our inhumanity and our refusal to live in harmony with nature, or to recognise that all this gee-whiz science is putting the cart before the horse.
We’re consuming the equivalent of 1.5 planets per year
Today, humans are using the equivalent of 1.5 planets per year to meet their demand for resources and to absorb their toxic waste stream. This means that it takes Earth 18 months to regenerate what we consume and cast aside every year.
Unchecked human consumption is unleashing catastrophic damage on an unprecedented scale and despite the mountain of evidence that we’re at a tipping point, we’re still living beyond our means, and the laws of nature.
But it wasn’t always so.
‘Older ways of life know the world as animate, as alive. That means the world is treated with the same regard and esteem as every living thing in it,’ writes Stephen Jenkinson.
‘People living these older ways of life know themselves as of the world, made of the same things, in the same ways. In modern, sophisticated ways of life the world is inert and inanimate, a staging ground for life, but not alive itself.
‘People living in that way tend to feel a bit like visitors or strangers to the world, uniquely wrought. But this faith in the unprecedented, singular self turns out legions of solitary, stand-alone people. This faith is hard on companionship. These people fan out over the countryside, compelled by need, bent on getting those needs met.’[viii]
Business as usual is unsustainable but there’s no sign that we’re about to change an ideology that’s driving us all to extinction. But the proposition that we could live and die with unmet needs and desires is intolerable only because we say so.
Why meeting our desires isn’t the path to satisfaction
Stephen Levine has related the story of a man with cancer who wanted to complete his life by ‘finding his lotus’ before he died. He reveals how the man’s relationship to desire was the source of his dissatisfaction and suffering, and that gradually, he saw that it wasn’t having what he wanted that brought him satisfaction but rather the absence of desire.
‘He mentioned that when something wanted was received, he noticed a momentary spiking of pleasure and the experience we call satisfaction. But to his surprise the satisfaction didn’t come from the having but from the momentary flash of getting when the light of his great nature was no longer obstructed by a mind full of desire.
‘It was the absence of desire, which offered the feeling of satisfaction, of temporary completeness. The very nature of desire was one of dissatisfaction with any moment in which the object of desire was not present. This recognition of the painful nature of desire didn’t make him desire-less but (it) allowed him to treat desire with a new respect.’[ix]
You can chase what you think you want and need. You can live your life pursuing a bucket list. And in conventional terms, achieving these things might look and feel like success and richness. But there are profound consequences for your grandchildren and the planet that will reverberate for eons.
Deeper still, meeting our desires in this way isn’t what it seems because it misconceives what we are, what we owe, and what brings us true satisfaction.
This an edited extract from Dan Gaffney’s new book and podcast series, ‘Journey Home — Essays on Living and Dying’, published in November 2019.
[i] International Union for Conservation of Nature (2015). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species
[ii] Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019). Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, May 6
[iii] Plumer, B (2019). Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace, The New York Times, May 6
[iv] Pimm, SL et al (2014). The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection. Science, 344, 6187
[v] Zhang, S (2015). Nola the Northern White Rhino’s Death Leaves Just Three on Earth. Wired, November 23
[vi] Mazza, E (2015). Nola, one of the world’s last Northern White Rhinos has died. The Huffington Post, November 22
[vii] San Diego Zoo (2015). Nola, the Northern White Rhino leaves an immeasurable legacy through her contributions to science. November 24
[viii] Jenkinson, S (2014). Op cit, p21
[ix] Levine, S (1997). Op cit, pp 149–150
