At an elevation of 7,900 metres on Mount Everest, Ralf Dujmovits made the difficult decision to abandon his sixth ascent of the highest mountain on Earth. The weather had turned bad and, as one of the most experienced climbers in the world, the 50 year-old German realized that the risks of proceeding were just too great — for himself, for his climbing companions and his sherpas.

That’s when he saw “in the distance on the Lhotse face,” as he noted in his internet diary, “a human snake, people cheek by jowl making their way up. There were 39 expeditions at the same time, amounting to more than 600 people. I had never seen Everest that crowded before,” he reported. “I was thinking how absurd the scene was. I had a strong feeling that not all of them would come back….That leaves you with a really oppressive feeling that some of the people would soon be dead. I was also filled with sadness [for] this mountain, for which I have immense respect together with the experienced sherpas, that a great deal of that had been lost” (Globe & Mail, May 31/12).

Indeed, four people did die on Everest that May 18th weekend, adding their corpses to the nearly 200 now littering its high slopes. The boast of climbing the world’s highest mountain is beginning to ring hollow and foolish, a mere tourist excursion in which people “drink [oxygen] like it was water,” Dujmovits notes, and anyone can attempt the ascent — even a short, fat French journalist and a Turkish-American who insisted on packing his bicycle to the summit to fulfill a “dream at whatever the cost.” As a consequence, according to Dujmovits, “the [appalling] jams of people… led to hours of waiting around which led to hypothermia and exhaustion. Many were dehydrated. But none of that seemed to have put people off.” As Dujmovits concluded, “People nowadays treat the mountain as if it was a piece of sporting apparatus, not a force of nature. It really makes my soul ache” (Ibid.).

This aching soul invites closer scrutiny, a search in our sense of the sacred, in the importance of mystery, in the magic of wonder, in our long and intimate history with Earth as the genesis of our existence. Perhaps the very act of summiting Everest is a fulfillment that ruins dreams, an accomplishment that defiles innocence, a victory that brings defeat. Perhaps success is a kind of destroying and knowing is a kind of killing.

Dujmovits was certainly concerned for the people who would likely kill themselves on Everest that May weekend. His concern didn’t seem personal, that the significance of his own efforts would be diminished by the ascent of others — by so many others. He seemed mostly concerned about the mountain being treated as “a piece of sporting apparatus”, as a mere object, as a wholly impersonal thing, and that the quest to reach the highest place on Earth was becoming an empty fad that was diminishing the stature of every climber, and of Everest, too. If people couldn’t respect themselves and the sacredness of their own lives, how could they respect the mountain and the sacredness of nature?

Perhaps Dujmovits was feeling that something wild and powerful, something natural and holy is being defiled by yet another rampant expression of wanton human desire, that the urge to reach the summit is becoming less an honourable pilgrimage than a vain and empty exercise in ego gratification, that the rule of empty pride is displacing something more selfless, humble and precious. Avarice is turning the grandeur of a mountain into a trivial trinket, just as the ubiquitous following, flocking and crowding is continually diminishing the value of everyone and everything. The ingenuity of crass commercialization and the tides of mass consumption are diluting and cheapening the magic and the mystery of being alive on this astounding planet. Whatever is touched by this process is more available and less valuable. Everest is still 8,848 metres high but it now seems lower, less formidable, less clean, less important, less respected and less inspiring.

Thus Everest becomes a symbol of our treatment of the planet, an image of what happens to environmentalists and naturalists who come to know nature, who fall in love with its intricate beauty, and then find it degraded or ruined by those who exploit it for prestige, fashion, profit or the plastic badge of material success.

Anyone with a hint of environmental sensitivity feels this daily as nature is systematically displaced, occupied, used and abused by the manic activity of our culture’s industrial hysteria. Because we can do things doesn’t mean we should. The frantic pace of constructing and intruding, of trespassing and polluting, of exploiting and defiling, of callous indifference to the integrity of landscapes and ecologies is ultimately self-defeating. Our creative ingenuity for ascending symbolic mountains is ultimately more disquieting than satisfying. The “appalling jams of people” on Everest’s littered slopes is a metaphor for the pipelines and tankers, the refineries and factories, the mines and tar pits, the highways and cars, the concrete and congestion, the chemicals and concoctions that clutter, defile and poison our planet.

Let us hope that the 200 corpses littering the slopes of Everest are not the harbinger of our future as we climb ever upwards, abusing nature in our headlong quest for more and more of everything, seemingly heedless of the dangerous altitude and the bad weather.

Spring comes, the earth warms, and the multi-foliate greens of fresh buds emerge from branches, stems and soil. People venture freely from the confines of their dwellings and shelters, shed unnecessary clothes, and embrace the outdoors with an optimism and trust that should be remembered throughout the rainy and cold seasons. In this time of opening and promise, as our planet tips itself to the welcoming warmth of the sun, we come closest to realizing our intimate bond with nature.

This memory lives in the spring rituals of tilling and planting, of celebrating and feasting, of travelling and adventuring. May Day, hidden beneath another misnomer called Queen Victoria’s birthday, is actually the modern incarnation of an ancient festival of rebirth and renewal, the traditional honouring of the fertility and revival that occurs every spring. People gather together in open places to parade, make music, dance and — in some remnant places — to dance around the Maypole.

Anthropologists note the symbolic significance of this event. The phallic pole is decorated with coloured ribbons as young children — pubescent girls in ancient history because they are the most vivid symbols of regeneration — skip and wind the ribbons in complex patterns around this erect pole. The intricate lacing and unlacing of the dance represents the biological urge of life inventing, spending and then repeatedly reinventing itself as the male and female energies of egg and sperm, of stigma and stamen, of flower and pollen, replicate themselves to perpetuate life. It’s a time of hope and a definition of our essential selves as participants in the endless rhythms of nature.

We, of course, are intimate partners in the living fabric of the most unique place in the universe. This is a role we have played relatively well for most of our history as a species, the proof of which is simply our survival, adaptation and refinement for more than a million years. Indeed, we have played this role remarkably well. Seven billion of us now occupy the planet, imposing ourselves in every possible piece of its geography, wielding such influence that we are now altering geographies, ecologies and even weather and climate. The effect of our success is currently so great that we are naming this epoch in Earth’s history after ourselves — the Anthropocene, a term that reflects both our power and our responsibility.

As children dance around the Maypole, enacting a primeval ritual and reaffirming our bond to nature and its imperatives, we photograph them with digital cameras, amplify the music with the magic of electricity, and dress in miracle fabrics made by the alchemy of technology. When we choose to travel, we can fly faster, higher and farther than birds, or we can speed along highways more swiftly than cheetahs. Within the confines of dwellings, our ingenuity can turn night into day and winter into summer. The foods of our feasts commonly come from distant corners of the world, brought by vessels that seem to defy the limitations of distance and time.

And yet, the common grass, so fresh and green beneath the feet of the dancing children, is essential to our sense of belonging and meaning. So, too, are the surrounding trees, the nearby ocean, the flowing river, the billowing clouds, the blue sky, the company of distant mountains and the companionship of animals, birds and insects — all are crucial ingredients in the richness we call the marvel of life.
Would our sanity survive if these natural things did not accompany us on our journey from the light of birth to the darkness of death? Could we live fully and contentedly within the mechanical shapes of cities, only wandering within the squares and angles of our buildings, always walking on the hard streets of asphalt and concrete? Just as an imprisoned animal confined to a cage, we would suffocate little-by-little even though we continued to breathe. We should not be surprised, therefore, to discover that we learn better, heal faster and relax more in the company of nature. Or that we protect ourselves from our own destructive inclinations by preserving nature in gardens, greenbelts and parks.

So something sacred pulses in the bodies of the dancing children as their ribbons wind and unwind around the Maypole, as their feet so playfully touch, leave and then return to the living soil. This is the contact that always was and always must be if we are to retain our sanity and our civilizations. We cannot escape the home of our origin and our destiny. The dancing, the parade, the music, the spring festivities — whatever they may be — all affirm that the familiar and unfamiliar members of the community are gathered together as more than neighbours, as more than citizens, as more than shoppers and consumers in the cold machinery of commerce.

The Maypole is an earthy and hopeful reminder that we belong to a more lasting and profound heritage than our tragic wars and our tangled squabbling over economics, finance, philosophy and religion. We all share the same fragile planet, each of us participating in the intricate steps of its timeless and sacred dance.

The Hunger Games have arrived, a storm of popularity that is selling millions of books and filling movie theatres. Suzanne Collins’ dystopian story is about North America in ruin after an unspecified cataclysm leaves the rich in absolute power and the poor as their slaves. The story has a credibility because it extrapolates from the present, with the roots of its chaos, poverty, injustice, savagery and heroism firmly anchored in today’s economic, political, social and environmental conditions.

Granted, The Hunger Games is a story written for young adults by an adult. Literary critics correctly note that it ingeniously possesses all the formulaic attributes that appeal to youthful minds in the turmoil of full adolescence rebellion against the wisdom of adults. But its success is something more than marketing cleverness. Adults have also taken an interest in the story because it fits the multigenerational cynicism of our times and is wholly compatible with the deep uncertainty that haunts the promise of a safe, secure and prosperous future.

If The Hunger Games were an anomaly, if it stood alone as a one-of-a-kind dystopia, it could possibly be dismissed as a culturally meaningless entertainment. But it is part of a trend that has obsessively occupied 20th century literature and thought. Therefore, it is significant.

The 20th century did not begin well. The dysfunctional values of the 19th century stumbled into the disaster of World War I. Then came the financial recklessness that caused the Great Depression of 1929. World War II followed, then the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the protracted Cold War with its tense threat of global nuclear annihilation. While hundreds of loaded intercontinental ballistic missiles still sit poised for firing, we are welcomed into the 21st century with enough serious environmental stresses — population, pollution and pillaging — to shake the confidence of any civilization.

The psychological and philosophical impact of all these stresses can be tracked by culture. War poets, playwrights, writers, painters and musicians have tried to understand the wholesale inhumanity unleashed by the mass tribalism of war. The Dada movement of 1916 simply abandoned understanding altogether and resigned existence to meaninglessness. The Existentialists abandoned society for the sanctity and burden of the lonely individual. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) castigated a society numbing itself with drugs and escapism. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) warned about the machinery of state victimizing societies by centralized control. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) also cautioned about totalitarian rule. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) captured the dark and destructive instincts lurking in the heart of humanity. Neville Shute’s On the Beach (1957) dramatized the devastating consequences of a global nuclear war. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) was one of a flood of more current dystopian novels.

Now environmental fear has been added to the list — terrorism is tragic to individuals but it doesn’t threaten the structural foundations of society like the looming and troubling ecological upheavals that scientists predict. So bookstores, television channels, movie theatres and media commentary propagate warnings of climate change, ocean acidification, species loss, excessive population, food shortages, societal havoc — choose your preferred worry. No wonder that The Hunger Games has appeared as a prevalent theme in the literature of young adults.

Phyllis Simon, co-owner of Vancouver’s Kidsbooks, notes that “the top five or six [bestsellers] are dystopias,” all linked to climate catastrophe (Maclean’s, Apr. 16/12). The theme of Exodus is a world drowning in rising sea levels because of melting ice. The Way We Fall explores society on the verge of collapse because of an escaped killer virus — the same threat, incidentally, that Stephen Hawking identifies as his choice of immediate dangers facing our civilization. The theme of The Hunger Games is just one expression of a fear that is infecting all levels of society, from children and young adults to senior citizens.

Such worrisome cultural markers are supported by empirical evidence that our affluence may not be as satisfying as we are induced to believe. Mental health issues cost Canada $50 billion per year in lost production and efficiency. Psychiatric illness in Europe, the New Scientist reports (Sept. 10/11), is the continent’s largest health problem. “Almost 40 percent of the region’s population — around 165 million people — experience a mental disorder each year, such as depression or anxiety…”. Anxiety is the most prevalent at 14 percent, followed by insomnia at 7.0 percent and depression at 6.9 percent. About 10 percent of other psychiatric conditions complete the spectrum of disorders linked to the stress of our lifestyles — not exactly ringing endorsements for a materialistic, consumer society that is busily wrecking the many of the planet’s crucial ecologies.

When our recent and present behaviour is considered in its totality, it reveals an undercurrent of apprehension about the strategies that are guiding our collective lives. The material wealth we have used as the dominant measure of our success hasn’t dispelled a growing doubt about the wisdom, prudence or sustainability of continuing on our current course. The economic, social, political and environmental conditions in which we presently find ourselves are disquieting and stressful, not a source of happy contentment but of worry and tension. The Hunger Games is just the latest expression of this mood.