Environmental Awareness
We need to find affinities with the natural world and connect with them. For when we do we will find it is easy to love the world, to naturally care for and renew it… just as it cares for and renews us.
We need to find affinities with the natural world and connect with them. For when we do we will find it is easy to love the world, to naturally care for and renew it… just as it cares for and renews us.
If you want to survive the holocaust of planetary proportions that is upon us all, you must defend the plants, and help them, or you must get out of the way, so they can get on with their planet-healing work.
I have stood by my window overlooking a ragged Suffolk garden and marshland for over a decade now and seen the insects disappear, the old hawthorns and ashes cut down, how the thrush and little owl no longer call from the hedge, how the green woodpecker no longer comes to forage for ants, the hedgehog to sleep in the woodpile, or the hares and lapwings appear in the fields
Biotime, or biological time, runs at a very different pace and rhythm to human time. It can be observed by recording events in the natural world. These can be as varied as the day the first spring bulb opens, the last frost before summer, or the first sighting of a species of bird or insect in a new habitat.
We may think like the wild, or we may think like the tamed. We humans, products, beneficiaries, and dependents of the web of life from which we were spun, can continue our collective course on this tangential path from the natural processes, limits, and communities of this planet.
The path to meaning – and real sustainability – is the opposite; it is through recoupling with nature. Instead of denying that we are an integral part of nature in which we swim, live, mate, laugh, cry and die, we need to embrace that fact.
What’s coming? Possibilities I hope for, probabilities to dread. Possible: A renewed stirring of love for the Earth. Respect for and reciprocity with all beings.
In this article, we will take a look at systemic thinking and the dangerous unconscious childhood illusion that each of us is a unique being independent and separate from the rest of reality.
These debates are precisely what makes the Anthropocene so valuable as an idea. It stops us short. It buttonholes us. It head-butts us. Then it asks us really, really hard questions while we’re reeling. I think that’s where its value lies.
One of the reasons I think our imaginations are in such a poor state in 2018 is that we spend so much time looking down. Look around you. On the bus, on the train, in the street. Our eyes are locked down to our screens, our attention elsewhere. So I want to share with me something that I find really helps.
We may be meeting our schools’ curriculum targets, but in many cases we are still missing the larger aims of environmental awareness, our essential inter-connectedness and inter-being with the planet we live on, and thus many teachers, and their students, are not acting out of deep ecological understanding or deep ecological commitment.
We’re new to this, all of us. Whether banished from Eden or evolved from hunting and gathering is irrelevant. Either way, we’re a collective eye-blink from integration. There was a time when I wouldn’t have fussed much over sparrows or hummingbirds. There was a time when I wouldn’t have been alone, but in a band, right here, tight-knit and stitched by kinship. It’s no energy bar that would’ve sustained me, but knowledge, the same knowledge as the wolves and bears.