It’s about a relationship

Share your Thoughts
Posted on June 20, 2007
Filed Under Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

I am challenged by a book deadline and dial-up over the next two weeks and will post as I can.

Meanwhile, contrasting images from yesterday’s NY Times that I want to share with you because it refers to something at the heart of our Spirituality and Ecological Hope project –

It’s about a relationship.

It is about the human relationship with the natural world of which we are but one thread in the fabric of life. If we continue to tear at other threads, pull them apart, discard them, if we don’t learn how to live in harmony and balance, the fabric will weaken and eventually unravel and we will all fall through.

We have to think differently about the human project in this web of life and fast. We have to learn some humility.

We have to start breaking rules of ignorant developers and planned community leaders.

Down in Florida, water is becoming a scarce resource — but many planned communities insist on nice fresh green lawns. So many people moving to Florida completely unaware of how unsustainable life is becoming down there. Read what I mean here.

And then this beautiful reflection from Verlyn Klinkenborg. We blogged about this a few days ago — about the vanishing birds, about “business as usual and the havoc it wreaks.”

Can the human ever see beyond our own small self-interest to recover a sense of our true nature, our real place within the life of this planet? Are we maladapted, wired for self-destruction, taking millions of species down with us? Are we an evolutionary mistake?

And then I read something like this editorial in the NY Times and I think, okay, not everyone. Some get it. Some know what the loss of millions of birds means. Some understand that the profits and comforts of humans are not more important than the birds — and the bees, and the polar bears, and the migrating animals, and the trees, and the air we breathe.

Go to the hope and live there.


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