Discuss: Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist

Excellent article Paul. Thanks. Keep walking and wondering.

Beautiful piece Paul, but did you leave without waiting for those of us who would like to walk with you and more reverently on the land?  Are you still there, can you hear our answers?

The issue, like poetry, is not in deconstructing the words or writing better “equations” of sustainability.  It is in the knowledge of where in each of us centers the felt understanding of the sanctity of life and for life, that is the soul of any true “environmentalist”.  And human child. 

It really was there before we advertised and “digitized” it out.  Many now take drugs to re-find that emotional truth about themselves and their world, that only nature can remind by her “wild” knowing, healthily. 

This is “natural intelligence”, a type of “emotional intelligence” or what healers and witches who knew nature best and worked in closest concert with it to “heal”, had to develop in the deepest sense.  It is an intelligence you got to learn in your wild walks of childhood Paul, that your dad unknowingly reinforced.  And in this piece therefore, managed to find the words to relay that felt, deep understanding.  Then walked away, knowing the words are for people—nature needs none to speak so clearly.

So here is my romantic counter to your ending despairing note that all agree may be a more probable outcome, just doing the “cognitive” math alone:  Emotional/Natural intelligence CAN be enhanced in the human child, just as it obviously can be destroyed.  The answer is in the wind, and teaching the wind’s language to those who hear it already as music, before they “download” the drowning noise.  It is in our teaching the nature of nature to the human child who as you say, is herself just a part of that whole.

If your despair becomes too acute, realize that teaching like that is still possible, if we don’t break the heart to “educate the mind”.

On your long walk, try and find a time to watch children at play in nature; I think then you might see—it is not all lost.  Not if we can learn from them, to remember to teach, what they know already. What some of us, like you, while even learning the “words” never lost the inner feeling for understanding: we are all connected and most deeply connected to this planet and ALL nature.  Raping her, no matter how “sustainably”, destroys all the meaning and the force of that love and leaves one with just the grey, pornographic pictures and horribly worse—no longer able to tell the difference.

Listen still to children laugh as they “play” in nature if any such children can be found and I think you will realize, there is still hope.

Bring that back from your travels in order to keep teaching them and us all, how to remember that hope and “play” in nature together again.

This hit home.  In Vermont, USA, where I live, and where heretofore we have been touted as Luddite granola-eaters, our governor helped to fast-track a string of wind turbines atop a pristine mountain range in the northeastern part of the state (which is less peopled).  They are blasting off the tops of the mountains, and our despair is useless.  I came here because I thought such things would never happen.  There is no place else to go.

I am sorry to read of the mountaintop deal in VT. Talk about skewed priorities!

Having been to leftist and right-wing reader comment sections, I have to say that the small gathering here is quite “homey” and makes me feel like I’m in a group of readers back at college. Except for the being sober part, this is the tops! LOL

Happy New Year and Old Earth~~!

Thank you for reminding us.

Lao Tzu lives!

I rode a bike around South Africa not too long ago. The essay is superb. I also want to get out again and go journeying in the places they haven’t killed yet. Everyone should.

Great article, we wrote one with a similar sentiment here: http://tasna.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/dark-green-romanticism/

I believe that this romantic essay, though beautiful, forgets the fundamental contact with reality. The magazines we are reading, the PCs we are using, the medicines we take, and so on, need energy and produce pollution.

How to provide them with the tiniest impact? Sustainable development is the better mainstream answer produced until now. Sadly to say, for mainstream problems only mainstream answers can be applied. No one wants really live as indigenous people - certainly not who writes articles and who reads them in the industrialized side of world.

It is obvious that sustainability HAS to be achieved smartly: we have to recover damaged environments, not destroy new ones.