“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
John Muir, the passionate conservationist, once said, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
In the early 1960s, well after the time of Muir, the field of ecology started to garner recognition within the scientific community.
This field, the study of how organisms interact with the world around them, changed the very nature of our perception of life.
At first, ecology only applied to the wild creatures of our planet. It applied to the big cats of Africa, the tiny insects of the rainforest, or the deep divers of the ocean.
We didn’t think about ourselves as creatures defined by this biological framework. We now understand that this is is simply not true.
We know that every action we take is an interaction with the environment and the natural world. We can see that our choices have repercussions that can be the catalyst for positive or negative change. With this knowledge comes great responsibility.
This is a responsibility we can no longer ignore. The time has come when we acknowledge our place in this world and take bold actions for the purpose of the greater good. The time has come for change.
Photo by Ian Macharia
