You ARE the Environment
Today is World Environment Day. The theme for this year is “Connecting People with Nature.” In a way, this is a little misleading — as if we COULD disconnect with the environment. And yet in a way — in many significant ways — we act as though we are separate from nature.
And so I brushed off a short bit of thought from a few Earth Day’s ago about the word environment — one of those words in English that falls so short of expressing the totality of the medium in which we swim. The fish doesn’t know it’s wet, etc etc.
I ran across this poster (get your own from the Environmental Advocates of NY). I browsed on, but kept coming back to it.
It resonates with me. Why?
Just curious: How does this four-word statement strike you?Is this New-Age tree-huggery? Is it pagan idolatry? Pantheistic blasphemy? Liberal new-speak?
Does it say anything to you at all, or is it just me?
Does the graphic inform your perceptions of the words?
The concept portrayed here so minimally and effectively points towards a crucial rethink to our future as a species and our relationship to the planet.
The century-long brain-wash has been thorough. Man and his economy are no longer part of or beholding to Nature or Nature’s economy that imposes limits, boundaries or tipping points.
So then, we are free do treat nature as Other, to gather golden eggs without limit with no need to ever consider the state of the goose.
There’s “out there” and there’s our inner kingdom and personal wants and entitlements that “the environment” must supply forever. Dominion, supremacy and control are human rights. It’s all about us.
Relationships to nature, place and global community have been broken as we’ve come to see ourselves not embedded within and beholding to “the environment.”
How myopic. How fatal and distorted this misconception. We ARE the environment.
It is what we eat. It is what we breathe. It is the physical source we draw from. It is not a god. It is not divine. But its health is our health. Its future is our future. As it goes, so goes the story of man.
It is worthy of more respect and reverence, honor and stewardship than we’ve given it in my generation.
So to my politically and religiously “conservative” brethren who are ruffled by this poster, I’d remind you that Adam comes from the word adama–of the earth; and that the word human comes from the same root as humus and humility.
I suggest we might use this simple graphic as a mantra, a thought-focus, a teachable moment.
You ARE the environment, no matter what color the state you’re in.
