Back Into the Natural Order

I would start off by pointing out that the word ECOLOGY and the word ECONOMY are both created off the greek word OIKOS, which means household. The two are --or should be--far more integrated than they are today.

So how does “getting back to nature” fit into the household of our daily commerce AND the household of future Earth resources?

I can’t address these matters in much detail in my five minutes here today, and I have 15 or so next week at TEDx right here on this stage to do that in a bit more detail.

For now, let me just claim authority for offering thoughts on this topic. Two months after the first Earth Day in April 1970 I married my first wife (who is here today) and I started graduate school in vertebrate Zoology at Auburn University. So I have been a “biology watcher” for what seems on the human scale of things like a LONG TIME.

The late 60s and early seventies was probably the time frame when I first heard this phrase that was a “Dope Slap” for my generation:

“If we do what we’ve always done we’ll get what we’ve always got.”

We saw clearly back then that this was not a viable option towards a resilient future for ourselves or our children. We should put Earth first in the design and operation of our economic machine.

Then we went blind again, and did things the old way for a few more decades, bringing us multiple opportunities to confirm that, like the economy, the planet’s living working systems are NOT too big to fail.

And now the lights are coming back on, hopefully in time, to do something different from what we’ve always done with our economy and TO our ecology.

I call this opporunity “writing the NEW STORY” of who we see ourselves to be. And it is a story of renewed RELATIONSHIPS--to nature, to place and to community.

Eudora Welty, I will quote next week at TEDx, tells us that “One place understood helps us know all places better.”

If we are to do things differently going forward, we will need to re-establish different and deeper connections here, on this ground we call HOME. If we are to restore WHOLENESS to the brokenness we’ve inflicted on the planets’ living systems, we will need to start locally--to touch and know that microcosmic part of the whole of nature that we can reach out and see, taste, hear, smell and wrap our hearts around in our own nearby terraine.

One place understood helps us know all places better.

The converse is also true. One place--THIS PLACE, any place, disregarded, ignored or of no concern to us will make us numb to “ALL PLACES”--this planet, that we must know better and care for as if our lives depended on it.

And so I think a lot, after 43 Earth Days, about how to finally do what we knew we must do but did not do back in 1970.

And I describe the reconciled relationships that we can bring about to nature place and community as “renaturing, relocalizing and establishing eco-empathy---or adopting what I call a “personal ecology.”

It will take renaturing within our classrooms and in our sunday schools rooms and board rooms and churches.

And listen to an old curmudgeon of a tree hugger, you youngsters.

Getting back to nature DOES mean getting outdoors more. It does mean learning the names for the trees and wildflowers, birds and mosses and ferns and other creatures.

But it is more than that:

To Reconnect with nature is to re-establishing ourselves within the NATURAL ORDER of things. It is to reverse the DIVORCE FROM NATURE that has lead to the now well-known malady that some have called NATURE DEFICIT DISORDER.

One place understood helps us know all places better.

One mountain stream, one wildflower meadow or mountain bald or beaver pond better known helps us both know and have an empathetic connection with all meadows and balds, forests and and wetlands.

Returning to nature means finally comprehending the myriad ways that your activities and mine have impacts on the WHOLE EARTH--in what we take from Earth as eaters and travelers and consumers. Our prodigious wants and needs alters the NATURAL COSMIC ORDER of this planet in economic and ecological ways that cannot continue in the manner in which we’ve done things for the past two centuries.

Getting back to these renewed and reconciled relationships in our times is a kind of ethical-aesthetic rediscovery of WHO WE ARE in the context of this incredible planet that we are only now beginning to understand.

Thankfully, this getting back to right relationship with nature will be easier in Floyd than in many other places, because we haven’t wandered so far away, and there’s not so much hurry, asphalt or ugly between our daily lives here and the soil from which our stories come.

Getting back to nature on Earth Day in 2013 is a part of the NEW STORY of life on the ground in Floyd County. Thank all of you for being a part of it.

[Short message prior to panel discussion on the “Ecology of Floyd County” for Earth Day, Floyd VA]