The Need for Wilderness? (2/3)
Recovering Our Sense of Community
In wilderness we find ourselves. (Part 1)
Looking up and around we can finally see what is surrounding us. The meaning and value of diversity can quickly be recognized. A diversity of colors, shapes, textures, smells, and forms of life.
As we frolic in nature’s company, we see living examples of complex community relations. Wilderness embodies mature interactions where the constant search for harmony and balance between all parts of the system is ever acting; every component working towards the better good of the system unknowingly committed.
Day to day millions of people spend their days looking at screens and social apps that give us a sense of “connectedness.” It is not uncommon to see a group of friends that get together to share, each intensely drawn into there devices screen, lifting their eyes to only to briefly share their screen before returning back into the virtual void.
I feel, in our current world connectedness is escaping us. We are becoming disconnected with ourselves, with others and with nature. The result of this disconnect is associated with dysfunctional relationships in these three directions. Otto Scharmer in Leading from the Emerging Future (Theory U) refers to these as the “three divides” (Ego to Eco — The Iceberg Model).
Changes in Earth and the responsibility humans have in accelerating and generating many of them during the last century should alert us to the impacts that might come as a consequence of our disconnect.
As the divide with nature widens, we as modern-day individuals feel a greater distance from Earth systems, from living systems. As we feel more and more independent and separate from nature — wilderness — , we lose the capacity to see ourselves as a species still part of this intertwined web of life.
Wilderness provides physical evidence of these connections and our place in the living systems, it provides a scenery for life to thrive, pollinators, plants, birds, trees, predators and prey, decomposers interacting with water, soil and the power of the sun. Wilderness is a great example of a complex community, one in which the relations of all these elements keep on interacting to guarantee the availability of food and water required for life to be maintained and to evolve.
It is evident that when wilderness is degraded we are negatively impacted, as all living parts connected in the system are affected. We are in the process or brink of the collapsing many of the systems which we depend on. Pollinators and food, water pollution, climate change, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, population, and planetary limits, and many other cycles are under great stress, in part generated by the lack of understanding ourselves as part of the interconnected life system.
It is imperative we reconnect with wilderness to recover our lost memories and remember who and where we are. For this, we need wilderness to be close to us, to be accessible and to allow us the time to experience it, by ourselves, with our families, with our friends.
Wilderness has the capacity to surprise us and bring back the sense of awe to our reality. Being in or close to wilderness will always help us remember we are part of a community much larger than that of our block, office or city (or facebook). We are part of the Earth community and as so our health is a mirror on our communities health, we need to care for each other and realign our actions in such a way we can recover from this momentary lapse of reason and understanding.
We need wilderness to recover our sense of community.
Luis Camargo is the Founder and Director of OpEPA.
