NATURA

Le Quattro Volte (2011) Official Trailer [HD]

2011-06-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

Van Jones: The economic injustice of plastic | Video on TED.com

2011-06-07T07:52:00.000-07:00

Van Jones: The economic injustice of plastic | Video on TED.com

Earth Day Special: Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the Rights of Mother Earth

2011-04-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

A good message for President Obama at the end of this interview.

Earth Day Special: Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the Rights of Mother Earth

Water is part of the Commons being exploited for profit

2011-03-14T15:53:00.000-07:00

Water wars

Plastic in fish: Ingestion of plastic found in small fish - latimes.com

2011-03-11T23:45:00.000-08:00

Plastic in fish: Ingestion of plastic found in small fish - latimes.com

Mike's Beautiful Life Preview

2011-02-28T15:36:00.000-08:00

"Magic microbes"

2011-02-21T17:28:00.001-08:00

BPs "Magic microbes" used in Gulf clean-up just a magic trick!

"Magic microbes"

2011-02-21T17:28:00.000-08:00

Aldo Leopold - The Land Ethic

2011-02-09T17:56:00.000-08:00

The Land Ethic

“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”- A. Leopold

Published in 1949 as the finale to A Sand County Almanac, Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’ defined a new relationship between people and nature and set the stage for the modern conservation movement.

Leopold understood that ethics direct individuals to cooperate with each other for the mutual benefit of all. One of his philosophical achievements was the idea that this ‘community’ should be enlarged to include non-human elements such as soils, waters, plants, and animals, “or collectively: the land.”

“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”
This recognition, according to Leopold, implies individuals play an important role in protecting and preserving the health of this expanded definition of a community.

“A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of land.”
Central to Leopold’s philosophy is the assertion to “quit thinking about decent land use as solely an economic problem.” While recognizing the influence economics have on decisions, Leopold understood that ultimately, our economic well being could not be separated from the well being of our environment. Therefore, he believed it was critical that people have a close personal connection to the land.

“We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”

ALDO LEOPOLD

2011-02-09T17:55:00.000-08:00

THE LAND ETHIC

When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his house-hold, whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence.

This hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong.

Concepts of right and wrong were not lacking from Odysseus' Greece: witness the fidelity of his wife through the long years before at last his black-prowed galleys clove the wine-dark seas for home. The ethical structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to human chattels. During the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only.

The Ethical Sequence

This extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequence may be described in ecological as well as in philosophic terns. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups t evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls fees symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced syrnbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been re placed, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.

The complexity of co-operative mechanisms has increase with population density, and with the efficiency of tools. was simpler, for example, to define the anti-social uses sticks and stones in the days of the mastodons than of bullet and billboards in the age of motors.

The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals; the Mosaic Decalogue is an example. Later accretions dealt with the relation between the individual and

society. The Golden Rule tries to integrate the individual to. society, democracy to integrate social organization to the individual.

There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but no obligations.

The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity. It is the third step in a sequence. The first two have already been taken. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief. I regard the present conservation movement a the embryo of such an affirmation.

An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average individual. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for the individual in meeting such situations. Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in-the-making.

The Community Concept

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for).

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state.

In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.

In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worth-less, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves.

In the biotic community, a parallel situation exists. Abraham knew exactly what the land was for: it was to drip. milk and honey into Abraham's mouth. At the present moment, the assurance with which we regard this assurnption is inverse to the degree of our education.

The ordinary citizen today assumes that science know what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not. He knows that the biotic mechanism is so complex that its workings may never bus fully understood.

That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is shown by an ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land. The characteristics of the land determined the facts quite as potently as the characteristics of the men who lived on it.

Consider, for example, the settlement of the Mississippi valley. In the years following the Revolution, three groups were contending for its control: the native Indian, the French and English traders, and the American settlers. Historians wonder what would have happened if the English at Detroit had thrown a little more weight into the Indian side of those tipsy scales which decided the outcome of the colonial migration into the cane-lands of Kentucky. It is time now to ponder the fact that the cane-lands, when subjected to the particular mixture of forces represented by the cow plow, fire, and axe of the pioneer, became bluegrass. What if the plant succession inherent in this dark and bloody ground had, under the impact of these forces given us some worthless sedge, shrub, or weed? Would Boone and Kenton have held out? Would there have been any overflow into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri? Any Louisiana Purchase? Any transcontinental union of new states? Any Civil war?

Kentucky was one sentence in the drama of history. W are commonly told what the human actors in this drama tried to do, but we are seldom told that their success, or the lack of it, hung in large degree on the reaction of particular soils to the impact of the particular forces exerted by their occupancy. In the case of Kentucky, we do not even know where the bluegrass came from—whether it is a native species, or a stowaway from Europe.

Contrast the cane-lands with what hindsight tells us about the Southwest, where the pioneers were equally brave, resourceful, and persevering. The impact of occupancy here brought no bluegrass, or other plant fitted to withstand the bumps and buffetings of hard use. This region, when grazed by livestock, reverted through a series of more and more worthless grasses, shrubs, and weeds to a condition of unstable equilibrium. Each recession of plant types bred erosion, each increment to erosion bred a further recession of plants. The result today is a progressive and mutual deterioration, not only of plants and soils, but of the animal community subsisting thereon. The early settlers did not expect this: on the cienegas of New Mexico some even cut ditches to hasten it. So subtle has been its progress that few residents of the region are aware of it. It is quite invisible to the tourist who finds this wrecked landscape colorful and charming (as indeed it is, but it bears scant resemblance to what it was in 1848).

This same landscape was 'developed' once before, but with quite different results. The Pueblo Indians settled the Southwest in pre-Columbian times, but they happened not to be equipped with range livestock. Their civilization expired, but not because their land expired.

In India, regions devoid of any sod-forming grass have been settled, apparently without wrecking the land, by the simple expedient of carrying the grass to the cow, rather than vice versa. (Was this the result of some deep wisdom or was it just good luck? I do not know. )

In short, the plant succession steered the course of history; the pioneer simply demonstrated, for good or ill, which successions inhered in the land. Is history taught in this spirit? It will be, once the concept of land as a community really penetrates our intellectual life.

The Ecological Conscience

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land Despite nearly a century of propaganda, conservation still proceeds at a snail's pace; progress still consists largely letterhead pieties and conventional oratory. On the back forty we still slip two steps backward for each forward stride.

The usual answer to this dilemma is 'more conservation education.' No one will debate this, but is it certain that on the volume of education needs stepping up? Is something lacking in the content as well?

It is difficult to give a fair summary of its content in brief form, but, as I understand it, the content is substantially this: obey the law, vote right, join some organizations, and practice what conservation is profitable on your own land; the government will do the rest.

Is not this formula too easy to accomplish anything worth-while? It defines no right or wrong, assigns no obligation, calls for no sacrifice, implies no change in the current philosophy of values. In respect of land-use, it urges only enlightened self-interest. Just how far will such education flake us? An example will perhaps yield a partial answer.

By 1930 it had become clear to all except the ecologically. blind that southwestern Wisconsin's topsoil was slipping seaward. In 1933 the farmers were told that if they would adopt certain remedial practices for five years, the public would donate CCC labor to install them, plus the necessary machinery and materials. The offer was widely accepted, but the practices were widely forgotten when the five-year contract period was up. The farmers continued only those practices that yielded an immediate and visible economic gain for themselves.

This led to the idea that maybe farmers would learn more quickly if they themselves wrote the rules. Accordingly the Wisconsin Legislature in 1937 passed the Soil Conservation District Law. This said to farmers, in effect: we, the Public, will furnish you free technical service and loan you specialized machinery, if you will write your own rules for land-use. Each county may write its own rules, and they will have the force of law. Nearly all the counties promptly organized to accept the proffered help, but after a decade of operation, no county has yet written a single rule. There has been visible progress in such practices as strip-cropping, pasture renovation, and soil liming, but none in fencing woodlots against grazing, and none in excluding plow and cow from steep slopes. The farmers, in short, have elected those remedial practices which were profitable anyhow, and ignored those which were profitable to the community, but not clearly profitable to themselves.

When one asks why no rules have been written, one is told that the community is not yet ready to support them; education must precede rules. But the education actually in progress makes no mention of obligations to land over and above those dictated by self-interest. The net result is that we have more education but less soil, fewer healthy woods and as many floods as in 1937.

The puzzling aspect of such situations is that the existence of obligations over and above self-interest is taken for granted in such rural community enterprises as the betterment of roads, schools, churches, and baseball teams. Their existence is not taken for granted, nor as yet seriously discussed, in bettering the behavior of the water that falls o the land, or in the preserving of the beauty or diversity o the farm landscape. Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were century ago.

To sum up: we asked the farmer to do what he conveniently could to save his soil, and he has done just that and only that. The farmer who clears the woods off a 75 percent slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the community creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society. If he puts lime on his fields and plants his crops on contour, he is still entitled to all the privileges and emoluments of his Soil Conservation District. The District is a beautiful piece of social machinery, but it is coughing along on two cylinders because we have been too timid, and too anxious for quick success, to tell the farmer the true magnitude of his obligations. Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land.

No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis loyalties, affections, and convictions. The proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it. In our attempt to make conservation easy, w have made it trivial.

Substitutes for a Land Ethic

When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread. I now describe some of the stones which serve in lieu of a land ethic.

One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbird are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity they are entitled to continuance.

When one of these non-economic categories is threatened and if we happen to love it, we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance. At the beginning of the century song birds were supposed to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them. The evidence had to be economic in order to b valid.

It is painful to read these circumlocutions today. We have no land ethic yet, but we have at least drawn nearer the point of admitting that birds should continue as a matter o biotic right, regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us.

A parallel situation exists in respect of predatory mammals, raptorial birds, and fish-eating birds. Time was when biologists somewhat overworked the evidence that these creatures preserve the health of game by killing weaklings or that they control rodents for the farmer, or that they prey only on 'worthless' species. Here again, the evidence had to be economic in order to be valid. It is only in recent years that we hear the more honest argument that predators are members of the community, and that no special interest has the right to exterminate them for the sake of a benefit, real or fancied, to itself. Unfortunately this enlightened view still in the talk stage. In the field the extermination o predators goes merrily on: witness the impending erasure of the timber wolf by fiat of Congress, the Conservation Bureaus, and many state legislatures.

Some species of trees have been 'read out of the party' by economics-minded foresters because they grow too slowly, or have too low a sale value to pay as timber crops: white cedar, tamarack, cypress, beech, and hemlock are examples. In Europe, where forestry is ecologically more advanced, the non-commercial tree species are recognized as members of the native forest community, to be preserved as such, within reason. Moreover some (like beech) have seen found to have a valuable function in building up soil fertility. The interdependence of the forest and its constituent tree species, ground flora, and fauna is taken for granted.

Lack of economic value is sometimes a character not only of species or groups, but of entire biotic communities: marshes, bogs, dunes, and 'deserts' are examples. Our formula in such cases is to relegate their conservation to government as refuges, monuments, or parks. The difficulty is that these communities are usually interspersed with more valuable private lands; the government cannot possibly own or control such scattered parcels. The net effect is that we have relegated some of them to ultimate extinction over large areas. If the private owner were ecologically minded, he would be proud to be the custodian of a reasonable proportion of such areas, which add diversity and beauty to his farm and to his community.

In some instances, the assumed lack of profit in these 'waste' areas has proved to be wrong, but only after most of them had been done away with. The present scramble to reflood muskrat marshes is a case in point.

Where is a clear tendency in American conservation to relegate to government all necessary jobs that private land owners fail to perform. Government ownership, operation subsidy, or regulation is now widely prevalent in forestry range management, soil and watershed management, park and wilderness conservation, fisheries management, and migratory bird management, with more to come. Most of this growth in governmental conservation is proper and logical, some of it is inevitable. That I imply no disapproval of it is implicit in the fact that I have spent most of my life working for it. Nevertheless the question arises: What is the ultimate magnitude of the enterprise? Will the tax base carry its eventual ramifications? At what point will governmental conservation, like the mastodon, become handicapped by its own dimensions? The answer, if there is any, seems to be in a land ethic, or some other force which assigns more obligation to the private landowner.

Industrial landowners and users, especially lumbermen and stockmen, are inclined to wail long and loudly about the extension of government ownership and regulation to land, but (with notable exceptions) they show little disposition to develop the only visible alternative: the voluntary practice of conservation on their own lands.

When the private landowner is asked to perform some unprofitable act for the good of the community, he today assents only with outstretched palm. If the act costs him cash this is fair and proper, but when it costs only forethought, open-mindedness, or time, the issue is at least debatable. The overwhelming growth of land-use subsidies in recent years must be ascribed, in large part, to the government's own agencies for conservation education: the land bureaus, the agricultural colleges, and the extension services. As far as I can detect, no ethical obligation toward land is taught in these institutions.

To sum up: a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts. It tends to relegate to government many functions eventually too large, too complex, or too widely dispersed to be performed by government.

An ethical obligation on the part of the private owner is the only visible remedy for these situations.

The Land Pyramid

An ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to land presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism. We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

The image commonly employed in conservation education is 'the balance of nature.' For reasons too lengthy to detail here, this figure of speech fails to describe accurately what little we know about the land mechanism. A much truer image is the one employed in ecology: the biotic pyramid. I shall first sketch the pyramid as a symbol of land, and later develop some of its implications in terms of land-use.

Plants absorb energy from the sun. This energy flow through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.

The species of a layer are alike not in where they came from, or in what they look like, but rather in what they eat Each successive layer depends on those below it for food and often for other services, and each in turn furnishes food and services to those above. Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical abundance. Thus, for every carnivore there are hundreds of his prey, thousands of their prey, millions of insects, uncountable plants. The pyramidal form of the system reflects this numerical progression from apex to base. Man shares an intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons, and squirrels which eat both meat and vegetables.

The lines of dependency for food and other services are called food chains. Thus soil-oak-deer-Indian is a chain that has now been largely converted to soil-corn-cow-farmer. Each species, including ourselves, is a link in many chains. The deer eats a hundred plants other than oak, and the cow a hundred plants other than corn. Both, then, are links in a hundred chains. The pyramid is a tangle of chains so complex as to seem disorderly, yet the stability of the system proves it to be a highly organized structure. Its functioning depends on the co-operation and competition of its diverse parts.

In the beginning, the pyramid of life was low and squat; the food chains short and simple Evolution has added layer after layer, link after link. Man is one of thousands of accretions to the height and complexity of the pyramid. Science has given us many doubts, but it has given us at least one certainty: the trend of evolution is to elaborate and diversify the biota.

Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. food chains are the living channels which conduct energy up ward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is no closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added b absorption from the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long-lived forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life. There is always a net loss y downhill wash, but this is normally small and offset by the decay of rocks. It is deposited in the ocean and, in the course of geological time, raised to form new lands and new pyramids.

The velocity and character of the upward flow of energy depend on the complex structure of the plant and animal community, much as the upward flow of sap in a tree depends on its complex cellular organization. Without this complexity, normal circulation would presumably not occur. Structure means the characteristic numbers, as well as the characteristic kinds and functions, of the component species. this interdependence between the complex structure of the land and its smooth functioning as an energy unit is one of its basic attributes.

When a change occurs in one part of the circuit, many other parts must adjust themselves to it. Change does not necessarily obstruct or divert the flow of energy; evolution is a long series of self-induced changes, the net result of which has been to elaborate the flow mechanism and to lengthen the circuit. Evolutionary changes, however, are usually slow and local. Man's invention of tools has enable him to make changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity) and scope.

One change is in the composition of floras and fauna The larger predators are lopped of f the apex of the pyramid food chains, for the first time in history, become short rather than longer. Domesticated species from other land are substituted for wild ones, and wild ones are moved new habitats. In this world-wide pooling of faunas an floras, some species get out of bounds as pests and disease others are extinguished. Such effects are seldom intended foreseen; they represent unpredicted and often untraceable readjustments in the structure. Agricultural science is large a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.

Another change touches the flow of energy through plant and animals and its return to the soil. Fertility is the ability of soil to receive, store, and release energy. Agriculture, by overdrafts on the soil, or by too radical a substitution domestic for native species in the superstructure, may derange the channels of flow or deplete storage. Soils depleted of their storage, or of the organic matter which anchors it wash away faster than they form. This is erosion.

Waters, like soil, are part of the energy circuit. Industry by polluting waters or obstructing them with dams, may exclude the plants and animals necessary to keep energy in circulation.

Transportation brings about another basic change: the plants or animals grown in one region are now consumed and returned to the soil in another. Transportation taps the energy stored in rocks, and in the air, and uses it elsewhere; thus we fertilize the garden with nitrogen gleaned by the guano birds from the fishes of seas on the other side of the Equator. Thus the formerly localized and self-contained circuits are pooled on a world-wide scale.

The process of altering the pyramid for human occupation releases stored energy, and this often gives rise, during the Pioneering period, to a deceptive exuberance of plant and animal life, both wild and tame. These releases of biotic capital tend to becloud or postpone the penalties of violence.

This thumbnail sketch of land as an energy circuit conveys three basic ideas:

(1 ) That land is not merely soil.

(2) That the native plants and animals kept the energy circuit open; others may or may not.

(3) That man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary changes, and have effects more comprehensive than is intended or foreseen.

These ideas, collectively, raise two basic issues: Can the land adjust itself to the new order? Can the desired alterations be accomplished with less violence?

Biotas seem to differ in their capacity to sustain violent conversion. Western Europe, for example, carries a far different pyramid than Caesar found there. Some large animals are lost; swampy forests have become meadows or plow land; many new plants and animals are introduced, some of which escaped as pests; the remaining natives are greatly changed in distribution and abundance. Yet the soil is still there and, with the help of imported nutrients, still fertile, the waters flow normally; the new structure seems to function and to persist. There is no visible stoppage or derangement of the circuit.

Western Europe, then, has a resistant biota. Its inner processes are tough, elastic, resistant to strain. No matter how violent the alterations, the pyramid, so far, has developed some new modus vivendi which preserves its habitability for man, and for most of the other natives.

Japan seems to present another instance of radical conversion without disorganization.

Most other civilized regions, and some as yet barely touched by civilization, display various stages of disorganization, varying from initial symptoms to advanced wastage In Asia Minor and North Africa diagnosis is confused by climatic changes, which may have been either the cause or the effect of advanced wastage. In the United States the degree of disorganization varies locally; it is worst in the Southwest, the Ozarks, and parts of the South, and least in New England and the Northwest. Better land-uses may still arrest it in the less advanced regions. In parts of Mexico South America, South Africa, and Australia a violent and accelerating wastage is in progress, but I cannot assess the prospects.

This almost world-wide display of disorganization in the land seems to be similar to disease in an animal, except that it never culminates in complete disorganization or death The land recovers, but at some reduced level of complexity and with a reduced carrying capacity for people, plants, and animals. Many biotas currently regarded as 'lands of opportunity' are in fact already subsisting on exploitative agriculture, i.e. they have already exceeded their sustained carrying capacity. Most of South America is overpopulated in this sense.

In arid regions we attempt to offset the process of wastage by reclamation, but it is only too evident that the prospective longevity of reclamation projects is often short. In our own West, the best of them may not last a century.

The combined evidence of history and ecology seems to support one general deduction: the less violent the man made changes, the greater the probability of successful readjustment in the pyramid. Violence, in turn, varies with human population density; a dense population requires more violent conversion. In this respect, North America has a better chance for permanence than Europe, if she can contrive to limit her density.

This deduction runs counter to our current philosophy which assumes that because a small increase in density enriched human life, that an indefinite increase will enrich it indefinitely. Ecology knows of no density relationship that holds for indefinitely wide limits. All gains from density are subject to a law of diminishing returns.

Whatever may be the equation for men and land, it is improbable that we as yet know all its terms. Recent discoveries in mineral and vitamin nutrition reveal unsuspected dependencies in the up-circuit: incredibly minute quantities of certain substances determine the value of soils to plants, of plants to animals. What of the down-circuit? What of the vanishing species, the preservation of which we now regard as an esthetic luxury? They helped build the soil; in which unsuspected ways may they be essential to its maintenance? Professor Weaver proposes that we use prairie flowers to re-flocculate the wasting soils of the dust bowl; who knows what purpose cranes and condors, otters and grizzlies may some day be used?

Land Health and the A-B Cleavage

A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.

Conservationists are notorious for their dissensions. Superficially these seem to add up to mere confusion, but a more careful scrutiny reveals a single plane of cleavage common to many specialized fields. In each field one group (A) regards the land as soil, and its function as commodity-production; another group (B) regards the land as a biota, and its function as something broader. How much broader is admittedly in a state of doubt and confusion.

In my own field, forestry, group A is quite content to grow trees like cabbages, with cellulose as the basic forest commodity. It feels no inhibition against violence; its ideology is agronomic. Group B. on the other hand, sees forestry as fundamentally different from agronomy because it employs natural species, and manages a natural environment rather than creating an artificial one. Group B prefers natural reproduction on principle. It worries on biotic as well as economic grounds about the loss of species like chestnut, and the threatened loss of the white pines. It worries about whole series of secondary forest functions: wildlife, recreation, watersheds, wilderness areas. To my mind, Group B feels the stirrings of an ecological conscience.

In the wildlife field, a parallel cleavage exists. For Group A the basic commodities are sport and meat; the yardstick of production are ciphers of take in pheasants and trout. Artificial propagation is acceptable as a permanent as we as a temporary recourse—if its unit costs permit. Group B on the other hand, worries about a whole series of biotic side-issues. What is the cost in predators of producing a game crop? Should we have further recourse to exotics How can management restore the shrinking species, like prairie grouse, already hopeless as shootable game? How can management restore the threatened rarities, like trumpeter swan and whooping crane? Can management principles be extended to wildflowers? Here again it is clear to me that we have the same A-B cleavage as in forestry.

In the larger field of agriculture I am less competent to speak, but there seem to be somewhat parallel cleavages Scientific agriculture was actively developing before ecology was born, hence a slower penetration of ecological concepts might be expected. Moreover the farmer, by the very nature of his techniques, must modify the biota more radically than the forester or the wildlife manager. Nevertheless, there are many discontents in agriculture which seem to add up to a new vision of 'biotic farming.'

Perhaps the most important of these is the new evidence that poundage or tonnage is no measure of the food-value of farm crops; the products of fertile soil may be qualitatively as well as quantitatively superior. We can bolster poundage from depleted soils by pouring on imported fertility, but we are not necessarily bolstering food-value. The possible ultimate ramifications of this idea are so immense that I must leave their exposition to abler pens.

The discontent that labels itself 'organic farming,' while bearing some of the earmarks of a cult, is nevertheless biotic in its direction, particularly in its insistence on the importance of soil flora and fauna.

The ecological fundamentals of agriculture are just a poorly known to the public as in other fields of land-use. For example, few educated people realize that the marvelous advances in technique made during recent decades are improvements in the pump, rather than the well. Acre for acre, they have barely sufficed to offset the sinking level of fertility.

In all of these cleavages, we see repeated the same basic paradoxes: man the conqueror versus man the biotic citizen; science the sharpener of his sword versus science the search-light on his universe; land the slave and servant versus land the collective organism. Robinson's injunction to Tristram may well be applied, at this juncture, to Homo sapiens as species in geological time:

Whether you will or not You are a King, Tristram,
for you are one Of the time-tested few that leave the world,
When they are gone, not the same place it was.
Mark what you leave.

The Outlook

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, a intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separate from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a 'scenic' area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has 'outgrown.'

Almost equally serious as an obstacle to a land ethic is the attitude of the farmer for whom the land is still an adversary or a taskmaster that keeps him in slavery. Theoretically, the mechanization of farming ought to cut the farmer's chains, ' but whether it really does is debatable.

One of the requisites for an ecological comprehension of land is an understanding of ecology, and this is by no means co-extensive with 'education'; in fact, much higher education seems deliberately to avoid ecological concepts. An understanding of ecology does not necessarily originate in courses bearing ecological labels; it is quite as likely to be

labeled geography, botany, agronomy, history, or economics. this is as it should be, but whatever the label, ecological training is scarce.

The case for a land ethic would appear hopeless but for the minority which is in obvious revolt against these 'modern' trends.

The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

It of course goes without saying that economic feasibility limits the tether of what can or cannot be done for land. It always has and it always will. The fallacy the economic determinists have tied around our collective neck, and which we now need to cast off, is the belief that economics determines all land-use. This is simply not true. An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the land-users' tastes an predilections, rather than by his purse. The bulk of all land relations hinges on investments of time, forethought, skill and faith rather than on investments of cash. As a land-user thinketh, so is he.

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written.' Only the most superficial student of history supposes that Moses 'wrote' the Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking community, and Moses wrote tentative summary of it for a 'seminar.' I say tentative because evolution never stops.

The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well an emotional process. Conservation is paved with good intentions which prove to be futile, or even dangerous, because they are devoid of critical understanding either of the land or of economic land-use. I think it is a truism that as the ethical frontier advances from the individual to the community, its intellectual content increases.

The mechanism of operation is the same for any ethic: social approbation for right actions: social disapproval for wrong actions.

By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.

About the author:

Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa, on January 11 1887. As a boy he developed a lively interest in field ornithology and natural history and after schooling in Burlington, at Lawrenceville Prep in New Jersey, and the She field Scientific School at Yale, he enrolled in the Yale forestry school, the first graduate school of forestry in the United States. Graduating with a masters in 1909, he joined the U.S. Forest Service, by 1912 was supervisor of the million-acre Carson National Forest, and in 1924 accepted the position of Associate Director of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, the principal research institution of the Forest Service at that time. In 1933 he was appointed to the newly created chair in Game Management at the University of Wisconsin, a position he held until his death.

Leopold was throughout his life at the forefront of the conservation movement—indeed, he is widely acknowledged as the father of wildlife conservation in America. Though perhaps best known for A Sand County Almanac, he was also an internationally respected scientist, authored the classic text Game Management, which is still in use today, wrote over 350 articles, mostly on scientific and policy matters and was an advisor on conservation to the United Nations He died of a heart attack on April 21, 1948 while helping his neighbors fight a grass fire. He has subsequently been named to the National Wildlife Federation's Conservation Hall of Fame, and in 1978, the John Burroughs Memorial Association awarded him the John Burroughs Medal for his lifework and, in particular, for A Sand County Almanac.

LEOPOLD QUESTION 1

2011-02-09T17:32:00.002-08:00

PLEASE READ THE SECTIONS BELOW AND THOSE SUGGESTED IN THE SYLLABUS UNDER THE WEEKLY READING SCHEDULE AND COMMENT ON THE FOLLOWING HEREIN:

1. WHAT DOES THE TITLE OF THE BOOK SAND COUNTY ALMANAC SUGGEST?

LEOPOLD QUESTION 2

2011-02-09T17:32:00.001-08:00

2. WHAT IS THE SEASONAL ARRANGEMENT OF THE FIRST PORTION OF THE BOOK MEANT TO COMMUNICATE?

LEOPOLD QUESTION 2

2011-02-09T17:31:00.000-08:00

3. WHAT DO YOU UNDERSTAND BY "THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN"?

LEOPOLD QUESTION 4

2011-02-09T17:30:00.000-08:00

4. RELATE LEOPOLD'S LAND ETHIC TO SNYDER'S ETIQUETTE.

John Coltrane

2011-01-28T12:21:00.000-08:00

“All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature,

and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.” -John Coltrane

http://www.johncoltrane.com/videos.html

THE REDISCOVERY OF NORTH AMERICA

2011-01-15T20:16:00.000-08:00

THE REDISCOVERY OF NORTH AMERICA Lopez

Lopez’s small book is a contemplation on our relationship with the North American continent since its “discovery” in 1492 by C. Columbus for the Spanish Queen Isabella. Lopez situates us on the approaching ships to provide some insight into the reigning mind-set that defined how this “new land”, its people and their cultures were met. At the end of his remembrance, Lopez again returns us to the ship in order to give us the opportunity to consider which direction our choices and decision might take after our “illiteracy” and ignorance about the continent has been challenged. Throughout the little book, Lopez challenges us to IMAGINE not only what might have been here at the moment of contact, something to which we have been continuously blind, but also to image how we might still be able to see what is here, and how we might be able to recuperate, for our own collective benefit, some of the knowledge associated with the place(s) we have settled. Discuss how we might shift our existence from “settlers” to “inhabitants” of place. What does this mean vis-a-vis our relationship to “local knowledge”, to history, to resources? What does “listening” mean in this context? What do you expect to hear? Finally, consider how these work to outline what we might call (using Stegner’s phrase) a geography of hope.

Gary Snyder THE PRACTICE OF THE WILD

2011-01-13T23:09:00.000-08:00

WILDERNESS LETTER by Wallace Stegner

2011-01-12T22:06:00.000-08:00

Wallace Stegner

This url is for the Geography of Hope. Introduction to the Wilderness Letter written by Stegner 2 decades after his Wilderness Letter...on this page you will also find a link to the full text of Wilderness Letter.

http://www.wilderness.org/OurIssues/Wilderness/wildernessletterintro.cfm

Snyder's Etiquette of Freedom

2011-01-12T17:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/selby.htm

GARY SNYDER “The Etiquette of Freedom”

Beginning with a story that leads to a consideration of impermanence and the role mythology in the creation of culture, Snyder invites us to contemplate the use, definitions, history, application and potential re-inscription of certain terms.
Wild and Free: “To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are – painful, impermanent, open, imperfect – and then be grateful for the impermanence and the freedom it grants us.” (168) He hereby bridges two of the main influences on his view, Native American and Buddhist.

Nature, Wilderness, Wildness…how does Snyder refer to these terms and what does he see as their function/presence in today’s world? This piece also makes references that we might well link to our prior reading of Lopez’s The Rediscovery of North America. Both writers ask us to reconstitute our view, approach and habits vis-à-vis the world in which we live, the land that we inhabit. Offering that “place-based stories the people tell, and the naming they’ve done, is their archeology, architecture, and title to the land” Snyder emphasizes the importance of reading cultures through the connections they have made with their places of residence. Therefore, the analysis of language and language use becomes vital as a tool of survival.

Nature, Wild, Wilderness…
What is wild? How do we define wild? Mostly by what something is not…pg. 171.
Snyder inverts the patter to propose wild through a positive reading of what things might be, which further expands the other terms addressed, including and particularly FREE.
Wild=Free when defined as not cultivated, ruled, tamed.

Culture…Language…
“To be well educated is to have learned the songs, proverbs, stories, sayings, myths (and technologies) that come with this experiencing of the nonhuman members of the local ecological community. Practice in the open field, “open country”, is foremost. Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Waling is the exact balance of spirit and humility. Out walking, one notices where there is food. And there are firsthand true stories of “Your ass is somebody else’s meal” – a blunt way of saying interdependence, interconnection, “ecology”, on the level where it counts, also a teach of mindfulness and preparedness. There is an extraordinary teaching of specific plants and animals and their uses, empirical and impeccable, that never reduces them to objects and commodities.” (178)

“The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.” (182)

Snyder's Etiquette and Momaday's Rainy Mountain

2011-01-11T11:10:00.000-08:00

Consider:

Snyder’s “Etiquette of Freedom” and Momaday’s “Rainy mountain” are parallel considerations of our place in nature. Both offer a language through which we might engage our relationship with the world. How do the languages of these texts compare, how do their culturally specific terms offer a new beginning (a la Lopez) or continuation for a (new) ecological consciousness and culture?

MOMADAY, RAINY MOUNTAIN

And consider then, Momaday’s book The Way to Rainy Mountain…what is the function of the Prologue, of the Introduction to the book? How does this book cross into the territory that Snyder defines? How does Momaday tell his story through his community? What is Rainy Mountain and what is meant by the Way there?

2011-01-10T00:28:00.000-08:00

I feel a little alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit... What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something outside the woods?

Henry David Thoreau

Barry Lopez THE REDISCOVERY OF NORTH AMERICA

2011-01-09T22:32:00.000-08:00

The first few short chapters of this small book address the
exploitative single mindedness that Christopher Columbus’
“discovery” of North America transported across the Atlantic
and that defined the terms of engagement with the new land
and its inhabitants. Lopez proposes that our existence here,
on this continent, is marked by this first encounter and little
has been done to alter the course as it was set back then, over
500 years ago. He defines the relationship as one in which
“instead of an encounter with ‘the other’ in which we proposed
certain ideas, proposals based on assumptions of equality,
respectfully tendered, our encounters were distinguished by
a stern, relentless imposition of ideas – religious, economic,
and social ideas we deemed superior if not unimpeachable.” (17)

Aside from locating us aboard Columbus’ ship as it neared
the “new world”, Lopez has us imagine what it might have been
like to have been a crew member, a common person, aboard
the ship. Someone employed to support the discovery and
exploitation, yet someone not directly rewarded for his actions
and in turn exploited because of his social status. The author
asks us to imagine the new world, its new life forms, its new
landscape with its inhabitants; and he asks us to imagine how
one faced with such novelty and beauty might remain blind
to it.

Reading on, Lopez takes us into a closer consideration of the
results of the voyage of discovery and the subsequent
settlement of the new world. Once we are brought into closer
proximity to the context he proposes, Lopez further asks us to
reconsider a series of vocabulary words the meaning of which
seems to have been lost or altered to support the erasure of
historical memory. The words include imagination, time, wealth,
residence, habitation, community, local knowledge, along with
the names of plants, animals, peoples, their localities, languages
and cultural traditions. All of these terms gravitate around what
we might come to consider as “a sense of place”, or querencia.
Querencia “refers to a place on the ground where one feels secure,
a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn. It comes
from the verb querer, to desire, but this verb also carries the sense
of accepting a challenge, as in a game.” (39) Finally, given this
definition, this term, this term of reference and residence we must
ask ourselves if we in fact feel secure in the place in which we
have come to rest, if we can call this place our own and, if we
in fact feel the slightest sense of discomfort there, are we up to
the challenge that it offers to make it a better place.

KEY WORDS

2011-01-08T11:04:00.000-08:00

Some Words to Consider in their meaning and usage.

What is Nature? Where is Nature?

Nature: one of the most complex words in the English language. Three branches of meaning 1. the essential quality and character of something 2. an inherent force which guides the world or humans 3. the material world itself, with or without human beings. Comes from the a root of nasci (L) meaning to be born which bestows upon it a sense of quality and process before becoming an independent noun. The branch of meaning related to an inherent force is also tied to the presence of a single prime cause...God and as such also the source of natural laws...the constitution of the world, universal and constant recurring force...
The 18th C bring about Nature as the "countryside" as an opposition to the town...nature is what man has not made...Nature-lover and nature-poetry date from this period.
As an expression of the "natural world" NATURE is problematic in the sense that it is difficult to view it objectively without overlaying upon it a conditioned eye. Nature can become an overly romanticized place that nevertheless lies outside of our immediate experience and canno therefore be known except through a mediated eye.
Nature is contrasted to man-made things…which we can eventually extrapolate to be natural since they are part and parcel of man’s “nature” to build, invent and construct.

Culture: This too a complicated word in the language, it also contains a sense of quality and process...it is accompanied by a sense of selection toward making something the norm. To cultivate is to prepare, groom, and selectively help blossom...agriculture therefore is a direct relative to culture as a process of preparing the ground for the proper propagation and production of a final product. Culture, as the aesthetic and intellectual construct we term “ours”…and the nourishing habitat of a “yogurt culture” (Snyder’s example).

Wild, a term that Gary Snyder couples with Free to generate “an American dream-phrase”. And he continues that to be “truly Free one must take on the basic conditions as they are – painful, impermanent, open, imperfect – and then be grateful for impermanence and they freedom it grants us. For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom.”

Wilderness/Wildness, are the places we don’t inhabit, that we set aside as parks and reserves for the former; wildness however can be said to be everywhere. And, possibly, even as wilderness diminishes all around us, wildness might continue to survive all around us. So wildness could be considered a term of energetic life force, a sense of vitality and vibrancy, that is of the natural environment.

Environmental Footprint: The amount of resources consumed by an individual. Does not indicate a "vital" level of consumption, merely consumption. Beginning with the assumption that there are world wide 4.5 biologically productive acres/person, we then calculate what our personal consumption is in relation to that. "The average ecological footprint in the United States is 24 acres per person."...which gives us a good indication of our position as consumers in the world.

Ecological Intelligence: Inversely related to the environmental footprint. Ecological intelligence is founded/developed upon our "conception of place", our relationship to the world and its resources and the recognition that we are dealing with a finite system of interdependent factors. Eco intelligence develops with recognition of interdependence and the increased ability to recognize and learn "the native language of the region."

Emerson's NATURE

2010-04-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes . Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable . We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses; -- in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur. Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant , a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

Chapter I NATURE

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough , and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit . To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Click on the title to go to Trancendentalism Website and the rest of "Nature"

Work on a Tuscan Farm: Spannocchia Foundation

2010-04-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

SPANNOCCHIA FOUNDATION

Anza Borrego...near Indian Hill

2010-04-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Anza Borrego

2010-02-28T17:06:00.000-08:00

Photos by Christina C.

Environmental Literature class field trip to Anza Borrego Park, Feb. 26, 2006

After so much reading and talking inside the stuffy rooms of the university
we finally get out into the fresh air. Ocotillos, harvester ants, ravens, agaves, sand and stone,
boulders, caves and pictographs...a full day.

What ABC refused to run before Presidential debate

2008-10-08T22:15:00.001-07:00

2007-12-19T08:41:00.001-08:00

JUST IN! FUR IS GREEN!

Heard an interesting short debate on CBC this morning between a rep from the fur industry and a rep from Liberation BC. Here are both their websites:

www.furisgreen.com

www.liberationbc.com

2007-11-20T21:14:00.000-08:00

The Secret Life of A Cola

From Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, by John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning, copyright 1997 Northwest Environment Watch, Seattle.

The Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality is encouraging citizens to think about all the consequences of their consumption through the proclamation of the third Use Less Stuff Week April 19-26, 2003. DEQ has provided a series of articles such as this one based on the book, Stuff--The Secret Lives of Everyday Things by John C. Ryan. When speaking at the Oklahoma Association for Environmental Education's EE Expo in February of last year, Ryan told the crowd, "Confronting resource consumption is North Americans' principal environmental challenge, although few realize this fact because impacts of consumption are mostly invisible to the consumer. The United States, with less than 5 percent of world population, consumes 24 percent of the world's energy and similar shares of other commodities."

This article outlines the "ecological wake" of cola (aka soda pop). Americans drink more water carbonated in soda than they drink plain from the tap. The world drinks about 70 million gallons of soda every day. Following are the resources used to get you that can of pop.
Corn Syrup. The cola contained high-fructose corn syrup from Iowa, a state where even the rain usually contains traces of pesticides. A milling plant used water, enzymes, acids, heat, grinders, and centrifuges to turn corn kernels into starch and then corn syrup. Making syrup is the second largest use of corn in North America; feeding livestock is the largest. On average, Americans consume 48 pounds of corn syrup a year.

To make your cola, the bottling plant combined corn syrup, citric acid, and flavor concentrate (a secret recipe containing flavors, preservatives, caffeine, and artificial coloring) first with water and then with carbon dioxide. The same corn-milling plant in Iowa fermented corn to make the carbon dioxide. The caffeine was a by-product of making decaffeinated coffee.
Bauxite. Your last cola was in an aluminum can weighing 15 grams (about half an ounce). Five grams was recycled from melted-down cans and scrap. The other 10 grams began as 40 grams of bauxite ore in the Australian outback. Massive machines with 15-foot-high tires and shovels big enough to scoop up a car, strip-mined the ore from a thin layer of underground rock. Bauxite mining destroys more surface area than mining of any other ore.

Near the mine, the bauxite was crushed, washed, dried, pulverized, mixed with caustic soda from California, heated, pressurized, settled, filtered, and roasted with calcium oxide from Japan. Forty grams of bauxite yielded 20 grams of the aluminum oxide powder known as alumina, which looks like wet sugar crystals. Most of the caustic soda was captured for reuse. The process also created 16 grams of “red mud”, a skin-burning mixture of oxidized metals and other contaminants. Pipes siphoned the mud to a settling pond, where a fraction of it leached into groundwater.

A Korean freighter hauled the alumina across the Pacific Ocean to the wall of breakers at the Columbia River bar, the four-mile-wide river mouth that Lewis and Clark called “that seven-shouldered horror.” The ship’s captain used sonar and satellite linkups to plot his course through the bar’s chaotic waves and shifting sands. He motored between the two-mile-long jetties. He entered the deep channel dredged into the Columbia’s shallow estuary by the Army Corps of Engineers. Jetties, dikes, and dredges have washed away or filled in two-thirds of the river’s tidal marshes. Tidal marshes and other estuary habitats are nurse beds for aquatic life, sheltering young fish, birds, and many other animals.

Despite all the electronic gadgetry and all the effort to tame the river, the bar--where the misnamed Pacific Ocean and the biggest river on the west coast of the Americas pound against each other--remained the most dangerous part of the freighter’s 24-day journey. Once past the entrance, it was smooth sailing upriver toward the aluminum smelter in eastern Washington.
Smelting. The smelter dissolved the aluminum oxide in giant steel pots filled with a bath of cryolite (sodium aluminum fluoride). Carbon electrodes (made from Alaskan petroleum) were lowered into the pots and delivered a massive 100,000-amp jolt of electricity. The powerful charge broke oxygen atoms away from the aluminum and attached them to the carbon, forming carbon dioxide. Small amounts of fluorine attached to the carbon and escaped the smelter in the form of perfluorocarbons (PFCs)-greenhouse gases that trap thousands of times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide. Few processes are as damaging to the global climate as aluminum smelting.
Electricity. The smelter ran on purchased hydropower 24 hours a day. The smelter bought the electricity at discount rates from the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the Pacific Northwest’s main provider of electricity. BPA markets power from 29 federal dams and a nuclear power plant. Eight of these dams along the main stems of the Columbia and Snake Rivers annually kill millions of young salmon heading to the Pacific. Dams, damaged stream habitats, hatcheries, and overfishing have eliminated more than 97 percent of wild salmon in the Columbia Basin.

Aluminum smelters use almost one-fifth of the electricity sold by BPA, but the eight aluminum smelters in Oregon and Washington provide only about 7,500 jobs--one-tenth of 1 percent of the regional total. The same smelters drink up to 16 percent of all electricity used in the two states-more than the million residents of Portland and Seattle combined. The average household served by BPA pays about $2 per month extra to subsidize the smelters.
Can. The smelters’ end products--giant slabs, or ingots, of aluminum--were trucked to the Seattle area. There, a mill pressed each thick ingot into a thin rolled sheet of aluminum. Then, at another factory, a high-powered press punched cups resembling tuna cans out of the aluminum sheet. Other machines stretched your can out to its final height, trimmed its edge, printed its colorful design, and applied a clear protective varnish. Ovens baked the can twice, once to dry the printing and once to cure a synthetic coating sprayed on the inside of the can. At the bottling plant, machines filled the can with near-freezing soda and immediately crimped the top on. The can cost more than the soda inside.If you threw your cola can into a recycling bin, it was one of 100 billion beverage cans used each year in the United States; 40 billon are tossed into landfills, and 60 billion are recycled. Your can was later trucked to a recycling center, shredded, and melted down. Within two months of being tossed, it reappeared as a new can. Recycling the can took 5 percent of the energy required to mine and smelt a fresh one.

What to Do? Drink less soda. It’s just fizzy sugar water. Have some water instead.

GRIZZLY BEAR: HISTORIC RANGE

2007-11-19T22:56:00.001-08:00

You can clearly see that the historic range of grizzlies is quite vast. Approximately 100,000 grizzlies once roamed the western half of North America, from the barren arctic tundra south to the high plateaus of central Mexico. Today, in the lower forty-eight states fewer than 1,000 survive today, concentrated mostly in Wyoming's Yellowstone Park area. Canada is home to about 10,000 grizzlies, half of them in British Columbia.

2007-11-17T08:18:00.001-08:00

Everything is as it is. It has no name other than the name we give it. It is we who call it something; we give it a value. We say this thing is good or it's bad, but in itself, the thing is only as it is. It's not absolute; it's just as it is. People are just as they are.

-Ajahn Sumedho, "The Mind and the Way"

TWO PIECES BY ARUDHATI ROY

2007-10-11T21:46:00.000-07:00

VIEW THE DOCUMENTARY

DAM/AGE

http://www.weroy.org/video_damage.shtml

and read the following at the subsequent urls

The End of Imagination

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/nukes/endOfImagine.html

The Greater Common Good

http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html

STOP THE SLAUGHTER OF BABY SEALS!!! IT'S TIME FOR IT TO END!

2007-06-07T08:52:00.001-07:00

The Lorax (Parts 1, 2 and 3)

2007-05-25T17:00:00.001-07:00

THE XAROL

2007-05-25T16:34:00.000-07:00

The Lorax

By: Dr. Seuss

At the far end of town
where the Grickle-grass grows
and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows
and no birds ever sing excepting old crows...
is the Street of the Lifted Lorax.

And deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say,
if you look deep enough you can still see, today,
where the Lorax once stood
just as long as it could
before somebody lifted the Lorax away.

What was the Lorax?
Any why was it there?
And why was it lifted and taken somewhere
from the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows?
The old Once-ler still lives here.
Ask him. He knows.

You won't see the Once-ler.
Don't knock at his door.
He stays in his Lerkim on top of his store.
He stays in his Lerkim, cold under the roor,
where he makes his own clothes
out of miff-muffered moof.
And on special dank midnights in August,
he peeks out of the shutters
and sometimes he speaks
and tells how the Lorax was lifted away.
He'll tell you, perhaps...
if you're willing to pay.

On the end of a rope
he lets down a tin pail
and you have to toss in fifteen cents
and a nail
and the shell of a great-great-great-
grandfather snail.

Then he pulls up the pail,
makes a most careful count
to see if you've paid him
the proper amount.

Then he hides what you paid him
away in his Snuvv,
his secret strange hole
in his gruvvulous glove.
Then he grunts, I will call you by Whisper-ma-Phone,
for the secrets I tell you are for your ears alone.

SLUPP
Down slupps the Whisper-ma-Phone to your ear
and the old Once-ler's whispers are not very clear,
since they have to come down
through a snergelly hose,
and he sounds as if he had
smallish bees up his nose.
Now I'll tell you, he says, with his teeth sounding gray,
how the Lorax got lifted and taken away...
It all started way back...
such a long, long time back...

Way back in the days when the grass was still green
and the pond was still wet
and the clouds were still clean,
and the song of the Swomee-Swans rang out in space...
one morning, I came to this glorious place.
And I first saw the trees!
The Truffula Trees!
The bright-colored tufts of the Truffula Trees!
Mile after mile in the fresh morning breeze.

And under the trees, I saw Brown Bar-ba-loots
frisking about in their Bar-ba-loot suits
as the played in the shade and ate Truffula Fruits.

From the rippulous pond
came the comfortable sound
of the Humming-Fish humming
while splashing around.

But those trees! Those trees!
Those Truffula Trees!
All my life I'd been searching
for trees such as these.
The touch of their tufts
was much softer than silk.
And they had the sweet smell
of fresh butterfly milk.

I felt a great leaping
of joy in my heart.
I knew just what I'd do!
I unloaded my cart.

In no time at all, I had built a small shop.
Then I chopped down a Truffula Tree with one chop.
And with great skillful skill and with great speedy speed,
I took the soft tuft. And I knitted a Thneed!

The instand I'd finished, I heard a ga-Zump!
I looked.
I saw something pop out of the stump
of the tree I'd chopped down. It was sort of a man.
Describe him?...That's hard. I don't know if I can.

He was shortish. And oldish.
And brownish. And mossy.
And he spoke with a voice
that was sharpish and bossy.

Mister! he said with a sawdusty sneeze,
I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs--
he was very upset as he shouted and puffed--
What's that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?

Look, Lorax, I said. There's no cause for alarm.
I chopped just one tree. I am doing no harm.
I'm being quite useful. This thing is a Thneed.
A Thneed's a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!
It«s a shirt. It's a sock. It's a glove. It's a hat.
But it has other uses. Yes, far beyond that.
You can use it for carpets. For pillows! For sheets!
Or curtains! Or covers for bicycle seats!
The Lorax said,
Sir! You are crazy with greed.
There is no one on earth
who would buy that fool Thneed!

But the very next minute I proved he was wrong.
For, just at that minute, a chap came along,
and he thought that the Thneed I had knitted was great.
He happily bought it for three ninety-eight.
I laughed at the Lorax, You poor stupid guy!
You never can tell what some people will buy.

I repeat, cried the Lorax,
I speak for the trees!

I'm busy, I told him.
Shut up, if you please.
I rushed 'cross the room, and in no time at all,
built a radio-phone. I put in a quick call.
I called all my brothers and uncles and aunts
and I said, Listen here! Here's a wonderful chance
for the whole Once-ler Family to get mighty rich!
Get over here fast! Take the road to North Nitch.
Turn left at Weehawken. Sharp right at South Stich.

And, in no time at all,
in the factory I built,
the whole Once-ler Family
was working full tilt.
We were all knitting Thneeds
just as busy as bees,
to the sound of the chopping
of Truffula Trees.

Then...
Oh! Baby! Oh!
How my business did grow!
Now, chopping one tree
at a time was too slow.

So I quickly invented my Super-Axe-Hacker
which whacked off four Truffula Trees at one smacker.
We were making Thneeds
four times as fast as before!
And that Lorax?... He didn't show up any more.

But the next week
he knocked on my new office door.
He snapped, I'm the Lorax who speaks for the trees
which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please.
But I'm also in charge of the Brown Bar-ba-loots
who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loot suits
and happily lived, eating Truffula Fruits.
NOW...thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground,
there's not enough Truffula Fruit to go 'round.
And my poor Bar-ba-loots are all getting the crummies
because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies!

They loved living here. But I can't let them stay.
They'll have to find food. And I hope that they may.
Good luck, boys, he cried. And he sent them away.

I, the Once-ler, felt sad
as I watched them all go.
BUT...
business is business!
And business must grow
regardless of crummies in tummies, you know.

I meant no harm. I most truly did not.
But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got.
I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads.
I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads
of the Thneeds I shipped out. I was shipping them forth
to the South! To the East! To the West! To the North!
I went right on biggering...selling more Thneeds.
And I biggered my money, which everyone needs.

Then again he came back! I was fixing some pipes
when that old nuisance Lorax came back with more gripes.
I am the Lorax, he coughed and he whiffed.
He sneezed and he snuffled. He snarggled. He sniffed.
Once-ler! he cried with a cruffulous croak.
Once-ler! You're making such smogulous smoke!
My poor Swomee-Swans...why, they can't sing a note!
No one can sing who has smog in his throat.

And so, said the Lorax,
--please pardon my cough--
they cannot live here.
So I'm sending them off.

Where will they go?...
I don't hopefully know.
They may have to fly for a month...or a year...
To escape from the smog you've smogged-up around here.

What's more, snapped the Lorax. (His dander was up.)
Let me say a few words about Gluppity-Glupp.
Your machinery chugs on, day and night without stop
making Gluppity-Glup. Also Schloppity-Schlopp.
And what do you do with this leftover goo?...
I'll show you. You dirty old Once-ler man, you!

You're glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed!
No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed.
So I'm sending them off. Oh, their future is dreary.
They'll walk on their fins and get woefully weary
in search of some water that isn't so smeary.

And then I got mad.
I got terribly mad.
I yelled at the Lorax, Now listen here, Dad!
All you do is yap-yap and say, Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!
Well, I have my rights, sir, and I'm telling you
I intend to go on doing just what I do!
And, for your information, you Lorax, I'm figgering
on biggering
and Biggering
and BIGGERING
and BIGGERING!!
turning MORE Truffula Trees into Thneeds
which everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE needs!

And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack!
From outside in the fields came a sickening smack
af an axe on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall.
The very last Truffula Tree of them all!

No more trees. No more Thneeds. No more work to be done.
So, in no time, my uncles and aunts, every one,
all waved my good-bye. They jumped into my cars
and drove away under the smoke-smuggered stars.

Now all that was left 'neath the bad-smelling sky
was my big empty factory...
the Lorax...
and I.

The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance...
just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance...
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.
And I'll never forget the grim look on his face
when he hoisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.

And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word...
UNLESS.
Whatever that meant, well, I just couldn't guess.

That was long, long ago.
But each day since that day
I've sat here and worried
and worried away.
Through the years, while my buildings
have fallen apart,
I've worried about it
with all of my heart.

But now, says the Once-ler,
Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.

SO...
Catch! calls the Once-ler.
He lets something fall.
It's a Truffula Seed.
It's the last one of all!
You're in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds.
And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs.
Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care.
Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack.
Then the Lorax
and all of his friends
may come back.

2007-05-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.

Edward Abbey

The Mountains and Waters Sutra. Dogen

2006-06-12T01:39:00.000-07:00

A Selection from Dogen's Mountains and Waters Sutra...

It is not the case simply that there is water in the world; within the world of water there is a world. And this is true not only within water: within clouds as well there is world of sentient beings; within wind there is world of sentient beings; within fire there is world of sentient beings; within earth there is world of sentient beings. Within the dharma realm there is a world of sentient beings; within a single blade of grass there is world of sentient beings; within a single staff there is a world of sentient beings. And wherever there is a world of sentient beings, there, inevitably, is the world of buddhas and ancestors. The reason this so, we should study very carefully.

In this way, water is the palace of the "true dragon"; it is not flowing away.18 If we regard it only as flowing, the word "flowing" is an insult to water: it is like imposing "not flowing". Water is nothing but water's "real form just as it is". Water is the virtue of water; it is not flowing. In the thorough study of the flowing or the not-flowing of a single [drop of] water, the entirety of the ten thousand things is instantly realized. Among mountains as well, there are mountains hidden in jewels; there are mountains hidden in marshes, mountains hidden in the sky; there are mountains hidden in mountains. There is a study of mountains hidden in hiddenness.

An old buddha has said, "Mountains are mountains and waters are waters."

Slow down and pay attention

2006-05-29T21:02:00.000-07:00

A THOUSAND REGIONS

2006-05-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them and be
Expert in home-cosmography.

Thoreau, Walden

Freegans

2006-03-26T23:30:00.000-08:00

www.freegan.info
A Site Dedicated to Revealing Human Over-Consumption and Waste

Change

2006-03-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

Before enlightenment,
I chopped wood and carried water.
After enlightenment,
I chopped wood and carried water.

Zen saying

SAVARY

2006-03-08T10:36:00.000-08:00

I am on
an island

I see islands
clear

or as muted shapes
through haze

and water so flat
to walk across

seems possible
here we are

surrounded
by ourselves

the sea
and the house

residence
in pieces of ourselves.

This place
has become my mouth

the light swarms
through the forest

to the beach
under the guise of words.

Days are longer
than we know

and the nights are
trees and wind.

Stars and satellites orbit us
oblige us into sight.

My children ask
about he silence

their eyes search for it
their mouths hang open

in expectation.
Nothing announces night.

Two days rain
and thundered winds

we are surrounded
by growth in sway

our stay
a cycle of moons

not enough to know
if this is a year

of seaweed and rocks
or jellyfish and beach glass.

Pebbles go
into making sleep

set in wax
to wick up hours

much like
the burning moth

oriflamme arrangement
fingers and imagination.

We climb
over each other

to reach
the summit

but it remains
a journal scrawl

from which
we have been distracted

and now must look
elsewhere.

The currents of import
spring from

another space
another ground

where digging is
unnecessary

all we can do is
look

in each other’s
direction.

The DEEP ECOLOGY Platform

2006-01-17T19:00:00.000-08:00

1) The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth; intrinsic value; inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.

2) Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.

3) Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.

4) Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.

5) The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

6) Policies must therefore be changed. The changes in policies affect basic economic, technological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.

7) The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.

8) Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.

-- Arne Naess and George Sessions --

from the Deep Ecology website...click on Title to connect

A Thousand Regions

2006-01-15T15:26:00.000-08:00

Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them and be
Expert in home-cosmography.

Thoreau, Walden

Lato Selvatico e l'Ambientalismo Americano

2006-01-14T22:52:00.001-08:00

Wilderness: Il "lato selvatico" e non conformista americano
di Zarelli Eduardo [28/12/2005]
Fonte: Arianna Editrice

Vi è un fiume carsico che collega il pensiero ecologista americano al ruolo profetico permanente nella storia degli Stati Uniti: quello di chi pensa, pratica e ripropone la buona custodia della terra (steawardship) come componente essenziale della libertà umana e della giustizia sociale. Dalle virtù civiche di Thomas Jefferson al “trascendentalismo” di Emerson ed Henry D. Thoreau, dal naturalisimo pionieristico di John Muir al conservazionismo di Aldo Leopold, c’è parte del retroterra culturale a cui attingono le “virtù rurali” di Wendel Berry; il bioregionalismo di Peter Berg e di Kirkpatrick Sale; il ritorno alla selvaticità (wildersness) di Gary Snyder; il “paradigma olista” di Fritjof Capra e di Gregory Bateson. Forse la vastità e la profonda bellezza dei paesaggi unite alla saggezza della cultura pellerossa, hanno insinuato fin dalle origini nello spirito americano - prometeica esaltazione della modernità conquistatrice di un “eterno” West trasposto nell’ideal tipo della Frontiera - un particolare richiamo interiore alla natura come riferimento sostanziale della civiltà. Poiché lo stile di vita edonistico statunitense è divenuto il maggior fattore di distruzione degli equilibri naturali, il ruolo di questi pensatori si è fatto più gravoso e contraddittorio rispetto a quello dei loro predecessori. Poiché la cultura americana ha tradito la sua vocazione originaria, essi si pongono criticamente nei confronti di quella vocazione.
Aldo Leopold - fondatore, tra l’altro, della Wilderness Society e morto 50 anni fa mentre tentava di domare un incendio nella prateria che minacciava la sua fattoria - nel suo Almanacco di un mondo semplice riproduce immagini semplici ed essenziali tratte dall’esperienza del mondo naturale. La sua è una commovente descrizione dei mutamenti che la natura subisce nel corso di un anno, con il fiorire e lo sfiorire della vegetazione e il conseguente comportamento degli animali: la ciclicità delle quattro stagioni come analogia della spirale dell’esistenza umana. Questa parte narrativa sfocia quindi nelle riflessioni sul rapporto uomo-natura, delineando quell’originale prospettiva biocentrica, in cui il sapere ecologico si allea all’etica e all’estetica; prospettiva, questa, che ha esercitato un influsso decisivo sull’ecologia del profondo. Leopold, evidenziando i fallimenti del “protezionismo” ambientale, parte dal presupposto che la “Terra è un organismo” e che, solo sentendola come una “casa comune” a cui apparteniamo, potremo servircene con il dovuto rispetto. Il degrado della bellezza della natura corrisponde alla riduzione della sua complessità, diversità, stabilità: quell’equilibrio, che ne sostanzia in profondità la pienezza vitale e simbolica.
Sicuro erede di questo atteggiamento interiore è Wendell Berry, poeta, scrittore, saggista, professore di letteratura all’Università del Kentucky, ma, soprattutto, agricoltore. Il suo approccio alla repentina degradazione ambientale, culturale e umana della società industriale inizia nei primi anni Sessanta, quando la dimostrazione dei danni ecologici diventa evidente al grande pubblico grazie a opere come Primavera silenziosa di Rachel Carson. A differenza di molti pensatori e letterati di quell’epoca, per la maggior parte legati alla Beat Generation, alcuni dei quali (come Gary Snyder) suoi strettissimi amici, Wendel Berry non vaga per il paese alla Easy Rider. La sua protesta contro il consumismo non persegue una “fuga dal Sistema” o la recisione delle radici; al contrario il suo contributo è rivolto alla riscoperta delle fonti della cultura occidentale, che l’industrialismo progressista ha soffocato. Rivisitando le grandi opere della letteratura europea, dall’Odissea alla Divina commedia al Paradiso perduto di Milton, insieme al Vecchio e Nuovo Testamento, Berry rintraccia i presentimenti del tragico destino occidentale. La sua poesia e la sua letteratura non hanno nulla di estetizzante o intimistico, ma si rivolgono comunque all’anima contemporanea straziata dalla mancata identità personale e sociale. Non indulgono alla nostalgia ma forniscono a politici, economisti e uomini della strada, delle indicazioni pratiche e della intelligenza tecnica e storica sedimentata dalle sobrie virtù civiche comunitarie.
Con i piedi per terra è l’emblematico titolo di una sua raccolta di testi (tradotta anche in Italia); gli argomenti spaziano dall’improprio primato dell’economia industriale, al fallimento “specialistico” dell’istruzione universitaria, al nostro rapporto con gli strumenti della tecnologia e con la natura selvaggia. Il problema della coerente e pratica applicazione della coscienza personale e comunitaria nella vita di ogni giorno è quello centrale di ogni uomo. Quando una società nega questa esigenza, separandosi dalla propria tradizione, regredisce nell’anomia individualistica e nel degrado culturale, nonostante la patinata veste di prodigi tecnologici e successi materiali di cui si riveste. Berry si richiama, in controtendenza, ad una prospettiva di radicamento etico del quale l’economia può, e quindi deve, essere un mero strumento. Nell’interpretare l’evoluzione del modello economico statunitense immagina retoricamente come sarebbe stata la società, se nel dopoguerra si fosse dato il giusto peso alle comunità rurali rispetto alla crescita esponenziale del prodotto interno lordo, se si fosse investito nella qualità della vita con lo stesso impegno impiegato per dispiegare il complesso militare-industriale più potente del mondo. Domanda oggi quanto mai pertinente e drammaticamente attuale.
La ricaduta localistica del pensiero di Wendel Berry è presa alla lettera dal movimento bioregionalista americano. La parola bioregione si compone semanticamente di bio, la parola greca che significa vita e “regione” che deriva dal latino regere, cioè governare. La vita che si autogoverna nel limite biotico di un territorio. Un territorio abitato, un luogo definito dalle forme di vita che vi si svolgono, piuttosto che dall’artificio della razionalizzazione; una regione governata dalla natura. Tutto ciò è credibile solo coltivando una rinata sensibilità per la specificità dei luoghi e delle culture, una lealtà politica verso il territorio in cui si vive, unite a pratiche economiche e sociali sostenibili, cioè radicate nella particolarità del territorio e delle sue tradizioni, espresse dalla sensibilità delle comunità locali. La pluralità delle identità comunitarie evita i rischi di accentramento del potere e quindi di colonialismo o imperialismo. La complementarietà e lo sviluppo di una fitta rete di relazioni intercomunitarie - tra cui la sussidiarietà e l’interdipendenza - possono definire con sufficiente approssimazione l’intento di un “federalismo ecologista”. Il problema di fondo è di ripensare pluralisticamente il mondo fuori dall’universalismo monistico e dall’etnocentrismo occidentale rispetto al quale tutto diventa barbarie, periferia retrograda.
In questa prospettiva naturalistica è maggiormente noto in Europa il pensiero di Fritjof Capra. Grazie all’originalità e all’importanza dei suoi contributi - fra cui il bestseller internazionale Il Tao della Fisica - il fisico americano è oggi considerato uno degli intellettuali più credibili tra coloro che propugnano un nuovo “paradigma” olistico per interpretare e favorire il mutamento del modello di sviluppo tecnomorfo. Il debito dell’autore all’ecologia del profondo è riconosciuto limpidamente, quando definisce il “nuovo paradigma” come una visione del mondo che si fonda sulla consapevolezza della interdipendenza fondamentale di tutti i fenomeni ed afferma che, come esseri individuali e sociali, tutti noi incidiamo e contemporaneamente dipendiamo dai processi ciclici della Natura. Nelle sue opere Capra, analogamente a Bateson, accosta la fisica contemporanea e la tradizione sapienziale constatando come, inconsciamente, la scienza contemporanea si allontani sempre più dalla cornice entro cui è nata, che è quella cartesiana di una scissione fra mente e natura. Così, idee come quella della “sostanziale interconnessione della natura” - fondamento di buona parte del pensiero orientale - o archetipi mitici come la “danza di Shiva” cioè della materia come emanazione energetica, cominciano ad acquisire un preciso significato nel linguaggio della fisica occidentale; infatti le teorie dei quanti, dei quark e del cosiddetto bootstrap giungono a descrivere analiticamente la “compenetrazione” dell’esistente. È intuibile la portata di questa vulgata, che travalica i campi del pensiero scientifico e investe le categorie della “modernità” tutta.
Capra prospetta un radicale mutamento in atto nell’ambito del sapere. I modelli lineari e deterministici ereditati da Newton e Darwin si stanno rivelando sempre più inadatti a favorire la comprensione del mondo e di noi stessi: è necessaria una nuova sintesi dell’universo, alla quale, da campi diversi, stanno contribuendo gli studiosi impegnati su fronti apparentemente distanti ,che si chiamano teoria di Gaia, teoria sistemica, della compessità e del caos. Capra tenta a una sintesi complessiva di questa “insensibile” rivoluzione, scorgendo il delinearsi di un nuovo/antico pensiero, che vede nella natura e negli esseri viventi non entità isolate, meccanicistiche, ma sempre e comunque “sistemi viventi” dove il singolo è olisticamente in stretto rapporto di interdipendenza con i suoi simili e il sistema tutto. La somma di queste relazioni, che legano gli universi della psiche, della biologia, della società e della cultura è una rete: la rete della vita. Ricongiungersi alla trama della vita significa edificare e mantenere comunità sostenibili, in cui si possano soddisfare i nostri bisogni e le nostre aspirazioni senza pregiudicare l’equilibrio complessivo. Tra le comunità umane la diversità culturale ricopre un ruolo analogo alla biodiversità nell’ecosistema. Diversità significa relazioni molteplici date da approcci diversi a problemi simili. La diversità è la risorsa vitale contro l’uniformità suicida di cui l’unilateralismo occidentale ne è epifenomeno epocale.

TAKE A MOMENT!

2006-01-12T17:25:00.000-08:00

LIT ITALIAN 137 ITALIAN ENVIRONMENTAL LITERATURE Pasquale Verdicchio
Office Hours: Mondays and Fridays 1-2:30 in Lit Building 3340 pverdicchio@ucsd.edu

This course, taught in Italian, will consider writings that reflect Italian culture's relationship with the natural world. Though most of the work we will read is concentrated in what can be termed the contemporary era, we will also look at the role of nature, or nature as a setting, for writers such as Petrarca. The reading list will include works by Gianni Celati, Italo Calvino, Jolanda Insana and Giuseppe Moretti. Moretti is the founder of Lato Selvatico, a group related to the bioregionalism movement that includes Gary Snyder in the US. Though mostly concerned with literature, we will also look at cross-disciplinary work by artists like Luigi Ghirri (photographer) and Studio Azzurro (multimedia artists).

Our main text will be the anthology ITALIAN ENVIRONMENTAL LITERATURE, edited by Patrick Barron and Anna Re (New York: Italica Press, 2003). The book is available at Groundwork Bookstore.

I would like to begin our consideration of this topic by initiating a general discussion on our place in the environment, what ideas or concepts might drive how we view ourselves in the environment, and consider some basic American ideas about the topic before diving into the anthology. As you’ll see, we’ll begin by looking at the prose section and then go back to the poetry section before looking at the more specifically titled “Environmental Writing” portion of the book. We will discuss why as we begin our readings.
Assignments for the course will include a 3 page write-up for each of the three sections: Prose, Poetry and Environmental Writing; and a 5 page final paper.
Breakdown is as follows:
Write-ups 3 x 15 = 45%; Final 40%; Attendance 10% and participation 5%

WEEK 1
MONDAY INTRODUCTION TO COURSE
WEDNESDAY Our Footprint/Rediscovering our Home
FRIDAY “Nature, Wild and Wilderness” Gary Snyder

WEEK 2 MONDAY CELEBRATE MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY
WEDNESDAY Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/
FRIDAY PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION to Anthology

WEEK 3
MONDAY Nature as a Cultural Object: WALK
WEDNESDAY Corrado Alvaro (144); Ignazio Silone (154)
FRIDAY Carlo Levi (165): Anna Maria Ortese (184)

WEEK4
MONDAY Mario Rigoni Stern (203); Italo Calvino (210)
WEDNESDAY Gianni Celati (237)
FRIDAY Nature as Language: Giovanni Pascoli (3); Gabriele D’Annunzio (11)

WEEK 5
MONDAY Dino Campana (34); Giuseppe Ungaretti (49)
WEDNESDAY Eugenio Montale (63); Andrea Zanzotto (99)
FRIDAY Pasolini (115); Iolanda Insana (123); Luciana Notari (135)

WEEK 6
MONDAY Environmental Writing: Introduction (257);
WEDNESDAY Laura Conti (263); Alfredo Todisco (274); Antonio Cederna (279)
FRIDAY Danilo Dolci (283); Giorgio Nebbia (290)

WEEK 7
MONDAY Fulco Pratesi (294); Gianni Mattioli and Massimo Scalia (298)
WEDNESDAY Virginio Bettini (304); Nicola Licciardello (310)
FRIDAY Loredana Lucarini (315); Giuseppe Moretti (321) and Lato Selvatico

WEEK 8 FIELD TRIP

WEEK 9
MONDAY Lato Selvatico and the Asian/North American Connection
WEDNESDAY STUDIO AZZURRO
FRIDAY TBA

WEEK 10
MONDAY Presentation of final projects
WEDNESDAY Presentation of final projects
FRIDAY Presentation of final projects