Earth as Element
How History, Ecology and Humanity Tell the Story of Place
Biologist and Naturalist, David Attenborough, has been quoted as saying
“No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced”
Through no direct fault of our own, many of us are missing the kind of experiences with the natural world that would help us care or even think very much about our planet. Each new day presents us with agendas based on an insidious structure built to command productivity that drives consumerism and keeps capitalism expanding. Growth is the objective and wealth for the few is the outcome. The rest of us are merely cogs in a system that demands all of who we are. And, we keep participating because that is all we know and all we can see.
But I’m a disrupter and very much want to say there’s a different way of experiencing life and so much more to see…
Enter the natural world in which we live and move and have our being (to borrow loosely from Acts 17:28)
For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,‘For we, too, are his offspring.’
Science and religion are conversing in new ways and showing us that once undisputed divisions between creation and humanity no longer hold true. But, to be fair, that’s far from new. Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote around the 5th century BC,
“From all things One and from One all things.”
We are now beginning to see how this can be so, how all of the universe comes from the same source. Humans share the same carbon based identity as the rest of earth’s community which makes the more-than-human-world as much our kin as our human family.
Very long ago, in geographically diverse regions, we lived in this knowing, but we’ve forgotten how to connect.
As an eco-chaplain, I want to introduce you to this earth community, to it’s yearning to know you as much as you might discover a yearning to know it. We’re at an inflection point. We can see how the old narratives are already failing and have a perfect opportunity to write a new story of what it means to be prosperous and successful on this earth if we dare to try.
To begin, we’ll focus on the earth, the ground where we live. I’ll introduce ecosystems and bioregions to foster connections and build the kind of relationships that can sustain us as kin through troubling times and into the future. And, along the way, gently nudging us to re-member ourselves to a way of being that keeps us living in “right relationship” with one another, the more-than-human world included.
Using a place-based lens, I’ll work from the location where I live to introduce physical attributes and spiritual concepts that I trust will transfer broadly to where you live as well. After all, there are no true boundaries between us, only earth and sky that connect.
Ecologically speaking, any place we find ourselves includes the history, ecology and living beings of the land.
So these are the concepts where we will begin.