Living Earthwise

Nature is Never Spent

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod:

            And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

            And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

            There lives the dearest freshness deep down things…

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Humans evolved to love, to play, and to cooperate with each other as part of the natural world. Now, so many of us around the world live in cultures where nature is something out there, separate from us. Nature has become a place to take walks, to recreate, to take a break from the fast-paced daily life where we are surrounded constantly by the images and sounds coming from our screens, small or large. All this is true, but is that all nature is? A break from the mundane?

What if we rethink, re-feel what nature is or can be? Perhaps we can deepen our experience by opening our senses to be more “sense-full” so that we feel/taste/hear/see some of that “dearest freshness” the poet references. If we do so, perhaps it will be possible for us to become more mindful of how interdependent our lives are with the life of nature. That is, we are one species deeply enmeshed with the millions of species that have evolved on this planet. We are all together responsible for the health of our planet if we are to survive. Bringing sense-fullness and mindfulness together may help us find our way to Living Earthwise.

I offer a brief personal story about sense-fullness. I grew up as a younger child in a large working-class family in the woods and orange-groves of central Florida well before Disney World opened and dramatically changed the landscape and people-scape of the area. After supper in the the longer days of summer, we would often play games such as hide and seek well into the gloaming. We played amongst a magnificent throng of aerial insects, mostly mosquitos and dragonflies (which we called mosquito hawks). The mosquitos focused on feeding on us as we played and the dragonflies focused on feeding on the mosquitos. I recall many such evenings with the sound of the breezes moving through the beautiful live oaks and camphor trees that surrounded our front yard. My senses were all completely activated by experiences like these, so I grew up always aware of the life all around me. This, for me, is an example of being sense-full. Mindfulness came later.

A caution is in order before we dive into the principles, practices, and examples of Earthwise living.  In order to create opportunities for future generations to live in health on a healthy planet, we must be fully aware that major changes are needed in almost every social, institutional, cultural, economic, scientific, and political structure on the planet. So, I write in the hope of fostering a deep commitment to lifeways healthy for us and for the planet, while also working as agents of needed structural change.

Why should we bother to live Earthwise? Taking a negative view, we are at the edge of failure in the experiment of human life on Earth and already experiencing the loss of millions of species, with our own future uncertain. Over many generations, especially in the last few hundred years, humans have created multiple crises through the ways we live, whether in politics, economics, education, cultural values, or lifeways. Among the many related crises are those of climate change, loss of biodiversity, massive food insecurity, and dramatic inequities of wealth, health, and power.  

But, there is a richer, more positive reason for why we should bother. There is a joy and a deep conviviality that comes as we learn to live in partnership with the natural world in ways that contribute to our planetary home’s health.  The survival of millions of species, including our own, depends on such partnerships.

Living Earthwise, what does it mean? That is what we will explore in these posts. I don’t promise that I know all that it means now, but I am confident that we will learn more as we collaborate and share. Here are some beginning thoughts that we will dig deeply into in coming posts.

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