I was born on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in a small little village, and the natural world was all around us.
Now that I live in a city, and most of us supposedly, most human beings now live in cities, or we’re on our way to live in cities, we are somewhat divorced from the natural environment, and I think this is a problem when it comes to children of
course, because many children have absolutely no idea where food, for instance, comes from. And some of the more unpleasant aspects of food, such as the killing of animals, et cetera, the industrial food industry, if you will.
So the natural environment is distant now, isn’t it? So how do we return to the natural environment on an ongoing basis?
Well, I think the very first thing we have to do is we have to encourage our friends, our family, our students to spend time in that world, in parks, in things along this nature, right? Real parks, forested parks, wilderness parks, if you will.
And the second thing, second proviso as well, is I would think, stop killing everything in the natural world, from mosquitoes to cockroaches to bugs to bees. We have to just stop picking these poor creatures off one by one.
My house is clean, quite clean, so there are virtually no cockroaches, but the other morning I came into my bedroom just before I left, and there was a tiny cockroach on the wall, and my natural inclination was to remove her immediately, flush her
down the toilet or whatever. And I thought to myself, no, I’m going to stop this. You know, I’m going to start to really respect the natural world around me. And as human beings, we have now truly taken over nature.
And if you think of the Gaia hypothesis by Dr. Lovelock, this suggests to us that every creature, every rock, human beings, all the rest of it, were all associated with Mother Earth, with Gaia. And Mother Earth obviously is now quite put off.
The Anthropocene is before us now that we’ve come to dominate nature itself. And that’s a pretty scary statement. I remember some 50 years ago when I used to fly with my father.
My father used to lease a tiny airplane, four-passenger airplane, with a pilot and three passengers, float plane. And we would go up to some remote logging camp that he was responsible for.
Maybe we would fly an hour, hour and a half, two hours, way up the coast of British Columbia. And there were trees forever. It was impossible for a four or five year old child to believe that the forest would ever be cut.
How could it ever be cut down, ever be removed? But it was. In my lifetime, the forests of British Columbia have been virtually cut at least once.
Of course, there are some so-called old-growth forests that are protected, but they are a very, very small percentage of the forests that remain now in British Columbia, and this is certainly true worldwide, from the Amazon rainforest all the way to
the boreal forests. So we’ve changed nature totally, haven’t we? And I think we have to sit back and say, is this a good thing? Probably not.
So how do I begin to assess nature? Well, I guess the very first thing to do is to get oneself to a park. And as opposed to just walking in the park, take your shoes and socks off and put your feet right on the grass.
This is something that Sadguru of Isha fame, this is what he suggests. Put your feet right on the ground and on the grass. And within two or three minutes, you will feel more bonded.
And it’s amazing, it actually works. It bonds you to the ground. You feel much more relaxed.
You truly do. And then, the second thing, this is a really good suggestion that I was reading the other day, is make a point at least once a week to go for a very long walk in nature, if at all possible.
And barring that, get to a park that is quite well forested. And just take a walk, a long walk, perhaps even alone. Just listen to the sounds of the wind blowing in the trees.
Perhaps the birds singing with their beautiful voices, right? Just listen, listen to nature. Such an important thing, isn’t it?
Because we will have to live on this earth with nature. We do need a partnership. At the moment, I think, at the beginning of the 21st century, we talk a lot about nature, but we still really do not have a partnership.
We are really exploiting it. And many times, the Native peoples, when they get control of nature, legally or otherwise, they exploit it as well.
So I think in general, Indigenous people, not always, but many Indigenous people also tie into capitalism rather quickly, don’t they? So think to yourself, how am I going to bond with the natural world?
Well, I’m going to stop killing things, killing the things that are around me, the spiders, the ants, the cockroaches, as I’ve said.
I’m going to take a walk in nature, and I’m going to say that I am truly a part of this natural world, and I will one day lay in it in some fashion. I will someday be, whether I want to or not, I’m going to be a piece of this natural world.
And you know what they say, you know what they say, critical thinking is truly everything, especially if I want to come to some type of harmony with the world and with its beings. And critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care.
God bless. Bye bye.