I've
written before about how we can't expect people to care about nature
and wilderness, or anything else, unless they've experienced it
first-hand. We may appreciate things intellectually (global warming,
the war in Darfur, poverty, the need for security against violence) but
we will not generally fight for them unless we relate to them
emotionally, viscerally. We have to experience them. Or do we?
I've
just been reading a fifteen-page list of environmental education
activities taking place in schools across Canada. The objective is to
get kids to care about nature, and about global warming, and about 'the
environment' (as if that were somehow something apart from us) by
getting them to experience it first-hand. It's a long list. Yet while
the kids talk a good story (the young are suckers for good propaganda,
and the education system is expert at it), and say they would vote
Green in an election, as soon as they reach voting age they tend to
vote very much like everyone else. The field trips are fun, but the
level of awareness of environmental facts and realities is as abysmal
among this age group (per my own experience and some recent polls) as
any other.
I've also been talking a lot with business
executives, and come to a remarkable discovery -- they care about the
environment, and about global warming, but not because they think it
has anything to do with the bottom line of the business (and, sorry,
they don't care about the 'triple bottom line' -- financial + social +
environmental performance), but rather because they feel responsible to
their children and grandchildren. This seems to be true whether these
children or grandchildren are yet of the age when they can chastise
their elders for social and environmental irresponsibility, or whether
they have if they are old enough to do so. It is instinctive,
emotional, visceral. It seems to be true even for those who do not, or
not yet, have children. They will acknowledge it is an issue that keeps
them awake at night, but also acknowledge they are not (and may never)
be prepared to compromise their companies' profitability to institute
socially and environmentally responsible programs. Though they wouldn't
vote against them if they had company.
Canadians, when asked,
say that the environment is the most important issue facing the country
today. Yet their votes (40%, a record high, for the Kyoto-abrogating
Conservative government; recent provincial elections where the Greens
ran in every constituency but could muster only as much as 8% of the
vote) suggest they consider this a low-priority issue.
A few
years ago I was at a weekend retreat with some of the brightest and
most creative people in the US. They were almost all very progressive
in their thinking (and universally loathed George Bush) but they
clearly cared more about immediate personal political and social issues
(the Iraq War and its threat to the US economy and security; the
large-scale erosion of civil liberties; domestic poverty, the abysmal
state of the education and healthcare systems) than about 'the
environment'. They claimed to care about global warming and urban
sprawl and pollution and garbage and the destruction of old growth
forests, but these were largely intellectual concerns. I got the strong
sense that they saw them as failures of technological imagination,
innovation, and creeping corporatism, that could be 'fixed' through a
combination of technology and having a political progressive in the
White House. Even An Inconvenient Truth
was appreciated as an act of political rectitude and outrage against
conservatism more than anything else, and the fact that that show was
virtually devoid of any solutions to the problems it pointed out was
not considered a serious matter.
So what's going on here? Most
North Americans live in cities, and their idea of nature is a park or a
summer cottage on the lake or a camping trip. So nature to them is a
tourist destination, like an overgrown theme park, a recreation, or an
abstraction. They know about global warming but their spending and
voting shows they don't think it is a priority, or even something they
are responsible or empowered to do anything about. They think
government and/or technology can fix it, if they are inclined or
pressed to do so. Even though everything they are taught shows that
this is untrue.
What's more, most North Americans don't really
want to hear about environmental or social issues or problems. At the
end of the day they want to relax, or to escape, and they don't want to
feel guilty about it. So environmental magazines and websites and blogs
can't compete with the political and technological and entertainment
ones (and the most popular environmental blogs are of the feel-good
'new technology will save us' variety). When it comes to the
environment, we mostly want to be reassured that someone else can and
will look after the 'problem'.
All this started me thinking about why I care so much, at such a 'deeper green', emotional level, than most people.
I
grew up in a small city, on a small lot. I went to the nearby park
sometimes, but the park was small and had few trees. In my childhood I
didn't really care about zoos. We had a cat, who I loved, and cried
when one day (I was around twelve) he never returned home. I was
deathly afraid of large dogs and (for some reason) beetles. We
sometimes rented a cottage for two weeks in the summer, but I was more
interested in baseball cards and comic books than the beauty of nature.
Yet even at this young age there was something inside me that,
I suppose, destined me to care about the natural world. I remember
being upset about finding dead birds, and about the devastation that
army tent caterpillars did to the neighbourhood trees. I was then (and
still am) irrational about cruelty to animals -- one of the two fights
in my life was with a kid I caught trying to hurt birds with a
slingshot, and when adults would make jokes about 'kicking the dog' I
would walk out, furious. Still, although I started to accompany my
father on fishing trips when the locations were remote and gave me the
chance to go for walks in the woods (while he fished), it didn't seem
to occur to me that my father's catch-and-release was cruel recreation.
By
the time I was in my late teens I had become a largely uninformed but
ardent environmentalist. I fought against boreal forest hydro
developments and arctic pipelines, and worked for environmentalist
parties and candidates. I recall speaking to a senior minister in the
Trudeau cabinet about the damage to caribou migration and the danger of
permafrost melt posed by the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline and was told
'Who cares about the permafrost?' When I replied that I did, and I
didn't understand why he didn't, he was hustled away by an aide before
he could engage in a fruitless debate. I protested against
environmentally destructive development on-campus in university. I
wrote to Paul Ehrlich about The Population Bomb asking (already) What can we do?
Then,
in the mid-seventies (and my mid-twenties) my environmentalism went
into a twenty-year period of dormancy. I have no idea why, except
perhaps that it didn't seem as if my angst was getting me anywhere, and
I was tired of being hurt by every new atrocity, local and global,
being reported. My membership in Greenpeace and Ontario Nature lapsed.
And
then in my mid-forties, in the mid-nineties, I rejoined the movement.
No idea what precipitated this, except perhaps more time to think,
revulsion and rage over the explosion of factory farms, and the fact
that I moved to a house in a wetland area. All of a sudden I just had
to walk outside the door to be in another, uncivilized world. In my
back yard and the 1200-acre conservation area behind it there was
virtually no evidence of other human life. I could watch deer, wolves,
foxes, beavers, muskrat, and a plethora of birds sitting in the middle
of my yard. Yet I suspect it was my reinvigorated passion for wild
places that led me to move here, rather than the other way around. I
just discovered my place, my home, the place I was meant to live.
And since then I have read some three hundred books and articles
on natural philosophy and human culture, so now my beliefs are informed
and modestly better articulated. But I haven't really changed. I'm
still the guy who grew up in the city. What made me care about nature?
What makes us (some of us anyway) really care about nature, wilderness,
the welfare of wild creatures and wild places, places that, for the
most part, we have never been and never seen?
Derrick Jensen, in A Language Older Than Words says:
If someone were to ask me what to do about the problems facing the world today I would say: Listen. If you listen carefully enough you will in time know exactly what to do.
Perhaps
that, more than instinct or study or experience, is what makes us love
nature. When I was very young I was carefree, a dreamer, and because I
didn't have any interest in the world of adults, perhaps I listened
instead to the voices inside and outside me. And then after two decades
of deafness, I started to pay attention and listen again, and reconnect
in some profoundly emotional and physical and sensual way with
all-life-on-Earth. I don't think it's emotional sensitivity. I don't
think it's knowing (what's happening or what's right or what's
possible).
My good friends who are preoccupied with political
matters and think a Democratic president will make a difference, or who
are enamoured of technological solutions to all things, are not stupid
or ignorant or insensitive. I find their optimism inspiring. But I
sense that, in a very real sense, they live in a different world from
me. They can't hear, feel, sense, instinctively know what I know. And
likewise I don't understand their world, I don't feel it.
I
don't think this is something that can be taught, to children or anyone
else. Probably doesn't do any harm to try though, I guess. And while
the books and articles in my reading list helped me understand what I
was listening to, make sense of it, there was a time when I could have
read any of these and they wouldn't have meant a thing to me. As Daniel
Quinn says (also talking about the importance of listening) in Beyond Civilization:
People will listen when they're ready to
listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren't ready to
listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let
people come to it in their own time.
Yet
I think it is in all of us to listen, to hear the voice of
all-life-on-Earth, to become a part, to reconnect, to fall under the
spell of the sensuous. For twenty years I became deaf to it, it stayed
inside me, waiting to re-emerge.
It is in our bones, our DNA.
No experience required. We are who we are, and at heart we are all wild
creatures, in love with this wild planet and every living thing within
it. It is just a matter of time before each of us is ready to listen.
Ready to come home.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
