Ecocide

see new blog:
https://eco-cide.blogspot.com

STEEP GLOBAL DECLINES IN ECOLOGICAL QUALITY, AS WELL AS STEEP INCREASES IN ECOLOGICAL DESECRATION, may have already crossed the point where desecration can be reversed.

The Great Renascent Work of the 21st Century involves the reintegration of human life into the larger Earth Community.  [See Thomas Berry, The Great Work].
Earth is not a platform for human life.  It’s a living being. We’re not on it, but part of it.  It’s health is our health (Thomas Moore).

see also blog: Iowa Water

https://iowawater.blogspot.com

For a caustic look at the decimation of Iowa water and soil primarily by corporate agriculture that has insulated itself from meaningful public health intervention on both on a state and federal legislative and administrative level.  Ecological problems cased by this intentional decimation are now at the level of a public health crisis for Iowa's citizens and for the water quality of the distant gulf as well as to the flora and fauna in Iowa and downstream and underlying water table.

Coming Eco

“As many as 51 trillion microplastic particles – 500 times more than stars in our galaxy – litter our seas." (UN)

new blog: Iowa Water

Water is precious.  Water problems are a strong issue in Iowa that also contributes to hypoxia or a "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of pollution reaching the gulf by the Mississippi River.

Because of this strong issue that is really a global issue in the form of global warming and water/atmosphere pollution, a new blog that is specific to Iowa focusing on presenting both data and a spiritual ecological sensibility wherein water is holy.

Go to:  http://iowawater.blogspot.com

Cosmic Nature: Mega-verse

Past To Present

FOR MILLENIA, IN MYRIAD CULTURES, COSMOS was powerful and the ultimate landscape that contained the sources of life itself—the Sun, Sol/Surya/Ra...—and human life [where the gods dwelled and continued to direct human life.  This cosmos was essentially a ceiling of starlight with Earth at its center.

At an important turning point, the photon and the measurement of its speed suddenly moved all of the stars away from the Earth at incredible distances.   For the illuminati or high culture of that era, cosmos became a deep field of stars.

And again, with the discovery that some of the blurs of light were dense clusters of billions of stars, cosmos became a deep field of galaxies that seemed only limited by the quality of our measures to see them.  The blur across the night sky was recognized to be a view through the galaxy in which Sol was positioned in the outer reach of an arm of this spiral galaxy.

And quickly, it was recognized that these galaxies were moving outward, expanding the universe that was synonymous with cosmos.  Gradually, a sense of space as being empty was completely turned over in favor of a sense of space as having form and energy and inseparability from matter.  And soon, it was recognized that the speed of this expansion was accelerating, and that this expansion was likely due to the influence of dark energy that was present everywhere and that comprised ninety percent of the content of the universe.

The nature of cosmos has dramatically changed from a ceiling to a universe of expanding galaxies with cosmological speculation of multiverses that interact.  An understanding of the nature of dark matter is considered to be an important step in taking the next quantum leap.  If anything is “known,” it is that human understanding of the nature of cosmos will continue to make astonishing quantum leaps.  The once vast, uninhabited landscapes of Earth—forests, deserts, oceans—were long-viewed as wastelands needing human use to activate them.  Now, there are recognized as active, complex ecosystems.

Human Conceptions Beyond Earth:

God(s)

Ceiling of Stars

Galaxies

Universe

Multi-verse

Mega-verse
?

Mega-verse, from Symmetry & Familiarity

RESOLUTION OF THE PREDOMINANT questions of the moment, such as the nature of dark matter, will not be blocked by the limits of our measures.  We will likely soon discover particle remnants of dark energy as we increase the energy of our particle accelerators.  This may appear to reveal the structure of dark matter but it will not fully recognize its real nature.  As in the past, the problem will be the smallness of our model of the universe/cosmos.

The present model of the universe has measured a beginning point—the Big Bang—and the acceleration of the space occupied by the accelerating matter and energy form.   And when we explore questions as to galactic life cycles, galactic evolution, and the end or continuance of the universe, we approach these questions from the perspective that influences will come from within since everything began with the Big Bang.   We would approach the question for the increasing acceleration of the initial Big Bang, which, like any explosion or like water rings moving out from a drop of water, should be decreasing given our present understanding.  Such a perspective may be akin to resolving questions from the perspective of approaching the cosmos as a ceiling or as a gathering of stars.

A new view:  The Big Bang is a “blossoming” of energy within a much larger mega-universe.  Just as we abruptly approached astro-ecology from the perspective of the ceiling and then from a community of stars and then from a collection of galaxies, we now approach the question from a larger perspective that may cause acceleration and flow of galaxies and open us to other phenomena.  In this mega universe, there would be other blossomings of energy, with each blossom being the equivalent of our present day universe.  The interaction of vast forces, well beyond the dimensions of our present sense of the universe, could provoke bursts of energy such as a Big Bang.

In this mega-universe, dark matter would be present in various densities.  Imagine dark matter as having something akin to a ocean or liquid form, a more solid mass form and a gaseous [atmosphere/deep space] form.  In the deep density of the ocean-like dark matter form, the energy or nutrient upwelling would produce luminous blooms or Big Bang bursts of universes.  The acceleration of the bloom would be determined by the “flow” of this ocean-like dark matter.  And there might be events in this deep density of the depths of fluid and solid dark matter that would be astonishingly different than anything like stars and galaxies.

This model has symmetry and familiarity with the dynamics of Earth process [with Earth as a dimension of the lifespan of a star] that is determined by the lifespan of a galaxy.

In summary, we always challenge the current model of the universe as restricted.  Then, with this larger context, we can see, for example, why galaxies would be accelerating.  And we would see other events that we have not yet described, such as the wavy, rather than straight-lined, “flight” of galaxies.

And so how to see this field that is beyond our measures, when we cannot see the beginning of the Big Bang or the edge of the galactic universe?  We already do this.  Einstein/Hawking/Crick& Watson, et al. 

RECONCILIATION ECOLOGY & RE-WILDING

FROM PREHISTORY through the contemporary (and clearly, into the future), human life and nature have never been apart.  Further, human life has/can enhance wildness and bio-diversity.

            [See earlier post, “Reconciliation Ecology, 1/21/2011]

  

RECOMMENDATION: 2015 PBS Series Earth A New Wild

http://www.pbs.org/earth-a-new-wild/home/

The 2015 PBS series hosted by Dr. M. Sanjayan Earth A New Wild illustrates this well.  It challenges the assumption that human use of the Earth diminishes wildness and bio-diversity.  It illustrates how human activity can enhance these processes. 

This is not to say that human activity cannot diminish bio-diversity.  Clear-cutting of forests would be such an example. 

A large part of the environmental problem is our erroneous sense of having become separate from wildness.

The key here is seeing how being inside landscape can mean the optimization of bio-diversity as well as the fittedness of human life into the larger Earth ecosystem. 

A Contemporary Ecological Renaissance

Lance Kinseth, Self as Landscape, 48”x60, 2015

IN THE GREAT WORK, theologian Thomas Berry suggests that the task for the 21^st century involves the integration of human life into the larger Earth ecosystem.  However, contemporary human life seems to be moving further away from nature.  Since 2000, the majority of people inhabit cities and this is anticipated to increase to 70% by 2050.  Berry suggests that this task will require the intensity of a renaissance because of the way that it will alter our fundamental understanding of human nature.

Berry’s task begins to seem possible because urbanization is driving ecologically adaptive features.  Remarkably, for example, global urbanization is unintentionally reducing the rate of global population growth to a degree which decades of intentional environmental activism have not been able to accomplish.  Because of the rate of reduction, there is even the guarded possibility that the global population might be lower at the end of the century than it was in 2001 (W. Lutz et al, The end of world population growth. Nature, Vol. 412, No. 6846, 543-545).

Global urbanization continues to diminish the health of both uninhabited and settled landscapes.  While we may desire to focus environmental efforts on improving unsettled landscapes, successes will be Pyrrhic victories at best if we fail to address urbanization as the primary locus for intervention for the integration of human life into the Earth ecosystem.  And the good news is that urbanization contains a naturalness that we did not expect.  There is a “living city” operant in the ecologically destructive separable city. 

In Finite And Infinite Games, James Carse would approach the city as a natural “infinite” system rather than as a “finite” machine, because a city is effusive and has no end.  The eco-barrier to be overcome is the design strategy rather than the city-form—a finite “hard grid” machine model that envisions separation from nature and continues to extract resources for consumption.  The reality is more one of an infinite soft, creative process that is so participatory as to be almost beyond design and capable of creating resources rather than only consuming resources.

If the city is viewed as the antithesis of nature, intentional urban planning and design corrects mal-adapted “artificial” modern life.  If the city is viewed as natural and “living,” design identifies outstanding adaptive ecological features and optimizes them.  What is especially noteworthy here for design is that the ecological adaptability of the post-modern city has already begun and does not have to be invented.  Design for an ecological “living city” would be quite different from either a now-popular strategy of a “livable city” or a “sustainable city” which have been the first steps in changing the “separable city.”  Rather than invention, the design task becomes one of listening and then optimizing existing ecologically adaptive features. 

When we begin to look differently, perhaps searching for a crazy oxymoron such as “human wildness,” astonishingly, ecological adaptive features of urbanization begin to be seen.  These include actions and large design elements, such as an astonishing reduction in the rate of global population growth, freeing up landscape by increasing people-friendly population density, shift to residency with its inherent interest in sustainability, resource efficiency due to density and public health even in urban poverty, enhanced intra-urban nonhuman habitat, eco-centered resource production rather than only consumption, primary support for environmental research, and specialization/innovation.  

 Thomas Berry’s ecological renaissance begins with our eco-literacy still in its infancy.  Say “nature,” and we glance out the window to find it rather than imagine oneself within nature.  A renaissance occurs broadly rather than as a specific social movement.  A “renaissance,” such as the Italian Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution is easily a century long process, and it tends to begin quite obscurely—as was visually demonstrated in the Italian Renaissance, beginning vaguely with artists such as Cimabue and becoming explicit with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.    

In this renascent view, human migration toward cities is a spontaneous intuitive effort to sustain in a peopled Earth.  In an infinite Earth system, cities must be complementary infinite systems to sustain across the long run.  And the long run outcome can be a surprising one—that we can create an oasis of human and non-human diversity and fittedness out of what we have presumed to be separate from wild nature and artificial and domestic.

Our environmentalism can transform to be a positive health model rather than adversarial, and be people-friendly.  The task before us is large, but we are beginning to look more as residents than as migrants—from a posture of inclusion rather than intrusion and exclusion.  In the city itself, there is an opportunity improve human health and optimize other species through fresh strategies such as reconciliation ecology and a litany of approaches such as “vertical gardens,” participatory architecture, green space, green technology.  An online search of eco-strategies will produce a near-unending list of creative endeavors. 

Startling, “domestication” that integrates “self-as-landscape”—this sense that humanness is more than human beings—may be the core expression of a constructive “human wildness.”  And this sense of contemporary human wildness is not esoteric or an ethereal return to a Pastoral state.  It is perhaps most wild in its quest for concrete alertness and adaptation—key dynamics of wild processes.  It is a practical, optimally healthful and deeply economic strategy, that, in a now-peopled Earth, can re-imagine Thoreau’s admonition, …in Wildness is the preservation of the world.

The Living City

Lance Kinseth, Living City, ink/bristol, 1984

APPEARING TO BE the antithesis of nature, the contemporary city is perhaps at the vanguard of nature.  Appearing so civil and domestic, the city is so very young in the history of the Earth.  It exists because of the yields of the grasses, and it has the energy of a wild, young river.  Wearing the mask of a citadel, the city is fragile.  Its foundations are the grasses and soil and waters and weathers.  Residents of culture, yes, and yet like fish in a river, only vaguely living their residency in Earth and cosmos.

Beyond The Death/End Of Nature

Lance Kinseth, Infinite Reach, 48”x48, acrylic/gallery canvas

WE NEVER ESCAPE being “ecological.”   Bill McKibben [find his publications] says we are “post-natural,” essentially (1) removed from wildness (to be fair, not really from nature as we are inside the universe/multi-verse) and (2) having now impacted on all of the Earth so that prisine nature has ended.  Really?  Such a statement from a person who clambers about the world telling people what to do, what is wild, what is wrong, and it illustrates our eco-illiteracy at the higher levels, as people bow down, as if they have been given the very real current state of affairs.

In fact, all of our problematic “post-naturalism” is, in fact, a gut-level, core, practical eco-response from wild beings, still so very young in the Earth, but so naive that we unintentionally do many of the right things (as well as the wrong things) for this “post-modern” moment in time.  In these modern, “dark eco-ages,” there can be a sense  that we are doing something right, something so right for all of the negative consequences, that it far outdid all, All, yes, ALL, of the wondrous, kind, best-intended, most benevolent efforts of the most engaged eco-saviors.

All the introduction of the human on the landscape, from the Neolithic on, is au natural, not a dis-ease.  Cybernetics—“computer-ology”—seems so unnatural, but it is still quite primal. 

Instead of being apart from nature or, more focused, apart from wildness, we are finding ourselves to be ore deeply lost in it.  “Wilderness” was once something dangerous, then something nearly inanimate and banal needing our “use” to activate it, and now something extremely complex, likely beyond us, beyond our intellect, extremely intelligent, full of calculus without thinking, form the slime mold to the dog chasing a bone in the river, to the stars.

Bill McKibbin—shame on you for such limiting, separating, misleading metaphors.

Yes, urbanization can seem like the “end of nature” but it is so deep, so inside, and so responsive globally and dominantly with adaptive eco-features [that I was once wont to only credit the beautiful rivers and grasses as capable of actualizing].  We are doing some good work that we can build upon.  And the idea that we are moving in the wrong direction, just keeps us from it.  So much eco-work keeps us from it by envisioning ourselves as separate/apart.  We become our words.  Say “nature,” and you look out the window, and yet, you are lost inside the overriding wilderness of Earth and galaxy and universe and multi-verse].

Yes, still so very young in the history of the Earth, we do not understand how to integrate into the larger Earth community (as Thomas Berry admonishes us to do in his book, The Great Work, but are sort of doing it anyway, although folks like Bill would tell you otherwise).  It is apparent that our eco-literacy is still in its infancy, especially with regard to our sense of expressing nature.  Viewing Earthrise over moonscape in 1970, we are, at our very best, at the beginning of a renascent shift, perhaps more like Cimabue in the early Italian Renaissance—just intuitively reacting without really having a concise directive or language.

Eco Body-Mind

Lance Kinseth, How Much Does Your Mind Weigh?, 19”x33, acrylic/panel

This post is an overview of sorts—a point of entry—with  more detailed aspects such as reconciliation ecology described elsewhere.

IN EARLY HUMAN development, a sense of separation or differentiation between human and other biota and inorganic material and processes such as weather and seasons would be inconceivable.

As human populations expanded and became more reliant on culture, there was a gradual separation of human life from nature.  Origin myths shifted from a sense of coming from the Earth to a sense of coming into the Earth and exiting it in death.

In post-industrial/cybernetic times, extended sensory experience of space and time—in infinities of largeness and smallness and a sense of a geo-time of epochs and stellar birth and death—has challenged a sense of apartness.  Satellite monitory of the Earth, shared DNA across all biota, and direct experience of degrading environmental feedback to the point of threatening human health reawakens an emotional experience of inseparability.

Still, ecology is a rather new term in the popular imagination.  For all of our material sophistication, we have really yet to acknowledge that we remain quite ecologically illiterate.  We remain cultural with little sense of more fundamentally creatural, and we become our words.  And “nature” continues to largely reference something “out there,” and this is reflected in how we act.  If we can be holy but a river cannot, then we will use it or at best, with a quality of usufruct, we will steward the river as a “resource.”

If we could begin to challenge our words, we might see remarkable processes that we have overlooked.  Because of our eco-illiteracy, our most effect “interventions” in the contemporary moment likely have not been our intentional environmental activism.  It has likely been an inherent wildness, unintended but survival-driven, as with, for example, global urbanization that has erroneously appeared to be nearly the

antithesis of  “nature.”

“Stewardship” implies managing, preserving, and maintaining of a separable landscape.  A “guardian” is not necessarily the same as a “steward.”  As in the movie Avatar, the indigenous hominid inhabitants were envisioned to be an expression of the landscape and gave it first priority rights in a natural “legal standing.”  In such a view, human life is not deemed to be secondary, but rather is one reach of landscape that continues to express human life.  Giving first priority to a river and to wild grass and woodland optimizes human life, and it is the real, practical work as well as being the highest literate life rather than a reactionary step backward.

Reverence would be the first step in such guardianship.  Reverence is not worship.  Rather, reverence is an acknowledgement of the landscape as capable of caring for life. And from this perspective, human action would involve following and listening rather than possessing and managing.  If there is regulation, it would be regulation of human action to come into harmony with the landscape.

Legal standing and reverence might open the gate to an eco-literacy that still remains far beyond the inherently anthropocentric words we use to guide our actions of recycling and sustainability.  If we are to sustain for the long run of things, we will leave ourselves behind, just as our deep ancestry did to become species sapiens.  And the larger landscape will be the designer and shaper of that which we will become, as it currently is in spite of our delusion of self-direction separate and above nature.

THE MANICURED WILDERNESS: The Adaptive Nature of Urban Ecology

The posts in this blog, The Manicured Wilderness, are often excerpts from a book-length manuscript (revised August 2009) with the same title.  The manuscript argues that (1) global modern human life is a wild state rather than something that is post-wild and that (2) global urbanization is predominantly an ecologically adaptive feature rather than the antithesis of wild nature and separate from wildness.  The chapters focus on  (2) the adaptive features that far outperform intentional environmental interventions and the appendices focus on (2) a philosophy of human wildness that includes modern life.

The following Contents page sketches the book-length manuscript:

THE MANICURED WILDERNESS: The Adaptive Nature of Urban Ecology

CONTENTS

Preface                        The Living City: An Overview     11                        [11 pp, 2831 words]

Chapter One                    The Transformation Of The Nature Of The City    22

Chapter Two                    Actualizing The Great Work    63

Chapter Three                  Describing The Living City    110

Chapter Four                    Initial Approaches In Designing The Living City    140

Chapter Five                      Five Major Design Considerations For The Living City    166

Chapter Six                        Global Urbanization As Ecological Renaissance    216

Epilogue                            A Letter To The Future    254

[Word Total for Preface—Epilogue: 2831+64796= 67627]

Appendix I                        Before Taking One Step: Challenging Biases Of Separation

From Wildness    258

Appendix II                      Describing Human Wildness    285

Appendix III                    The City From Geological And Ecological Perspectives   327 

[Word Total for Preface—Appendix III: 92276+2831 = 95107]

Notes                                 Chapter One—Appendices [300+ Citations]    358-371

Sparrow & Earthrise

Lance Kinseth, “Dusky Seaside Sparrow,” detail, 1997

WINTER, 1968, A VIEW of the whole earth over moonscape: Seeing the biosphere radically transformed our sense of ecology, both as a planetary process rather than a local or regional process and as a personal process that places us inside the landscape.  And in this capstone image of the whole earth, there was a complementary sense of the smallness of the earth in interstellar space and it fragility.

Before 1968, our dominant image of the Earth was one given to us by mappists.  And if the map was transposed to a classroom globe, it was a flat grid upon which we seemed to stand.  And further, it was a cultural image that divided the earth into a patchwork of political states.  The mappist Earth was proprietary.  It was a divisive and possessive landscape.  But with Earthrise, our image of the Earth was of something that was not only integrative but also seemed to be alive or at least dynamic.  It was continually changing and starkly beautiful blue and green and brown overlaid with transparent white.  There were essentially no visible dividing lines then (until the detail of satellite photography eventually revealed some sharp discrepancies along countries’ borders, where the land might be depleted on one side). 

With Earthrise over moonscape, we saw a dramatically new condition of existence.  We lived inside a thin membrane of atmosphere rather than lived separable from the landscape.   And we lived because we were dwellers inside a sea of atmosphere rather than simply possessors of ground. 

Suddenly, local was global.   The atmosphere just above our local place today came from around the other side of the globe just days before.  And our actions in our local place were doing the same thing, having either minute or dramatic consequences over there.  There was no longer any “away,” and we began to comprehend that there never had been, and that they never would be, an “away” or an “outside.”  Local environmental degradations or improvements did impact globally as bits and pieces of larger processes such as sulfur and CO2 emissions and degraded water quality.  The personal activity of each of us such as either electrical energy consumption produced sulfur expelled into the atmosphere from coal-fired plants or food consumption produced nitrogen in fertilizer washed into the water.

Now, due to increasingly diverse and more sensitive satellites, we understand that local is the result of the global.  But the local is interconnected with the far away “local.”  For example, daily dust storms in the Central Sahara Bodele basin [an ancient mega-lake of 400,000 square kilometers] lift phosphorous and iron [from the sandy sediment comprised of shells of freshwater diatoms] into in the high atmosphere and transport it to the nutrient-poor Amazon rain forest where it downpours in abundant rainfall.  With contemporary climate change, there is the possibility of altering this process.

Winter 1968, an astonishing view of the whole earth over moonscape, but also an inseparable, sour afterimage in summer, 1987: dusky seaside sparrow, extinct.  In 1987, the ecological inseparability that continues to be opened was opened by this view of earthrise over moonscape ironically acted in one specific local place to consummate in the extinction of one obscure [by our making] species.

June 16, 1987: The last known purebred dusky seaside sparrow, Orange Band, a captive resident of Discovery Island, Disney World, died.  In March 1989, four crossbreds—part Dusky and part Scott’s seaside sparrow—disappeared in a storm.  By mid-June 1989, a lengthy search for the crossbreds engendered no response and lead to the official declaration of the extinction of the species. 

The view of Earthrise over moonscape—especially the ecological image of the biosphere—was an indirect outcome of a quest to “set foot on the moon” rather than an intended outcome of a quest for a radically new view of the Earth.  And the demise of the dusky seaside sparrow was an indirect or unintended consequence of the alternation of everyday life in a local community.  Specifically, the quest for the moon resulted in turning Cape Canaveral into a boomtown. This fostered land development of a ten square mile salt marsh near the St. John’s River, in the form of roadways, pesticides, and draining for residential and commercial development.  The purchase of a wildlife refuge to protect the species in 1972 came too late. 

The image of Earthrise over moonscape bowled us over.  The extinction of dusky seaside sparrows did not.  The first image was a news banner and the other was a back page note.  And even if we were wise enough to know ahead of time that space exploration might provoke a species’ extinction, the resistance to prevent the extinction would have had little impetus.  And even now, having accomplished the quest for the moon and the powerful impetus that the quest gave to technological advancement would likely seemed to have been well worth the tradeoff in one or even several species’ extinction.   The side outcome of enhanced satellite monitoring of the whole Earth that did improve our ecological understanding and ongoing monitoring of landscapes might be a justification for the tradeoff.

Big gains seem to offset small losses.  Big is more, and small is less.  Big and Small: This capacity to trade off one thing for another represents a measure of an important limit in our ecological literacy.  However, now in the 21^st Century, a continuation of the misunderstanding that small is really big, begins to be at least faintly acknowledged.  With the tradeoff visible in bits and pieces, it can delude us into thinking that small is less.  By giving up something small to get something bigger can be directly experienced to degrade both the ecological health of the earth and human optimal health for sure, and our sustainability across the long run of existence. 

And even within extinction, there are biases with regard to worth.  The extinction of a Tasmanian tiger or a Western Black Rhino or a Japanese Sea Lion is lamentable to many.  The extinction of a Golden Toad in Costa Rica or a Black Andean Toad is lamentable to a few, and a variety of minnows lamentable to a handful, and sustained only as long as fragile laws prevail.  Finally, there is a vary limited effort to initially identify threatened species and ecosystems or even to identify species still unrecognized, so that the growing list of threatened species is only superficial at best.

Still only vaguely glimpsed in our eco-literacy in a now peopled Earth is a growing sense that the little picture is really also a big picture.  The “extinction of species” is a phenomenon that occurs simultaneously within a larger pool of “endangered species” that occurs simultaneously within a still larger pool of “threatened species,” and they all occur simultaneously, by anyone’s measures, within a “degraded” global landscape.  

When we protect an endangered species, and when we move it out of endangered status and even threatened status, we make real environmental progress that once seemed impossible.  It is remarkable that we have been able to stand in the way of our own immediate interests in the form of halting or limiting construction of the built environment.  And it is not simply some profiteer’s concern that we have limited with the U. S. Endangered Species Act.  We have restricted water to farms to protect a species of minnow.  However, defense of endangered species is a defense for just a few of the niches where there happened to be an endangered species present.  The prairie skink might be “preserved” in a particular form of prairie, but only for a time if those niches are reduced to remnants that are dispersed and rare in a bioregion where unsettled prairie has largely been eradicated. 

The extinction rate may already exceed one species per hour.  In the past two decades, one million species of biota may have become extinct.  Such numbers can be appropriately debated as inaccurate, but they are reasonable metaphors for a pool of genetic diversity that is unknown. 

Even domesticated varieties of animals, currently most evident among species of poultry and pigs, are becoming extinct at an estimated 2 breeds per week, as well as plant varieties such as potatoes and apples, as we rely on fewer varieties that have fit our standard processing.  Long French fries at global fast food chains favor a few varieties and drive agricultural production.  With fewer options in the face of diseases, both the availability of our food supply as well as the increased need for pesticides places our food supply at risk and concentrates chemicals in the landscape.

One way to get a sense of the loss of a species is to try to research it enough to draw it.  While some illustrations of biota, such as Audubon’s, might said to be “ensouled” rather than simply illustrative, it is difficult to take any reproduction and hold it up to a living species and feel that its essence has been captured.  If expressive, reproduction might be said to express more our own biases of, for example, wildness. 

In winter 1987, I drew images of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow from other reproductions.  Being “small” and “drab” and limited in range had resulted in just a few images.  I was frustrated by the way that all reproductions from which I worked fell short, like my desk globe’s image of the Earth.  They were unclear, where before they had seemed to present more than enough.  The discrepancy was recently brought home to me again.  My granddaughter and I were observing a Barred Owl.  Observing it, she wanted to draw the owl as soon as we returned home.  Returning home, I gathered up various guidebooks to make clearer what has seemed somewhat obscured by the night.  None of the various guidebooks came close to matching what we saw that night, and, in the case of the Barred owl, still have an opportunity to see.

The complexity of a whole Earth, of a contiguous biosphere, is contrived of the complexity of local places.  Diminish the complexity of the local place and it is impossible to not diminish the complexity of the whole Earth.  Small extinctions are the pinnacle of large degradation.  And this degradation that was once lamentable for its impact on other species is increasingly experienced as impacting directly on human health.  It is apparent that space exploration, especially that of local surveys of the Earth, markedly enhance our monitoring of the Earth.  But it does not, in itself, make us do things differently.  For all of our astronomical and cybernetic sophistication, the bridge of ecological literacy between the local place and the global is still poorly contrived, if present at all.

In a peopled Earth, there is a popular sense that nature is receding away from local places.  However, in the post-industrial era, we are actually moving more deeply inside the natural order.  Efforts have been made to box attention to wholes and to small nuances as either faulty avant-garde, New Age postmodernism that aspires to “deconstruct” our view of the world or a Romantic nod to age-old Zen or Taoism or First Nation ethics.  But this attention to wholes is really a rational, practical, “eco-literate” transformational shift in economics and health.

Now, in a peopled Earth, both vastness and smallness are gradually coming to be understood as one contiguous terrain viewed from different-sized windows.  It is now easier to understand that a whole ocean can be in jeopardy as well as a sparrow.  But this understanding is still effusive because our eco-literacy has barely emerged.  We are likely more intuitively aware than cognitively aware.  And now our intuitive responses, while less conscious, are responses to direct loss of quality and no longer Romantic escapism.  And yet, our conscious actions tend to be less rational, and lag behind our gut sensibilities. 

To ponder the fact that we will never hear the songs of the dusky seaside sparrow—its cut-a-zheeeeee—still seems to be no more than a frivolous Romantic lament in a global ecosystem that is always changing and redesigning.

Now in the 21^st Century, in a fragile Earth rather than in previous centuries when Earth seemed to be overflowing with vast stored capitol, the renascent task for our age is one of integration with the larger Earth ecosystem rather than either exploitation or some Romantic technological escape.  As was the consequence of the large view of Earthrise, the small view might also become a provocation more than a lament.  And if we begin to focus on what is not wrong, we might being to invest in the adaptive ecological features of both unsettled and settled landscapes. 

At our highest development of our eco-literacy, we might begin to encounter ourselves as an expression of the Earth, and still young and wild.  And we might begin to amplify our eco-literacy.  We might begin to recognize an enduring shamanic vision of, for example, the objectified “tree” as a channel of energy, as aliveness, and as sensitivity and, therefore, conscious.  Such visions would transform how we interact with trees—how we use trees—perhaps with more usufruct and design sensitivity.  What if trees were a living field of something like “sensitivity”?  Energy channel, aliveness, sensitivity are subtle, knowable dimensions rather than effusive, esoteric presumptions that will be a strong measure of our advanced eco-literacy that lead to profound, practical design.  Such perceptiveness will be akin to the imaginal (i.e., deeply intuitive rather than imaginary fantasy) reaches of Einstein that have provoked profound leaps in technology and our understanding of landscape.

Small and large—civilization that has seemed to have swollen to be larger than the Earth as a result of peopling the Earth also seems to shrink in our age of astronauts to something small and fragile.  Our own numbers are vast and yet we are still small. 

The local and the global: There is no longer any conversation about the “environment” that is not local and global, that is not “sparrow and Earthrise.”

  And in this modern era, so what is perception that most blocks our movement forward?

In our eco-literacy, we are willing to include our activity as a contributor to environmental degradation, but as an intruder.  We imagine ourselves to be destroying the adaptive features of the larger Earth ecosystem.  While there is a sense of truth in this observation, it is narrow.  We miss how we have always been on the inside of the larger Earth ecosystem and primarily adaptive.  We design for separation and miss the ecologically adaptive features in our own activity that we can optimize for our own benefit and for the larger Earth ecosystem.  Our global urbanization that appears to be the antithesis of nature might be envisioned as the adaptive, intuitive ecological process that it is.  Our effort to try to sustain a net of landscapes by believing that we can cease intruding has always been a delusion.  Our health lies in the net of landscapes that sustain us more than we can ever sustain them.

Today, in a peopled Earth with few remaining physical frontiers, the hero’s journey is, paradoxically, just beginning.  For all of our advancement, we are still so very young in the history of the Earth.  The hero’s activism is not as much an outbound quest as it is the capacity to find the universe(s) where we stand. In this age, the terrors are no longer wild, fearful six-headed Scylla and its counterpart Charybdis.  The terror is not in the living, vibrant, healthy things that have never been out to get us, that sustain us by their presence.  The monster in our hero’s journey is our blindness, our sleepwalking about in ongoing creation.  The terror is always where it has been, in our fear of standing alone against the universe.

We are only just beginning to imagine ourselves as a landscape, as small eco-niches that are expressions of Earth.  Even though we have imagined ourselves to be more than the Earth, our personal force will continue to emanate from self-as-place.

Small and large:  In a world of problems, we can awaken, as Ranier Maria Rilke wrote, “little things that hardly anyone sees, that so unexpectedly become big beyond measuring.”  Our personal force becomes wise and indomitable when it is ultimately larger than our own lives.  This personal force is not unlike Gandhi’s satyagraha—“soul force” or “truth force.”  To optimize our health, we attune to and express the same indomitable force that expresses the Earth.

Looking at the small can touch vastness.  The complexity of a wild grass remnant that seems so locally fitted so as to be limited on the Earth to a few square miles or at least to a region of a specific continent or part of the ocean is not local.  You cannot have a prairie without a mountain range rain shield, and you cannot have rain without a relationship to oceans.  And none of these things—mountains, oceans, prairies, or the miniscule events within any terrain—occur without interaction with a star.  Each “thing” is more an event, requiring a complex global process and processes beyond the Earth to simply come into being and sustain.  Each blossom expresses the tilt of the whole earth that tilts as an aspect of its spiraling roll in the tail of a star flowing in relation to other stars and galaxies and a beyond that know one will ever fully comprehend. 

Earthrise over moonscape has seeded a transformation in self-perception.  Since 1970, seeing a photograph of earth’s biosphere abruptly expanded our identity as having a larger reach than culture so that earth was no longer a surrounding stage-set.  Human life was deep inside, inseparable.  But the term is still infantile and effusive.   Like a fish in the ocean, we did not really “feel” the ocean or have a gut sense of being an expression of it.  We inspired more efforts toward caretaking as if we were stewards somehow inside yet still apart.  Having peopled the earth by 2000, the direct experience of degrading environmental quality further challenged out vision of apartness and added new terms such as sustainability.  And now, ecology has enlarged from a nostalgic term to a practical quest.

In a now peopled Earth, this transformation in self-perception is an economic and health sense of life as inseparable from environmental care.  “Ecology” directly affects our health and determines our economy.  And attention to it is akin to real work that needs to be done rather than an esoteric side pursuit.  To sustain, we need to look for health and act from a posture of health.  And yet our problem solving tends to bypass health and focus on illness or disease.  “Where is health” and “what is healthy” are questions that we answer poorly.  We are good at taking things apart, but health is a process of putting things together—a design process of integration.  In our traditional approach to environmental care, we try to keep things apart, and we make wild and tame, natural and artificial, culture and nature.  A longstanding rational sense of differences as either-ors is becoming the new erroneous Romanticism to which we try to cling.

SPARROW AND EARTHRISE have value for us as eoliths—as markers that enjoin large and small and, especially, enjoin events that can wear the appearance of being opposites.  A wild grass remnant and a city are like sparrow and Earthrise.  The city impacts on the remnant as Earthrise impacted the sparrow.  Surprisingly, but becoming more evident, both are ecological forces, different and yet not opposites.  And so, a strategy of aspiring to make them more alike rather than separate is the ecological way forward.

Wild Mercy Is In Our Hands

TO TRY TO FIND wildness in urbanization can seem like an overreaching quest when more important work, such as the preservation of unsettled landscapes, cries out for our attention.  However, with urbanization as the now-predominant human habitat, our “established” concepts may misread the world as it is, and be potentially destructive to both human and non-human life on Earth.  Our concept of wildness has never been fixed, but rather has evolved from being a threatening terrain to be avoided, and then to a wasteland in need of human exploitation to be activated, and then to a Romantic Eden that has now become an archaic remnant to be preserved, to a now still effusive, ecological vision of wildness as a vast cosmic dynamic of an ongoing cosmic creation process that is inside our identity and at the heart of our core economics.  As our sense of wildness has changed, so has our sense of human nature.

The explicit sense of wildness in the post-industrial era is still that of a quality found in unsettled nonhuman landscapes.  There is an emerging implicit sense of wildness as a quality that is not limited to a specific place,[i] and that is inherent throughout the universe as a central dynamic, that “can be seen as a property of the body or mind,”[ii] and that can be found in the city and suburb as well as the rainforest.[iii]  The emphasis upon nature and wildness being separate from human life—as “out there”—is beginning to be challenged as a misperception.  Our predominant sense of wildness may be a beautiful belief in an idealized pristine nature.  Further, there is new concern that continuing to describe a pristine wildness creates a distorted image of a nature that has been free of human influence that is reinforced in a post-industrial mass culture of nature shows and stores and zoos.  And this image of pristine nature as external can avoid addressing societal and economic problems rather than highlight environmental problems as integral.[iv]

Despite the “gray….man-made desert”[v] of the city, there is a new sense of nature as including the post-industrial rather than as “other” or “out there” or as external to civilization.  The very new, emerging “literacy” of ecology challenges our longstanding dialectic of self and other, creating a continuum of being so that self is transpersonal, making self-as-landscape a more authentic description of life.  Like all other life forms, human beings are continual, inseparable rivers of respiration and digestion with eloquent, shared macromolecular structures.  The word “ecology” is so very new and, as a result, effusive rather than explicit in its meaning, yet to be filled out in ways that will profoundly challenge our understanding of not ony the city but also of human nature. 

John Tallmadge offers a rare first step into the possibility of an authentic “practice of the wild” that includes “going in” urban life itself rather than a quest that is external to human settlements.[vi]  While disconcerting to his longstanding sense of wildness, Tallmadge writes that there is “more to this matter of wildness than I had ever imagined” and that “To practice the wild meant to step off the trail of received ideas about people and nature, to embrace learning and metamorphosis.”[vii]  Tallmadge suggests there is a new very effusive sense of the possibility that even wilderness—the epitome of wildness—might continue to be created, and that wilderness and civilization might not be opposed to each other.[viii]  In the future, such self-questioning might seem laughable in the same way that past wondering if mountaintops might have once been seabeds now seems humorous to post-industrial life.

“Going in” urban nature, the traditional sense of the presence of wildness in the city continues to focus on the presence of nonhuman species in human habitation, overriding weathers, and acknowledgement of geological formations and ecosystems such as forest and coastline.  Rarely does a sense of going into urban nature, “go into” either human activity itself or the built landscape to experience wildness.  Going in post-industrial life to taste wildness is a new frontier.  As Tallmadge writes, “None of the nature writers had offered much wisdom for living in cities.”  And he speculates further, “Perhaps urban nature remains largely invisible because we lack an appropriate philosophy and vocabulary.” [ix]  Writing about the broader dimensions and subtlety of wildness and pondering the possibility that wildness remains an enduring aspect of human life that we have failed to articulate, Terry Tempest Williams lyrically comments,

Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats,

the silent space that says we live only by grace.  Wilderness lives by this

same grace.  Wild mercy is in our hands.[x]

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[i] Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996, pp. 83-84.

[ii] John Knott, Imagining Wild America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, p.7

[iii] There is a longstanding natural history literature identify nonhuman species in urban environments.  For examples of more contemporary statements that also begin to challenge the sense of wildness as completely separable from human life see: Peter Friderici, The Suburban Wild. Athens: University of Georgia, 1999, p.6; John Tallmadge,

“Resistance to urban nature,” in Robert Grese and John Knott (eds.) Reimagining Place. Michigan Quarterly Review, 40 (Winter, 2001, special edition), pp. 178-189, and John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning From Nature in the City. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004; and John Knott, Imagining Wild America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, p.7.

[iv] Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

[v] John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch, pp. 12-13.

[vi] John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch, pp. 123 and 35 respectively fro quotes.

[vii] John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch, pp. 35 and161 respectively for quotes.

[viii] John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch, p. 40.

[ix] John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch, p. 42.

[x] Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. New York, Pantheon, 2001, p. 229