Evanescent, fading and ephemeral, the distant sunset hardly matters anymore. We simply turn on our lights, way too many lights and we drive the coming darkness away. We blot out the fact that the world and all of its creatures are supposed to slow down and rest at some point in the 24 plus or minus hours of a day.
Humanity is both fragile and brutal. We are the stain on the earth. Our acts are the melanoma that seems to be eating away at the supple skin of this place. We have no respect for the interrelationship of things because we believe we have a mandate from God to treat the world as our tool. Usufruct, that is the word isn’t it? We place ourselves above the natural and routine rhythms of life. But as we struggle, clutch and scrabble to hold the world in our control we kill that which we need to survive.
Maybe it is time to take a couple of minutes and go walk out into the fen and observe. Maybe it is time to move our mental image of where we stand in nature’s hierarchy down a couple notches, just saying. It is not just that I am thinking about the collapse of the world’s fisheries or what BP has done to the gulf. It is that I am extrapolating, what I have done to the gulf by living my middle class life.
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I have property in Colorado in a high desert valley surrounded by snowy mountains, remote and sparsely populated. Near the creek that flows at the back of my land at the base of Mt. Blanca, I dream of building a small cabin topped by solar panels and a windmill sending the sun to batteries to store for later. I scour the internet for the best recyclable toilet and have figured out how to make an indoor wetland, a place of growing and cleaning the water I use, in a solar greenhouse. I can grow food year round in the rich, composted soil.
Unfortunately, my husband and sons refuse to leave NJ.
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