Environmental Readings Volume 1: Humans Relationships With Nature Published by: Groundwork Education www.layinggroundwork.org Compiled & Edited by Jeff Wagner with help from Micaela Petrini, Caitlin McKimmy, Jason Shah, Parker Pflaum, Itzá Martinez de Eulate Lanza, Jhasmany Saavedra, & Dev Carey First Edition, June 2018 This work is comprised of articles and excerpts from numerous sources. Groundwork and the editors do not own the material or claim copyright or rights to this material, unless written by one of the editors. This work is distributed as a compilation of educational materials for the sole use as non-commercial educational material for educators. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to edit and share this work in non-commercial ways. Any published derivative works must credit the original creator and maintain this same Creative Commons license. Please notify us of any derivative works or edits. Environmental Readings Volume 1: Human Relationships With Nature Published by Groundwork Education, compiled & edited by Jeff Wagner Skywoman Falling by Robin Wall Kimmerer .......................................................1 An alternative view: how to frame a relationship with the natural world that’s not just extractive and destructive. The Gospel of Consumption by Jeffrey Kaplan ....................................................4 What is the origin of our consumption-based society, and when did we make this choice as a people? Earthbound: On Solid Ground by bell hooks .......................................................9 “More than ever before in our nation’s history black folks must collectively renew our relationship to the earth…” Do we really love our land? by David James Duncan ..........................................11 What do people mean when they speak of “love of the land?” Most Americans claim to feel such a love. Most Americans also move, on average, every four years. Is this the behavior of true land lovers? Epiphany in the Beans by Robin Wall Kimmerer ...............................................12 What does it mean to love the Earth? Could we develop a loving relationship with the Earth? What Outdoor Education Didn’t Teach Me by Dev Carey ....................................15 “Outdoor education, when it exposes people to wilderness, may be the first step toward inspiring a way of life that can coexist with the land rather than destroy it. But it is only the first step.” The Rights of Nature ..........................................................................................17 As enshrined in the 2008 constitution of the Republic of Ecuador. Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth .........................................17 From the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia. Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest by Vandana Shiva ...............19 The famous Indian ecofeminist summarizes some of her main ideas. Thinking Like A Mountain by Aldo Leopold .......................................................22 This seminal essay, published 46 years before the reintroduction of wolves to the northern Rockies, is an accurate and philosophical look into relationships among species. The Land Ethic by Aldo Leopold ........................................................................23 “The land is one organism” writes Leopold. Well before its time, this essay lays the foundation for Deep Ecology and modern environmental ethics in the West. Conservation Refugees by Mark Dowie .............................................................32 which bring order to an otherwise chaotic world and to which we should willfully commit Conservation movements today continue the long tradition of forcibly removing ourselves! Dogen's “You should know that even though all things are liberated and not tied to indigenous people from their land to create parks. Are large state governments going to anything, they abide in their own phenomenal expression” is medicine for that. The “Mountains preserve biodiversity hot-spots better than the people who have lived there as far back as and Waters Sutra” is called a sutra not to assert that the “mountains and rivers of this moment” stories go? are a text, a system of symbols, a referential world of mirrors, but that this world in its actual existence is a complete presentation, an enactment—and that it stands for nothing. Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique by Ramachandra Guha .....................................................................37 Walking on Water Guha, writing from an Indian perspective, proposes that Deep Ecology deepen its views There's all sorts of walking—from heading out across the desert in a straight line to a to include the social and political systems that have brought us into our current ecological sinuous weaving through undergrowth. Descending rocky ridges and talus slopes is a specialty in crisis. “Deep ecology runs parallel to the consumer society without seriously questioning itself. It is an irregular dancing—always shifting—step of walk on slabs and scree. The breath and its ecological and socio-political basis.” eye are always following this uneven rhythm. It is never paced or clocklike, but flexing—little jumps—sidesteps— going for the well-seen place to put a foot on a rock, hit flat, move on— The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature by William zigzagging along and all deliberate. The alert eye looking ahead, picking the footholds to come, Cronon ...........................................................................................................43 while never missing the step of the moment. The body-mind is so at one with this rough world that it makes these moves effortlessly once it has had a bit of practice. The mountain keeps up The American ideal of wilderness is less than two centuries old. We might all agree on with the mountain. protecting the environment, but it’s always important to examine our ideals and ask In the year 1225 Dogen was in his second year in South China. That year he walked out of where they originate. the mountains and passed through the capital of the Southern Song dynasty, Hang-zhou, on his way north to the Wan-shou monastery at Mt. Jing. The only account of China left by Dogen is Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth ...................55 notes on talks by the master Ru-jing (Kodera, 1980). I wonder what Dogen would have said of Can we progress towards workable solutions or do we need to start from scratch? city walking. Hang-zhou had level broad straight streets paralleling canals. He must have seen the many-storied houses, clean cobbled streets, theaters, markets, and innumerable restaurants. Should Species Be Allowed to Die Out? by Jennifer Kahn ..................................63 It had three thousand public baths. Marco Polo (who called it Quinsai) visited it twenty-five years later and estimated that i t was probably the largest (at least a million people) and most affluent As a planet, we are in the midst of our 5th great extinction, losing more species than we city in the world at that time (Gernet, 1962). Even today the people of Hang-zhou remember the can count. How do we decide which ones to devote ourselves towards saving? lofty eleventh-century poet Su Shi, who built the causeway across West Lake when he was governor. At the time of Dogen's walk North China was under the control of the Mongols, and How Much Should A Person Consume? by Ramachandra Guha ........................70 Hang-zhou would fall to the Mongols in fifty-five more years. “There is an intimate, though not often enough noticed overlap, between ecological The South China of that era sent landscape painting, calligraphy, both the Soto and Rinzai entitlements and economic status. For not only do the rich and powerful consume more schools of Zen, and the vision of that great southern capital to Japan. The memory of Hang-zhou than their ‘fair share’ of the world’s resources, they are also usually better protected from shaped both Osaka and Tokyo in their Tokugawa-era evolution. These two positions—one the the consequences of environmental degradation.” austere Zen practice with its spare, clean halls, the other the possibility of a convivial urban life rich in festivals and theaters and restaurants—are two potent legacies of East Asia to the world. If The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character by Wendell Berry ........................84 Zen stands for the Far Eastern love of nature, Hang-zhou stands for the ideal of the city. Both are brimming with energy and life. Because most of the cities of the world are now mired in poverty, “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: overpopulation, and pollution we have all the more reason to recover the dream. To neglect the we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or city (in our hearts and minds for starters) is deadly, as James Hillman (1989, i69) says. we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.” The “Mountains and Waters Sutra” goes on to say: All waters appear at the foot of the eastern mountains. Above all waters are all The Use of Energy by Wendell Berry .................................................................89 mountains. Walking beyond and walking within are both done on water. All mountains walk