My usual hesitation sitting down to write something here almost lames me again: how to make a distinction between what "belongs" in writing about the environment (a word I find ever more useless) when it seems that it is inseparable from everything else that goes on in a life every day. How to separate attending to the flour moths that have invaded the bird seed then moved on to the grains stored in the kitchen to flutter throughout the house. How to converse with the driveway-paving sales guy who ignores the polite sign on the front door asking that salespeople not disturb us, who pursues his sale pitch with the cold wind chilling the house as he insists he can pave our driveway cheaply --"only $2300" [!] (after I've told him that paved driveways are undesirable for rain run-off that should not flood the sewer system) if only I sign the paper now and pay later, because after all, our house is only a "tear down" in a neighbourhood where McMonster houses are the rage. How in fact live a life that is committed to attention to "ecological issues" in a culture in which daily experiences are divorced from simply being a creature among creatures caring about our fellow-creatures' well-being?
The problem of talking about "environmental" or "ecological" issues is the aura it gives them of being somehow "out there", as if we're not all in the soup together.
There's a nearby book emporium (one of those industrial-strength chain stores with a massive footprint), the only bookstore in these far reaches, where I can go to browse the news stands for any periodicals of interest. Saturday's hunt yielded a rare copy of The Sun (January 2010) with an interview of Sandra Steingraber, "On How We've Made The Environment Dangerous To Our Health." Her next book, to be published in the spring of 2011, concerns "the ecology of childhood", saying what should be common sense: "Our food becomes us; it becomes the bodies of my children: their muscles, blood, and brain tissue." Except that even that basic knowledge seems to have been lost from the press of daily life as well as how such knowledge connects to being part of the world where the food is grown, where it comes from, who does the work of growing it, what kind of water the food absorbed, who buys it and sells it (whether water or food), what kind of food do children eat at school, what kind of food is advertised on television, and the list goes on to expand to every aspect of being alive, of being alive in this world now. Except that now, such explorations have become aspects of "environmental studies" with the weight of scientific studies and arguments and economics, with no space for an argument for joy and connection and sensual pleasure.
What my "ecology" of childhood included was the smell of laundry taken down from the clothesline; homemade bread baked in unglazed clay flour pots for the crust and the special flavour; family expeditions on Sundays to the creek where people got together to wash their cars: no soap, just buckets of water hauled up from the creek, rags for washing and rags for drying, the kids chasing gophers or at creek edge looking for tadpoles; planting potato eyes in the garden and digging little trenches for sweet pea seeds; playing baseball in a vacant lot until after sundown.
Many people have written eloquently about the possibilities for transforming our lives in small ways, and many people are restoring the simplicity of our lives. People are reading Steingraber and her informed and passionate writing, people are reading Utne Reader for the essay by David Barash's insight that "our relationship to the natural world is a Ponzi scheme" -- how we are ripping off the natural world out of greed and lust for profit. And some people may find a copy of World Pulse and its stories about women changing bit by bit the way they are transforming their lives, from political action to fair trade. All valuable pieces of writing -- but even for a writer, words are not enough, they are often "out there" and not where we live.
Where we live is in our imaginations and daydreams as well as our anxieties, and the language that addresses the limits of language -- poetry and fiction that restore connection rather than itemizing the problems we face -- can keep our internal fires alive, balance the intellectual awareness of the crisis talk about climate change, and take us out of ourselves.
More of this next time -- the mail has arrived, tea needs to be made, birds need feeding, and a few seeds to start sprouting, as well as other writing to sink into.
I want to explore the importance of language older than words -- not (just) the essential book by Derek Jensen but communication beyond the use of human language.
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