P/P Photoweek:Rime on Barber-wire (I.20.08)

The Expanding Circle of Awareness

"The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community
to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land."

Aldo Leopold

The key challenge of the current era, it seems to me, is the need
to awaken a new creative energy or spirit and sense of ethical
responsibility and compassion that are strong enough to
counterbalance our already devastating powers of destruction.

The image that presents itself is simple and crystal clear. It is
the image of an expanding circle of awareness, one which grows
to embrace the whole of the living Earth. It is the image of the
planet in space—certainly the greatest leap in creative awareness
since the discovery the Earth was not flat but round—as seen from
the surface of the Moon.

This image of the whole living Earth has already deeply and
irreversibly transformed the consciousness of humanity. At the
same time—and tragically, few of its implications have been
realized. And many of the outmoded straight-line, flat-earth
habits of seeing, thinking and acting are still fully active and
dominant.

Chief among these old habits are the concepts of war and waste.
They are old because they are not in harmony with the new reality
of one world, one humanity, and one planet. And they are habitual
because they unconsciously repeat the same mistakes over and
over again. It seems to me that the root of these old habits is the
now in Western culture all-pervasive and extremely powerful
illusions of separation and independence. The thought that I can
have my peace and security here, by waging war over there;
And the similar thought that I can have a clean and orderly
environment here, by dumping my trash over there.
In the past, when we were merely throwing stones at each other
and burning camp fires, these ideas did little harm. But now
that the atom has been split—perhaps the ultimate and terminal
phase in self-destructive fragmentation—a handful of bombs can
take down the planet, and the waste of but a few reactors comes
full circle to remain a threat for more generations than we can
honestly think about.

So, clearly a great leap of creativity is called for. First and foremost,
I would say, is to steadfastly refuse to follow the old paths of war
and waste. Personally, my conviction that this is not only necessary
but possible comes from how I see the natural world. I feel very
strongly that war as the kind of deeply entrenched conflict which
has up to now typified humanity does not exist in Nature. Simply
because Nature, in my view, abhors the contradiction embodied
in conflict and the concomitant waste of energy. The case of waste
is even more obvious. It doesn't exist in the natural world; everything
is recycled. One of our highest priorities should not just be the elimination
of waste, but more especially the elimination of the very idea of waste
itself.

In other words, the circle expands and comes round. What could
be more natural than that? How to do this is a political problem
with any number of possible solutions. But why to do this, because
of its truth, or ethical necessity, is different. The why of it is, I would
say, spiritual. The why is:—because it is the right thing to do.
Regardless of the short-term difficulties thereby encountered.

It would be naive to think we could solve problems of a global scale
like Climate Change by not somehow at the same time addressing
the facts that about a third of Earth's resources are presently devoted
to either preparing for war or actively waging it, and that present
economic structures are based not on the conservation of resources
but on the wholesale trashing of them. So, Aldo Leopold's marvelously
expanding circle of the Land Ethic must now of necessity be expanded
very much further. In a way, I think it is inevitable, unstoppable almost.
Every child can see the truth of the way of renewable energy and the
light of the Sun. And every mother can see that life on planet Earth is
eternally and wholly not a straight line to nowhere or somewhere else,
but round.