Today I read two thought provoking pieces that cross traditional divides while addressing key issues in environmental thought. In both cases I think a Pagan sensibility brings new and valuable insights to the table.<\/p>\n
First John Tierney wrote a column<\/a> in the New York Times discussing Charles C. Mann\u2019s new book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created<\/a><\/em> . I haven\u2019t read it, but now I want to.\u00a0 Mann is a locavore, like me he seeks to eat what has been grown close to where he lives.\u00a0 But we locavores eat food which often originated far away, and is produced here only because of earlier global trade.\u00a0 Tierney then explores the implications arising from this paradox, and lists many of the greatest losses and gains from this process.<\/p>\n For my more focused purpose here the chief issue is that we locavores would enjoy a much much more restricted menu in the absence of the international ecological exchanges we often lament.\u00a0 For myself, all meat animals I currently consume other than turkey, all grains other than corn (and it originated far away in Mexico), and many vegetables would be absent from my table. If I were still in Kansas my table would be still yet thinner in variety, and in Alaska?\u00a0 I would not want to actively contemplate it. One Koyukon Indian elder, being asked whether things were better before the arrival of the white man, replied essentially “Be glad you never had to eat ptarmigan droppings in the spring<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Our food even when grown locally is far richer in variety and taste because so much of it is not of local origin.<\/p>\n Next is a fascinating article I found this morning over breakfast while reading my favorite regional publication, High Country News<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 In her article \u201cThe mirage of the pristine<\/a>\u201d\u00a0 author Emma Marris<\/a> writes of the last remnants of an old growth forest in Seattle, in Schmitz Park.\u00a0 There 700 year old Douglas fir still reach their mighty trunks up to the sky as they did before Europeans first came to these shores.<\/p>\n But the life span of a Douglas fir is 1200 years and neither there nor elsewhere in the region are there any trees that old.\u00a0 Here is a mystery with a surprising answer.<\/p>\n The present cool temperatures of the Northwest did not exist 700 years ago during what is called the Medieval Warm Period.\u00a0 Fires were more frequent.\u00a0 Trees would almost certainly have burned before the 700 year mark was reached. Today’s Seattle old growth is not an example of a forest that would have occurred naturally for a very long time until shortly before Europeans arrived. Marris explores this and more in her book Rambunctious Garden<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0 which I also want to read.<\/p>\n The point here is that the pristine wilderness is always in flux, even absent people, and people have changed North America so much that even what Europeans first encountered was far different from what could have been expected had human beings never lived on Turtle Island.\u00a0 The same is true for Australia where Europeans never encountered many of the animals and perhaps plants that the aborigines did when they arrived.\u00a0 And let is be clear, this observation holds for everywhere else. But even absent people, there would have been change for \u201cShe changes everything She touches, and everything She touches changes.\u201d<\/p>\n So is the popular efforts to preserve wild lands simply a romantic fantasy rooted in wishful thinking about an Eden we never knew?<\/p>\n No, I do not think so, and I think we as Pagans have something important to add here.<\/p>\n The issue is not whether we preserve an unchanging landscape, an effort as doomed as our effort to prevent change in our lives.\u00a0 Rather the issue is the attitude with which we enter into relationship with the more-than-human.<\/p>\n We cannot help using the world for our purposes, as do all life forms.\u00a0 Look at a red ant hill out in the Utah deserts, as I have, and ponder their relation to nature.\u00a0 For a considerable distance around the colony nothing growing can be found.\u00a0 In their immediate surface vicinity the ants cannot be accused of enriching their environment by even the most die hard lover of the wild, although they play an important role within a greater context.<\/p>\n We use the land and all within it as does everything that lives, but that is not all there is to the issue. We also are able to appreciate its sacred dimensions, the intrinsic value of other life forms, the presence of the\u00a0 energies of rock and water, sky and the living fire deep within the earth.\u00a0 We live in relationship with the world, and perhaps unlike other beings here, we know that we live in relationship because we have the possibility of doing it better or worse as a matter of choice.<\/p>\n It is a lot like love and friendship.\u00a0 Love and friendship are very useful and we make us of our friends and loved ones all the time.\u00a0 But if we seek friends or lovers because they are useful, we are not really a friend nor are we really demonstrating love.\u00a0 Friendship and love rely on our appreciating the other for qualities they have independently of their utility to ourselves.<\/p>\n Yet strong friendships and love are what makes life at its richest.<\/p>\n The same attitude, I suggest, holds for the other-than-human world.\u00a0 When we realize that the beings and forces within it have value independently of their service to our own utility, the other-than-human becomes the more-than-human. At the dawn of modernity Leonardo Da Vinci put this point clearly \u00a0\u201cThe virtues of grasses, stones, and trees do not exist because humans know them. . . . Grasses are noble in themselves without the aid of human languages or letters.\u201d\u00a0 He also observed \u201cif you only love them on account of the good you expect from them, and not because of the sum of their qualities, then you are as the dog that wags its tail to the person who gives him a bone.\u201d
\nLeonardo\u2019s ethic is a profoundly Pagan one.<\/p>\n