Blogger blogging near Seattle
“Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.” ~ Rachel Carson
May you find inspiration on this Earth Day to make a positive impact on your community.
Is this the right word?
This “sustainability?
Or symbiosis?
Healing our environment from millennia of destruction requires a new mindset. “Sustainability” gets bantered about a great deal. It points to a goal: creating a life that minimizes, or, better yet, eliminates environmental damage. Though the word gets used a great deal, especially by marketers, we aren’t living sustainability. There are, perhaps, a few elements of our economy that could be considered sustainable, if you bend reality enough.
We need to consider how we interact with our ecology and the ecosystem writ large. How do we build up the environment, or, invest in our environment ensuring the healthiest system for us to survive on.
Westerners in particular have developed a disconnect from the ecosystem from which we draw life. It’s time to think about what we GIVE to that which provides us life. Only taking eventually fails, whether it’s large scale biological systems, or just a group of friends in the neighborhood pub.
With that, I am not convinced that “sustainability” inspires the right vision. Lately I’m leaning towards “symbiosis”. Like the picture above, there’s an exchange between the entities. Something given for something taken. When the loop is big enough, we have a cradle-to-cradle system. Which is when we finally have a system that won’t fail. That is my objective.