This year I have been thinking a lot about the environment and the responsibilities we all have to protect and preserve it. Last year I was swept off my feet by a charismatic Green Peace representative, and for the first time I found myself actively working to spread awareness of environmental issues. Although I largely look back on this as a mildly embarrassing phase of my transition into adulthood, I cannot deny that my brief involvement in environmental activism was responsible for many of my most educational and rewarding experiences in college. In truth, sometimes I wonder why I became disenchanted to begin with and certainly why I feel so silly about it in retrospect. I guess people generally look at Green Peace (as well as many other radical NPOs) and see crazy progressives preying on student’s naïve idealism. A lot of people look at it and see largely uneducated kids marching around the streets being obnoxious to much more realistic adults who scoff and say, “When you’re older you’ll see how the real world works”. As I mentioned in last week’s post, there is certainly some truth to this. A lot of times I felt like I was organizing and planning for the sake of being busy, then doing pointless protests so that we could take pictures to put on Facebook. It’s not I gave up on environmentalism altogether, or that I see the fight as useless… I just wasn’t sure that I was going about it in the right way. In fact, the main reason I’ve drifted is because I decided it was only worth it if I decided to dedicate my career to it – which I was not. I felt like I would never make an impact worth the effort unless I made it a full time occupation.

While rereading these blog posts, I’ve realized that environmentalism isn’t something one can really give up once they’ve become privy to it. I’ve realized that environmentalism is largely a state of mind, a perspective and a lifestyle. Of course, this is definitely different than being an activist, but this simple realization has suddenly made environmental activism feel a lot more accessible to me. Last week Meeps talks about the film Chasing Ice, and how James Balog wanted to show climate change to his viewers. Anytime anyone mentions the EFF, that film comes up; everyone who saw it loved it and everyone who missed it is regretful. I think environmentalism, in particular climate change, is often an incredibly abstract concept to people. It was exactly this abstraction that left me feeling disconnected from what I was trying to do with Green Peace. That’s why the film works so well. It isn’t trying to convince people through statistics, because to a certain extent almost anyone who reads them doesn’t really understand them. Instead he’s just showing footage of the actual effects – He’s trying to show people something that’s otherwise inaccessible, give people a connection to something that he thinks is in need of attention.

In this week’s post, Anne talks about how this class has made her more inquisitive and attentive to her everyday ecological systems. I would most certainly agree, and I’m beginning to think that this attentiveness is the most important thing we can foster as environmentalists. What I found the most frustrating about Green Peace is that so often we were met with people who simply didn’t care. People found our activism to be crazy, they found us to be hippies. I wasn’t frustrated by the insults, I was frustrated because I honestly couldn’t understand why everyone else didn’t care. I now realize that no amount of protesting would get these people to care. They don’t care because they don’t understand; they simply haven’t been exposed to nature in the same way that I’ve been privileged to. In our first open topic post, a lot of us wrote about our bodies of water at home. While writing about his creek, Bestie wrote the simplest thing that stuck out to me. He ended with a resolute acknowledgement: “[Eighteen Mile Creek] has been a big part of my life”. I think that’s ultimately something that brings a lot of us Earth Lodgers together; we have grown up around nature, nature is part of who we are, and at the end of the day we will probably never stop caring for it.

I then have to ask myself, is caring enough? Is having this relationship changing anything? Of course the answer to both of these questions is yes. How can anyone be expected to take care of the environment if they don’t understand it? The other day Carey Jamieson from the school of continuing studies came to our GreenUR meeting. We were talking about Nature Deficit Disorder and she told us a story about watching a kid cry because he was scared of a sparrow. Spending her entire life on a farm, she was flabbergasted that a child didn’t understand that sparrows are harmless. Can we blame the child? Of course not; just as we can’t really blame people for not caring more. They just need to be shown why it’s important. Like how Bleach explains his first conceptualization of light pollution. He was only concerned about the detrimental effects of civilization because he was privileged to live in a place left largely unaffected. It was his relationship and love for Maine’s unadulterated starscape that made him recognize the importance of environmental attentiveness. I mean, can we really expect people to care that the birds don’t chirp anymore when they never heard them to begin with?

I guess this brings me back to William Cronon’s article that we read a few weeks ago. The duality we create between man and nature really is problematic. Nature is everywhere just as the effects of man are everywhere. We’re so intertwined that we can no longer think of the two as separate. In George’s post “Rivers and Roads”, he talks about this new landscape we’ve created. But I think it’s easy to be much more attentive to manmade structures than to nature. We experience objects through their utility, and it’s easy to take the little brook running by the road for granted. We’re only willing to notice when it’s our backyard or a sublime view of Zion Canyon; we forget that our happiness is much more reliant on the chorus of birds in the morning, the frogs at night, the stars, the feel of moss under our feet – then it is on things that we are so much more vocal about, like broken doorknobs or potholes.

So where do I go from here? I’m making it a goal to continue to be more and more attentive to the world around me. Taylor talks about working at the William Byrd Community House’s farmlet, and I was really inspired. He writes of being surprised how unintuitive a lot of his work was; like pruning plants by almost half in order to urge them to grow more, or mixing poor soil in with the compost to avoid creating an impenetrable bubble for the plant. I want to involve myself with nature in a hands on way, so that I can actually understand how it work. I think this new level of attentiveness would help me better comprehend the natural world around me, better recognize when it is healthy and when things are afoul. It’s like when people ask me if I care whether other people eat meat. It’s not that I think everyone should be vegetarian, I just think everyone should understand where their meat is coming from, and then decide whether they’re comfortable supporting that.

It’s not that I think everyone should dedicate their life to environmentalism, I mean I’m not. I just think everyone should try to at least recognize – try to see for themselves – that we are part of a system that all have a stake in. And for me, opening opportunities for people to forge such relationships is probably more rewarding than any other sort of advocacy I can think of. As Jenni wrote two weeks ago, Earth Lodge has the potential to help demystify the natural world for our community as a whole.