The Ecological Age

This quotation from Thomas Berry’s The Dream of the Earth is of the utmost importance:

“Presently we are entering another historical period. one that might be designated as the ecological age. I use the term ecological in its primary meaning as the relationship of an organism to its environment, but also as an indication of the interdependence of all the living and nonliving systems of Earth. This vision of a planet integral with itself throughout its spatial extent and its evolutionary sequence is of primary importance if we are to have the psychic importance to undergo the psychic and social transformations that are being demanded of us. These transformations require the assistance of the entire planet, not merely the forces available to the human. It is not simply adaptation to a reduced supply of fuels or to some modification of our systems of social or economic controls. Nor is it some slight change in our education system. What is happening is something of a far greater magnitude. It is a radical change in our mode of consciousness. Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human. It is to transcend. not only national limitations, but even our species isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and value.

How to See

I’ve spent two hours a week this year taking an online course in abstract watercolour painting. The course and others are offered by Avenue Road Arts School, which used to be an actual place and has gone digital for a while. That means that people can join in from any where, rather than just in Toronto as I used to do. The instructor, Sadko Hadzihasanovic, has established an international reputation, but still enjoys working with amateurs and sharing his insights with energy and new technological skills to help us over Zoom. We can email our works in progress and he often make suggestions of small changes in the images on his ipad and sends them back. Often it’s composition where we need help from an experienced eye.

Sometimes abstracting helps us reconnect with the real world. Taking an idea to the next step and putting it into a visual framework we know can send a message that moves us to new understanding. “Poets are the unacknowledged legistrators”, the poet Shelley said. So are any artists who help us to return to learning through our five senses.

San Francisco Artist Ana Teresa Fernandez recently sat down with Bill McKibben to speak about her social sculptor, On the Horizon. It was a response to a comment she heard that sea level will rise six feet in the next fifty years. That’s a nice abstract number, but what does it look like? Her answer as a creator was to put a six foot tube on the beach, fill it to the top with the help of children who will face that reality and let viewers of all ages respond to it.

You can see it here:

What does it look like? How will it change us? Why is this happening? Artists ask the questions that in our day to day pre-occupations we avoid. We need them th help us see what we are doing to ourselves.

Place

In another essay written by Wendell Berry, he talks about returning from New York to the small community in Kentucky where he grew up - and previous generations of his family had lived. One of his New York colleagues at the University where he was teaching, tried to dissuade him by quoting, “You can’t go home again”. Berry disagreed. In the sense that the metaphor stands for change, there is some truth - but indeed you can stay in the same community and have a sense of place. I’ve now lived continuously in the same city since 1978 - with only a brief period of months away from it.

Living in the same community makes us aware of both change and stability within it. It allows one to interact with it and take some responsibility for the changes. Flying off to other countries as I have done, allows me to have a taste of them - but not to have any sense of their continuity. Visiting New York City after a span of about 35 years was revealing. The avenue and street numbers were the same as the Chelsea I lived in earlier in the 60s, with its Puerto Ricans who had escaped from Spanish Harlem for a new life, side-by-side the affluent young who were mortgaging their lives to buy and renovate crumbling brownstones. Even then the blocks below West 20th street were being razed for new development. More recently the old brownstone where we lived in a fifth floor walk up had stone facing added- and a doorman.

Stability was one of the monastic virtues - dashing around the world wasn’t in a time when travel was by foot or cart. Our ease of travel and relocation can take away our sense of place. Living in the same place makes us aware of land, soil, water, air. If we think of these things only as an environment to be glanced at on our travels, we lose all sense that we are part of them. Even city living - in contrast to Wendel Berry’s farm community allows for some of that.

Eating Fish

Netflix has recently issued a documentary outlining how we are exploiting the fish supply. Many who watch it are becoming like vegans and giving up fish altogether. I’m trying to each less meat and more vegetables and fish often seems the right choice. Thus I am encouraged by Guardian and New York Times writer Paul Greenberg who allows for four types.

• Farmed oysters, mussels and clams. - because those that farm them, have to abide by clean water rules

• Alaskan Sockeye salmon. - because preserving their habitat meant that an Alaskan copper mine never happened.

• Peruvian anchoveta - because if you can find it, it isn’t being reduced to pellets, as so many industrial fish are.

• Fish I or a family member catches -n a fresh water lake. I loved fishing from a rowboat accompanied by my father when I was a child. It was a time of calm and companionship - but moreover it was a sustainable kind of fishing. We kept only the perch, bass or trout that met size requirements. We went home or to the cottage, cooked it and ate it. We were mimicking the Georgian Bay patterns of the first nations people who lived there before we settlers came.. To pretend that anything we eat - even vegetables - doesn’t depend on the resources of our planet home is foolishness.

Climate and Weather

Beautifull spring days here in Toronto mean that people like me are bringing up cushions from the storage locker and enlisting younger family members to wash balcony windows to enjoy the coming season. It’s easy to confuse weather and climate.

But the study of norms is sobering. It examines patterns over time. I don’t know whether there are similar Canadian statistics, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the US Department of Commerce publishes norms each decade and a new one was recently released. Comparisons between previous temperate climates and current warming ones are scary

This is what industrialization and other human action is creating. Look what we are doing to ourselves.