Ecological Intelligence: Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature (EasyRead Large Edition) by Ian McCallum

Author:Ian McCallum
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Nature, Ecology, General
ISBN: 9781458748225
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Published: 2009-09-15T07:56:45.184000+00:00

PART TWO

LOOKING AHEAD

Tonight

I want you to feel the blurred edge

between good and bad,

to say no to the urge to look away

or to take sides…

but to give

with both eyes

I make no apology for a fascination with the soft edge of science.

It is here, it seems, that we get fleeting glimpses of strange shadows just beneath the surface of current understanding.

Lyall Watson

7

THE BLIND SPOTS

THE NOTION OF AN ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE, OF LIVING IN A MINDFIELD, and of the need for a poetic language—all for the purpose of a deeper awareness of the multifaceted relationship between humans and Nature—may sound appealing and even logical, but it is going to require rhetoric as well as logic, and that is not an easy task. I use the word rhetoric in its classical oratory sense—the art of persuasive language, the art of influencing the one who hears. To some, the notion may be too far-fetched, not in keeping with conventional wisdom and, in all probability, too difficult to apply.

Don’t be surprised if, in some instances, the resistance to what the poets have been trying to say is as dismissive as it was about Galileo’s moons. Change is always unsettling and often threatening, but we must not shy away from it. We must face up not only to the mounting environmental pressures of our time, but to the nagging internal pressures also—the ones that urge us to come to terms with the significance and responsibilities of what it means to be the human animal. Who knows, we might find unexpected patterns or directions within the very pressures we are trying to avoid. Consider the surprising truth about the short-range subnuclear forces of intergalactic space, for instance. These are not detectable until they are crushed together by huge stellar pressures. And yet, says Karl Popper, these are the very forces that are responsible for holding together all the more complex atoms of the universe. When looked at differently, our external and internal pressures, like those massive stellar forces, could be both appropriate and necessary—a reminder that there would be no evolution of size, shape, or consciousness without them.

The environmental pressures of our time could be the very pressures behind a new evolutionary leap—not another expansion in brain size, but of a consciousness and an intelligence that can redefine our sense of history, our sense of Nature, and our sense of coexistence.

I believe the pressure is on and that it has to be taken personally. It is in the heated poetry of Antonio Machado: “what have you done with the garden?” It is in the voice of the ecologically intelligent Rainer Maria Rilke: “tonight, I want you to take a step out of your house.” It is in the challenge of Rumi who asks: “are you faithfully with us?”

To be ecologically intelligent will demand nothing less than the courage of Oedipus. It is to discover that Sophocles’ timeless myth is far less a story of incest than of our ultimate responsibility as human beings—to be accountable and conscious of our citizenship.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.