bolg post #4--closing the gap...more questions than answers

I found myself giving some thought to the question that Linda posed to the class last week: “What is the most serious and immediate [environmental] crisis?” What is critical, and what is fixable? Mainly I wondered how it is even possible for the average person to assess whether human alienation from nature is a more serious issue than desertification, global warming, acid rain, environmental pesticides, or any of the other environmental crises that humans have created? How did we get here, and where are we going? Is it them, or is it us? What do we know, and how can we use this knowledge?

The environmental issues facing humans are so complex and so completely relative to the micro-level realities of place, time, politics, and economics for every individual on the planet that I cannot truly comprehend the existence of a villager in a third-world country, of a farmer in my own state, or even the life of someone who lives less than a mile away from me, even though I have spent time in all of these places. Those who are educated and informed know this quandary. Leopold asserts, “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” Leopold writes, “is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen” (197).

Like the lens through which Leopold, Dillard, and Lopez view nature and wilderness, the lens that we view everything through focuses sharply when we are close up and surrounded by unfamiliar environments that we place ourselves in either through travel or inquiry. It is when we have the opportunity to view a place up close and first-hand that our perceptions evolve, perhaps enough to connect us with the real, living version of life—as opposed to life as we imagine it from the vantage point of insular existence from our homes and classrooms.

Education, Leopold feels, keeps us at a far remove from understanding relationships: “This science of relationships is called ecology, but what we call it matters nothing. The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism?...If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?” (210).