Strangers in our own home

"Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap, lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.—Alan Watts"


By now you have probably seen James Cameron's film Avatar. If not, you might be so sick of hearing about it that you plan to boycott it on principle. Either way you are aware of the enormously popular film and its basic premise: the sacred interconnectedness of all living beings. Here's a rhetorical question: when was the last time this topic was covered on the evening news?

This thought haunted me today as we paddled the Tuolumne River through West Modesto. Why does it take computer-generated imagery at a cost of over 200 million federal reserve notes to peak our interest in our connection to nature? More importantly, why have we banished this topic to the realm of fantasy? This is a frightening situation, and it goes a long way toward explaining our complacency in the face of massive desecration of the natural world.

The Tuolumne River makes its rounds in the news, but it typically does so in the form of a commodity. Just as forests are measured by the number of board feet that they can render, the T tends to be--with startling ease--reduced to quantitative assessments of its worth as a source of irrigation water and hydroelectricity. To commodify this river system in such a fashion is to completely ignore the interests of the nonhuman stakeholders in its functioning. Perhaps that sentence looked a little bit strange, and I confess that I initially balked at the word choice. NONHUMAN STAKEHOLDERS? They do indeed exist, and though they cannot speak English or wear a tie to a board meeting, they have every bit as much of a right to live in this watershed as we do. And though we tend to ignore it on a day to day basis, it is a fact that our fate is intertwined with the fate of our fellow residents.

Here in the Tuolumne River watershed, and all over the planet for that matter, we are in dire need of a re-inhabitation of the land. At the moment, our society is engaged in an alien occupation of its natural environs; we are truly strangers in our own home. The idea that this process can continue unabated is dangerous and delusional. We must engage the topic of our vital spiritual connection to nature in a serious fashion, rather than deride the notion or interact with it solely on the level of entertainment.