Kindle Notes & Highlights
Progress? For a fourth-grader, certainly. Compared to the slaughter of 1995, when 11,220 square miles fell, it appeared our planet was on the mend.
Minimal progress
My childhood seemed a golden-hued era for environmental consciousness.
Glamorized environmentalism
I see these efforts, now, reinforce a common American attribute: if you want to champion a cause, slap a price tag on it.
Profit off of anything
But what I think my childhood exposure to environmental awareness did was convince me that the adults were on the job.
Raised thinking adults were acknowledging and addressing the issue when they really did very little (or nothing) and placed the responsibility on next generations
I never realized we learned about saving the rain forest from paper workbooks and plastic tchotchkes.
I trusted that older generations would have our best interests in mind.
Why should my generation be left to clean up the mistakes of our parents and grandparents?
Responsibility passed on
These previous generations might have less at stake in this issue than their offspring.
My cousin was exempted from the lesson and received a stay from advocating conservation.
People think dealing with it is an option
I remember my uncle stating he wouldn’t trade a single lumberjack for all the owls in America.
I did all the work expected of me in fourth grade, assuming what I understood in the classroom mirrored what people believed on the outside. Instead, there was a line in the sand for adults and the environment. Protect it, yes. But what’ll it cost me?
Habit, routine, and comfort often trumped the roles I assumed adults should play as custodians, caretakers, and educators.
Considering the state of things and the even worse-off place this country is in now when it comes to climate issues, it isn’t hard to fathom my disappointment, my early onset cynicism. It’s had a hardening effect on me.
“social traps,
I’ve increasingly felt bamboozled because younger people have been left with a mess that has supposedly been handled. Reality shows it certainly hasn’t been.
we’ve been given a bad bill of goods. The deck is stacked against the young.
Ignorance is what’s placed us in this precarious space.
nature was this place we drove to.
“idle savage” and hostile Mother Nature.
these lines and boundaries have hurt people, and places; and about how in an era of climate change, they might even be threatening our very existence.
As the blade cut deeper, and the tree’s once-flesh-now-dust flew into the air, it passed the 1960s—Nixon, hippies; 1950s—Cold War; 1940s—WWII; 1930s—depressions, dust bowls; and 1920s—prohibition and revivals. Buried deep inside the bole of the tree, the blade approached the growth rings of 1913, the year the first avocado trees were planted, and the year Richard Nixon was born, just down the street from where I stood.
the language used to talk about eucalypts as an ecological menace and the language used to ostracize illegal immigrants as social pariahs is similar. Both discourses make use of epithets—“eucs” or “wetbacks”—to distance and demonize. Both eucalypts and immigrants are often derided for uncontrolled reproduction and the danger they pose to native ways of life, whether that be biological competition for growing space or economic competition for jobs. In a strange twist the eucalypts are anthropomorphized in order to be dehumanized, and illegal immigrants are dehumanized in order to be
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arboreal “ethnic” cleansing in the name of native floral supremacy.
what both the Channel Islands case and the woman in the black Mercedes say to me is just how deeply ingrained the boundaries we draw around the other can become—between culture and culture, and between culture and nature. It is time to rethink these lines and boundaries.
in a world of increasing ecological catastrophe, the solution is not necessarily to ramp up our technological strength over a more aggressive “nature”; nor is it necessarily to bring back pristine ecologies by removing every last scrap of nonnative species.
Climate change doesn’t care whether our parks look the same as they did two hundred years ago, and human compassion does not respect borders between nations.
the artifice of modernity: build it up, make it shine, all will be fine.
“When you are in the shower, check to see if you are really in the shower.” His point is that so often we move through life without being truly present where we are.
Surface conversations on Facebook instead became more personal phone calls, hearing about new places to hike became actual hikes, and our humdrum meals became experiments with international recipes or exploring interesting restaurants in the area.
Lesson: You need not travel to travel. Other ways of being and of being wise are everywhere if you’re primed to receive them.
Growing up, I noticed that progress was tied to making the natural world unnatural but more comfortable.
Instead of riding a bike through a park we now had the option of riding a bike in the safety of a gym and with a TV screen that showed, in real time, a local park in our area. Television shows about the fascinating qualities of animals were steadily replaced with shows either about wrangling those animals or about how we’ve wiped them out and now must save the survivors.
the words “civilization” and “development” have typically been wielded like badges of honor. The terms often meant, at their core, that a collected group of people had created the greatest distance between themselves and the natural world, and that this was an achievement to be praised.
I grew love and buried environmental grief.
What is it to be in touch with thousands on Twitter but not with those whose breath we can feel? How can our connected generation disconnect so we can connect? We’ve built it up, and we’re making it shine, but I’m not sure all will be fine.
as we walk this fine line between unsettling weather anomalies and climate disaster, deniers mount misinformation campaigns against the scientific data pointing irrefutably to anthropogenic global warming.
In the southwestern United States, and regions worldwide, farmer livelihoods, local food security, and community health are integrally linked to precious and limited water resources, and development and climate change threaten these relationships.
This was not the setting of my father’s childhood, but one that more closely resembled my own.
Not only are we disconnected from the natural world, I thought, we are actively destroying it.
The human/nature dichotomy pervades our culture and mediates our daily lives. We are distant from the capitalist production practices that transform nature to meet our needs.
Our physical distance from production processes enables us to ignore the social, political, and economic causes of environmental degradation. But, like it or not, these production practices constitute our relationship with nature and with one another. Nature is not a wilderness “out there.” Nature is embedded in everything we do. Nature is us, and we are nature.
Using wilderness as a measure of our sustainability ignores our dependence on the land.
