We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. -Wendell Berry, farmer and author (b. 1934)
Though Berry’s quote limits planetary concern to “our land,” the poignancy of his statement about Western Civilization’s misplaced patriotic priorities trumping any concern for biological symbiosis with nature, from which we arise and on which our healthy life depends, is little diminished.
Understanding is a process of letting the unknown draw
one’s instinctive curiosity into deeper consideration of the nature of an
entity and its relationhip to the natural universe of which it is a part.
Overstanding is the process Western Civilization bases on
the premise that all of nature is in thrall to a “stewardship” exclusively granted
to mankind by an external monolithic creator. That such a premise is considered
a conclusive fact accounts for the energy man devotes to exploiting the
environment for gains that only profits one within a machine held together by
faith in wishful thinking. This faith pervades even the supposedly more secular activities of science limiting any remedy for our obvious abuse to keeping the economy afloat no matter how much land must accommodate the new water from melted ice caps and glaciers.
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