Philosophy is where we go to understand what a good life is. It literally means love of wisdom (philo & sophia).
Wisdom is the moral intelligence that lets us make wise or unwise decisions on the playing field of raw survival. It helps us to survive; stockbrokers, Ephesians have their wisdoms, and all to the purpose of living a good life.
Courses like Land and Liberation bring cultivates
also elevates us What stockbrokers call wisdom Ephesians would not. call sin, but is not the same as what Christians or "Wisdom" for stockbrokers i Christians word that conjures image of elders counseling the young, teaching them the tools come to mind? The make decisions that affect ourselves and others we call upon wisdom. Wisdom is moral, and it is the awareness that we fit into a larger pattern. The wise person--the lover of wisdom--knows how to live a good life.
The reason Biocitizen teaches environmental philosophy instead of regular philosophy has everything to do with our moment in history. Like no other generation before us, we are burdened with the task of reducing our negative impacts upon the environment. I am in favor of efforts by our government, universities and corporations to re-design inefficient technologies as a way of reducing our impacts, but I don't believe that doing things like driving electric cars is going to create a sustainable economy. What worries me is that devoting too many precious resources to finding technologic fixes to the problems caused by technology might be a waste, when the most important fix of all is the one that realigns our intelligence of what and who we are, and how we fit into environment.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Friday, December 1, 2006
Why Biocitizen?
To bring you to places like this, the Pia, Patagonian Chile:
Leaning back to breathe in the cold blown from great walls of ice cracking in chromium light. The river banks are quicksand, the river a bottomless hurl of glacial milk, chin dribble of fresh chewed mountain.
There's a wilderness outside and inside, a place that no machine or word or idea can access. Even if you've never been in the wilderness, you've felt it when the tv says the hurricane, tornado or blizzard is on its way. You've felt it when the plane hits too much turbulence. You've felt it when your dreams tumbled off during a catnap and you relived a moment in your life that somehow changed everything. You've felt it in the crush you had or are having.
Wilderness, like happiness, is a feeling. It is the feeling of being free, because you've entered a place where anything could happen, of your self stretched out as far as your perception can take you, over peaks and valleys, permanent and strong. You feel at once tiny and inconsequential yet magnified by allegiance with the biome and elements. The feeling of wilderness, of being small and limited, inspires respect for life: the life of the biosphere en masse, and the single life we are living. From this feeling of miracle comes the ethic of conservation, of keeping living
The reason it is important to leave the world behind from time to time and enter the woods and the wilderness, is that a part of your self that is not called upon elsewhere awakens there. It your wild side, from the side of your family that goes back to the earliest hunter and gatherers. We are creatures whose bodies have taken shape over billions of year; and, as a species, have lived the superhighway strip mall way of life for about fifty years. Industrial civilization has flourished for only three hundred years, but in that short amount of geological time the world as we know it has been constructed. The construction of the industrial world required, and continues to require, the wholesale destruction of nature and wilderness, but there are obvious signs that
Our sensory and motor abilities are unexercised in the world we drive around in. But when we train and use these abilities, a beautiful world appears of watersheds and biomes, and a self that recognizes its biotic connection to
Biocitizen exists to walk them both.
Leaning back to breathe in the cold blown from great walls of ice cracking in chromium light. The river banks are quicksand, the river a bottomless hurl of glacial milk, chin dribble of fresh chewed mountain.
There's a wilderness outside and inside, a place that no machine or word or idea can access. Even if you've never been in the wilderness, you've felt it when the tv says the hurricane, tornado or blizzard is on its way. You've felt it when the plane hits too much turbulence. You've felt it when your dreams tumbled off during a catnap and you relived a moment in your life that somehow changed everything. You've felt it in the crush you had or are having.
Wilderness, like happiness, is a feeling. It is the feeling of being free, because you've entered a place where anything could happen, of your self stretched out as far as your perception can take you, over peaks and valleys, permanent and strong. You feel at once tiny and inconsequential yet magnified by allegiance with the biome and elements. The feeling of wilderness, of being small and limited, inspires respect for life: the life of the biosphere en masse, and the single life we are living. From this feeling of miracle comes the ethic of conservation, of keeping living
The reason it is important to leave the world behind from time to time and enter the woods and the wilderness, is that a part of your self that is not called upon elsewhere awakens there. It your wild side, from the side of your family that goes back to the earliest hunter and gatherers. We are creatures whose bodies have taken shape over billions of year; and, as a species, have lived the superhighway strip mall way of life for about fifty years. Industrial civilization has flourished for only three hundred years, but in that short amount of geological time the world as we know it has been constructed. The construction of the industrial world required, and continues to require, the wholesale destruction of nature and wilderness, but there are obvious signs that
Our sensory and motor abilities are unexercised in the world we drive around in. But when we train and use these abilities, a beautiful world appears of watersheds and biomes, and a self that recognizes its biotic connection to
Biocitizen exists to walk them both.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)