Seeding Eco-Solutions

 

Wild ReSolve.

After years of thought and hope, a lot of circles and circling, and a lot of despair over the changes to our habitat I see taking place ever day — you know the habitat we depend on for life? That one — I finally used my breath to blow the seeds of hope and intent into the wind. I’m starting to create the project I call Wild ReSolve.

It is at the moment living on Patreon (link).

Over the course of the next weeks the project will become a virtual space in the “world wide web” where we can connect. It will feature solutions journalism, updates of all the stories I’ve covered or assigned thru my career as an environmental writer and journalist, but also offer things I’ve always wanted to include: multi-media projects, mini-docs, a podcast of interviews with those who have inspired or informed or warned us for decades about the damage we are doing to the only Home we have here on Earth. And most importantly it will be a cultural center for micro-communities and individuals to gather to find information and ideas that are solutions, solutions, solutions to the habitat destruction and climate changes our human lifestyle fuels. It will be a cultural sphere of hope for our wild and beautiful Earthly habitat.

Why “Wild” and why “ReSolve” you can find at the link above.

Here is my heart: I so love this Eden we live in and share as life itself. We are a part of this natural world; it is our only home as I’ve written previously. I am saddened to the point of despair as I see wildlife lose habitat, or fertile lands dry up with drought, soil destruction, and for marine animals to strangle in plastic or for skies to fill with smoke from out-of control-wildfires driven by increasing temperatures due to our fossil fuel use. I even feel concern as I notice the micro-biome of the soil in my little garden bake in temperatures and heat-intense sun previously unexperienced, all due to climate warming too fast for adaptation.

We humans, every one of us, are driving the change and we are driving too fast.

I want to yell “Do Something!” as I have throughout my long career in writing about environment, but at this point in my age, and in having recently survived yet another year of unexpected illness (this time I’m privileged—lucky? fortunate? yes to all 3—to have survived this novel virus Nature has thrown at us), I feel it is me I am yelling at, not just into the silent void.

So, lets talk about and cheer on rewilding projects. Let’s learn how to foster them in our own communities.

Let’s learn how to connect regional habitats so our fellow wild-living animals have a change to adapt or move to places they can survive in this speeding climate change.

Let’s learn what communities in parts of Africa are doing to use the overflowing ever-present availability of plastic trash to create fuels for lights or cooking. Let’s learn to do it in our own backyard because our communities too too are covered in plastic single-use rubbish.

Let’s also learn how to support those who save, nurture and release orphan elephants to protected areas, work with local villages to foster mutual care for them, and how to support those who die in the service of of protecting the few mountain gorilla left in the national parks of shrinking forests of central Africa.

Let’s learn how indigenous and first nations might have better ideas to steward the land back to health, and how we too can give it a try in our own backyard.

And let’s learn why we need to quit talking about our habitat as if it’s an abstract economic asset. Rather we need to use language that connects us, living-thing to living thing, rather than measuring the value of a place merely by its use or monetary value.

Let’s become inspired rather than overwhelmed. Let’s connect and feel resolve that we can create sweeping change by doing so.

If we all “do something” we will soon find we have assembled a core power of healing action for the only Home, our Earth habitat, sustaining us and life itself. And maybe we will successfully create a culture of care rather than of destruction. With little actions do we express our ever growing love for life itself, in all its amazing beauty.

I hope you love this wild earth, our Eden, too, and will help me to seed a new project!

 

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Infinite Time

 

In so many ways, loss shows us what is precious, while love teaches us who we are.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler, Life Lessons

 

If I were to count the clouds in my photograph above, there would be one for every loss and love I’ve let go of since I wrote my last post on Earth: Sacred/Possession.

Two, no three, cats if I count the stray who briefly brought such joy to my home tho I didn’t know she had come here to pass away in a warm bed on a January night. My beloved remaining dog of my littermate set, at the ancient age of 16 even tho her brother had left us at the good age of 13. I was humbled by her love and her lessons to me. Two parents, divorced over 40 years but passed away within a few months of each other, as if they were still in a race to be first to the best of the finish line. Another dear friend, who healed my broken heart with such care, decided at age 94 he’d had enough and was gone in a poof of letting go in a matter of just a few days. A hope for a new life abroad, two daughters not only through undergraduate education but now nearly finished second masters in vocal performance, the loss of my being an anchor in their lives and now a visitor. A family cabin where I learned to love Nature and wildness and built alters of flowers and rocks to give thanks for the beauty, tho I was only 6 or 7 or 8. It just seemed natural to do that in the setting sun of what seemed huge mountain, but as I drove there daily to care for a mother who barely recognized me through her illness, it was just a small field, while she herself was “losing her mind” as she oft marveled. Yes she was, till she had returned to childhood and then left altogether. The list goes on. And on.

Sooo much leaving.

All this to badly explain such a gap in my writing about Earth whether sacred or possession.

But I realize in doing so finally that what we’ve lost, too, of our Earth habitat in 6 years is truly stunning.

Whether through hurricanes with new measures they are so large, or tornadoes that are  beyond what was previously know, heat that sears us and reaches 135 degrees with alarming regularity, vast clearings of Amazonian forest, or ice caps that seemed they could never disappear, or a lethal virus that is invisible in our air, unseen but Lordy, what an illness —and too often death — it brings to us, these are all signs we’re losing our “temperate” home. And quickly it feels.

We’ve lost our sense of safety.

We’ve lost our sense of belonging perhaps.

And I don’t think it’s just me that is in a state of grief for these things we’ve lost or know we are losing as we hope not to see or feel what our survival instinct alerts us to. For in the loss of a “temperate” nature, we also lose our dreams. Some of us lose our dreams of a cabin on a creek. Our children are losing their dreams of a hospitable quality of life as they experienced the weather. For all of us we are losing a future as we envisioned it.

I’ve been learning a lot about grief these years obviously. It cascades and overwhelms or it pokes at odd times followed by a deep breath and a look at a blue sky. It darkens days and lights up nights with the starbursts of tossing and not often enough the tears to wash it away. Because there is no away. There is only the awareness of what feels lost. And time feels infinite in these moments of realizing what is precious but is no more. For we are bound still in love with it.

Sooo in love.

Tonight there were cries outside. A young hawk has been gracing this urban racetrack where I live, stopping briefly in my trees the past few sunsets. These were cries of working to live. A fledger flying and figuring out the hows of life. A few hours later I was brought out into the night by chrrrs — very small owls, perhaps three of them — in the same trees, calling to each other. I had no idea where their mother was but obviously near by and they seeming to reassure each other of nearness in the adventure of this night with their cries.

Crying is not always a bad thing, I’m reminded. It is a sound of being alive.

Nature so wants to live.

The news notes regarding increases in wildlife seeming to live better when we humans took to our hiding places inside these past few months made clear to me what possession really means:

Our temperate world is to be shared and we are too often oblivious of the life getting out of our way. It has no place, we feel, in “our landscape”. Yet what other habitat is there for all the “others” we identify as not being our relations in stardust and life force?

With all the losses I see and feel, experience and intuit, I’m learning very slowly, it truly is only love that remains.

With the grief comes the love, like rain on a hot day, or stars poking out at night.

With losses comes the recognition of what we find precious.

May we see how precious this earth is, and in our grief may we find ways to love it into better sustaining all the lives and places and time(s) we love.

 

*Please see www.edmontaigne-author.com for information on my new book on learning to communicate from my dogs: “Training Two: Learning the Language of Love …”. There’s a blog there too. It’s also available on Amazon: Training Two: Learning the Language of Love from Two Dogs Who Share One Brain

 

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