Recommended Reading from EmergenceMagazine: The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Invisibility of Nature that prompted this response and comments this lovely Friday morning. Might be among the last "pleasant" days we have for a while. Promise me you'll go outside and...just be there.
It was apparent to me, young tree-hugger, teacher and naturalist in the mid-70s, that all those hippies (who were my students then) who thought it was time they got themselves back to the garden probably had not spent much time in one themselves, but rightly intuited that earth and trees and wildness represented their true place and their healthiest future in the world.
There are those who have put down those flower-children as silly idealists. But they were sincere in their hopes, and earnest in their commitment to reclaim the next generation so that it would no longer be separated from the living world by the lure of affluence and consumption, success measured by profit and efficiency on the climb up the ladder of success.
And yet, there was a falling away from those agrarian simple-life aspirations a decade after the first Earth Day and since. For a lot of reasons, the centers of human culture thereafter were increasingly cast in concrete and siloed around academic, commerce and tech networks and not in the bush where the wild things lived.
Of all the unlikely causes to reverse those trends, it has taken the pandemic of 2020 to make us wake up and smell the roses. It has been, after all, "the first time all eight billion people on the planet have had the same thing happen to them at the same time.” And for very many, once at a distance from the natural world, they are seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling a connection with nature--and finding it both urgently needed and remarkably rewarding.
The sudden and global break with business as usual is being called the "anthropause" in which fouled rivers lately reveal fish in clear water; skies obscuring the distant mountains for decades becoming clear in a matter of two weeks; and wildlife coming out from hiding and into back yards and urban parks once again.
"You saw anew nature's fantastic power and resilience. You saw the wonder of it. And let me say, you also saw the need for its benefits to be available to everyone, and for the issue of equitable access to nature to rise up the political agenda... “
Here in Southwest Virginia, we are fortunate to live close to the land all along. Floyd County is a farming community by history. It has been generously enculturated by some of those 70's back-to-the-landers among us who, along with their children, still grow gardens and tend orchards and make music and craft art and hug trees.
So given this life from the soil here, the shock of the anthropause has been somewhat less of a trauma for many of us than for the city and suburban folk who have had to work harder to reconnect with nature. But it is happening, even there. And one can hope that the effect of this reunion will outlive whatever "recovery" society makes from Covid-19. We need NOT return to BAU (Business As Usual.)
Paradoxically, Nature Deficit Disorder may have found its cure in the form of a Planetary Pathogen. This is what it took to take us away from our hypnotic screens and shopping malls, board meetings and commutes, squirrel-cage exercise machines and Netflix binges and bring us back to Earth itself.
That was a hopeful, encouraging post.