Green Options

Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.

In my previous posts on sacred places, I have claimed that:
1) Sacred places in our past are crucial for making us appreciate nature and formulate an ecological consciousness. So they are crucial for environmentalism.
2) Sacred places are readily available in our present lives, not isolated to extreme or remote locations. So if we want to save the wilderness/wildness in nature and the wildness in people, then we have to recognize and sanctify the nature in our lives and the nature in ourselves.

Now (for the sake of time), I would like to say a bit about sacred places future.

How can we ensure that our children and those beyond have places that they can hold sacred? Obviously, on a general level we have to continue (increase!) efforts to preserve species, habitats, resources, and overall biological diversity. That goes without saying. I want focus here on how we can ensure that our children will be sensitive to nature–that every future generation can be a Generation W (Wild) filled with lots and lots of little green men and women.

Even as we fall more and more under the tyranny of technology, even as we enter a “brave new world” that is more like the one Huxley envisioned than Shakespeare, there are many possible sacred places for future children. But I think some of the most will be green homes, green schools, and green screens.

Stop Missing the Trees for the Forest!

In an earlier post, I discussed sacred places in our past and “sensory flashbacks”–how our physical senses can open up a wormhole in time and space to take us (mentally speaking) to the places in our past that we cherish. I would like to focus here on the sacred places in our present lives–that is, to discuss the dire need for recognizing the sanctity of our surroundings and why these sacred places (recognized or not) are so crucial.

Anyone who cares enough about nature to become a card-carrying, tree-hugging, thump-stumping “environmentalist”–or even to bother going green at all nowadays–surely recognizes that nature has special sacred places. Places that somehow touch the heart and stir the spirit. Places that somehow capture and convey just what it means to be alive on Earth. Yes so many people recognize that, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “There lives the deepest freshness deep down things.”1

When people think of “sacred places” in nature, though, I fear they most often think that these are also “wild places” exclusively. They believe that nature’s true majesty is found in the places where the human footprints are well buried beneath leaves or worn away by the winds of time. And, they believe, nature is found in the places where it is at its most “extreme,” most overwhelming, and most picturesque, where the sights and sounds and smells and schizophrenia of city life seem like a nightmare vision of some distant planet.

Mark Powell over at blogfish has written a characteristically thoughtful post on the need for getting and appreciating the “wilderness experience.” What he says is really great, especially since he emphasizes that we need “to save the wildness in people” in addition to the wildness in wilderness.

Like surely all environmentalists, I believe that we need to continue protecting the most inspiring, intimidating, and “wild” places in nature. Of course!

But we also need to focus just as much, if not more, on those sacred places whose “wildness” or “naturalness” is not prominent, pristine, or necessarily imperiled. We need to recognize and cherish, to sanctify, all those sacred places in our present lives where nature sneaks in and infuses in us the wild woolly wonder of Nature.

We need to sanctify not only the “extreme” wilderness experiences but also the “boring” nature experiences.”