One Place, Understood

I am pleased to be able to contribute to the fine work of Richard Louv and the Child and Nature Network.

I share my recent and on-going ruminations about the urgent need to reconcile our broken bonds to nature and to place. From that guest post essay,  The Wisdom of One Place: Why We Need to Know Where We Are, I’ve pulled this excerpt:

To restore wholeness to the brokenness we’ve inflicted on the planet’s living systems, we need go no further than that one place just beyond our doors–to sense and know that accessible fragment of the whole of nature that we can see, taste, hear, smell and wrap our heads and hearts around in our own nearby terrain.

As we succeed with that reintegration of human lives with nature, we also will grow to appreciate the places where our stories unfold, to reclaim sense of place–an identity with the where of our lives in all its uniqueness of topography and history and culture. We become placed persons even as we become a renatured people.

From this reintegration with nature and place may evolve eco-empathy: an organic personal-ecological ethic that puts each of us back into the web of right relationships, back not only into local nature but into the intended natural order as stewards with a seven-generation commitment to the well-being of people and planet.

If you want to be a “field guide” for your students, children, grand children or other young people who might follow you outdoors, the Child and Nature Network has many great resources.

Related articles

• Richard Louv’s Nature-Deficit Disorder
• But There is Hope
• The Healing Powers of Nature: Exploring the Unseen
• Creating a Sense of Place