Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
see the planes banking towards them in preparation for landing. The roaring and the
shaking as the planes flew over them were intense and deeply stressful. My friends had
nowhere else to go, so in the end they decided to surrender and slowly they learnt how to
love the loud noises, the shaking, and the planes themselves. As they watched the planes
coming in they would lovingly think of the wonderful places where a given plane might
have come from—perhaps the coral-studded Caribbean, or the snow-covered Alps, or
the sun-soaked Mediterranean. In the end, they transformed their negative feelings about
their place into a sense of connection with the whole of life. Admittedly, this is a very
high level of practice, which most of us would almost certainly be incapable of, but it
shows what is possible.
We need to find a place we find beautiful: perhaps a park or a small garden if we
live in the city, or a wood or the seashore if we are lucky enough to live in the country.
Once we have found our place, we need to spend time in its silence, getting to know it
intimately with our intuition and feeling, whilst using our rational mind to find out about
its geology, botany and zoology, and about how humans have interacted with it over the
years. We need to give ourselves time to experience the
soul
of the place, and through
it the soul of the world, the
anima mundi
. A next step is to extend our love of place
outwards to our local bioregion, which is, according to the Convention on Biological
Diversity, “a territory defined by a combination of biological, social, and geographic cri-
teria, rather than geopolitical considerations; generally, a system of related, interconnec-
ted ecosystems”. In other words, your local watershed, your local valley, or your local
tract of wild bush, jungle or desert, should you be lucky enough to live in such a glori-
ous place. Through love of place we deepen our love of Gaia.
Love of place becomes a political act when we share it with other people. It nourishes
a sense of the local human community embedded in the air, soil, water and more-than-
human beings of the immediate surroundings; it nourishes local economies, and the
growing of local organic food; it nourishes the raising of children in the love of place;
and it nourishes art, music, literature and science, all based on what is local. In these
ways, love of place is the ultimate act of non-violent resistance to the major force that
is destroying the animate Earth that we evolved into. And what is this destructive force?
Two words sum it up: Economic Growth.
The Trouble with Growth
Let me make it clear that by 'economic growth', I here mean growth in the throughput
of physical matter into and out of the economy, not growth of non-material things such
as music, ideas, information and so on, as long as the growth of these things in no way
