Friday, June 22, 2018

The Greatest

Environmental protection and restoration are the highest calling a person can have. Ministers administer and kings reign, but environmentalists serve the embodiment of God in all of his earthly creation. Those who would be greatest must be the servants of all creatures; they must be environmentalists.

Caring for the environment benefits both non-humans and humans. When, in the course of restoring nature, dilemmas arise over sacrifices for nature's sake, it could be that society has departed from the way. Remedial actions that seem harsh to humanity may be part of a necessary retreat from something that is even harsher to non-humans. Ultimately, a return to Eden would benefit humans more than any other outcome.

The world is being so overrun by enough clueless, heedless, and competitive people that little Edens will not be enough to save most of us from a mounting onslaught of disasters, insults, and injuries from Gaia's reactions. Universal repentance over diet , transportation, and work (in sum, modern life with all its negative consequences ) would have to occur for the world to avoid such tribulation. If we manage to repent over our unsettledness and downshift to a pastoral lifestyle, then perhaps we could still include a bit of meat in our diets with climate-smart agriculture.

Whatever measures we wind up taking to survive the anthropocene, it seems that cities should become virtual prisons and that only environmentalists and their subjects should be allowed to roam freely and keep property outside those confines. Environmentalists should be as angels keeping watch over the realms outside the domain of heavy human settlement. Suburbia should be returned to nature or sold to farmers. Farmers should all be lovers of the Earth, unlike the deriden rednecks who see the earth as a thing to be conquered.

The numbers of people in cities vs. the countryside are not as important as the personal qualities that suit an individual to be in one or the other domain. Current policy in the U.S. is to drive down the number of small farms through an incentive system that favors industrial (read "redneck") farmers who exploit the impoverished land. Disincentivizing industrial agriculture would be the first step toward reducing farm sizes and populating the countryside with environmentalists. May it be that the new Farm Bill leans that direction (though I see no indication that it will).

It should come as no surprise that environmental restoration is not an especially lucrative occupation, yet one may be deeply enriched by it. Depending on how close one is to the natural world, this connection can offer resources aplenty. With such knowledge, self-reliance is attainable (even self-actualization).

I would be sadly myopic were I to claim the title of Environmentalist. I can barely call myself a Master Gardener and a Master Watershed Steward, but, among those whose efforts directly deal with eco-systems, Environmentalist rightly belongs to the likes of those who restore landscapes and rivers to wild conditions. I merely have experience in making healthy soil, growing plants and fungi, and keeping runoff in check. It's a start, but with my few remaining years, my contribution may fall far short of that of the greatest among men.


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