How do we create and maintain ecological abundance?
Tomorrow is Winter Solstice – a time of maximum darkness for those of us in Earth’s northern hemisphere.
In the days that follow, light grows and darkness declines.
The richness of life – species, numbers, relationships – is in current massive decline.
Can we reverse this?
How? What practices, processes, ideas, tools of thought may help us to do so?
Some have suggested we face an extinction cliff – a possible 6th mass extinction of the kinds of life.
We might also envision our near future as a bottleneck rather than cliff.
A bottleneck we may pass through – and on the other side of which we hope to see an ecological resurgence.
I like the image from Revive & Restore because it shows such a bottleneck. (And noting that genetic design is only one potential element of the work to attain this).
For the Children, a poem by Gary Snyder, conjures a similar image. After a steep climb, he says, everything going up and up as we all go down, we may find pastures where we can meet in peace.
To get there –
stay together,
learn the flowers…
…In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
(From Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974), © Gary Snyder.)