Later in the survey, they were asked to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land. The median response was 'none.'
How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment? Perhaps the negative examples they see every day- brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl- truncated their ability to see some good between humans and the earth...when we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?
We are a people of stories. We need those stories to guide is in who we are. For a very long time, the human story has been one of dominance over nature. It has been a story of our species using the planet to our own end. We are separate. Our beliefs have taken us out of nature and put us above it; we are more important. Our stories tell us that the planet is there to provide for us, indefinitely. We are taught that we are resourceful and intelligent, and that science and ingenuity will always find a way for survival. Our stories are lies, or at the very least, incomplete.
What we need now are stories that reflect the true nature of life on Earth. Resources are finite. There is a limit to what we can take. There is a limit to how much of our waste the planet can absorb. There is a limit to what we can engineer and manipulate. There are fundamental basics that are required for life on earth and we are playing with and destroying these at an alarming rate. Clean water, fertile soil, breathable air, thriving oceans and an atmosphere that is conducive to human life. Without these, our species does not survive. Our stories do not tell us this. Our stories do not include lessons of how to sustain and nurture these fundamentals for life.
We need new stories.
If our students can not even imagine a world where we have a positive impact on the planet, how can we hope to survive on the planet? Are we destined to be a plague on the earth? Right now, we are parasites sucking the life out of the very planet we rely on for survival. How do we change our relationship from parasitic to symbiotic? How do we heal our relationship with the planet?
We change our story. We have to. We no longer have a choice.
But how do we change it and what do we change it to?
