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Several of my favourite ecology teachers encourage their students to explore the origins of the word ecology itself, pointing to its two Greek roots oikos and logos. Oikos translates literally as home or household, and logos as knowledge or understanding. Ecology's original meaning, they remind us, is less about observing our surroundings – as the word "environment" implies – but of coming to know the home in which we dwell.
Natural scientists have long been studying and writing about this richly complex and evolving household of life, and yet we see now that information alone is not enough to create the conditions for living honourably here. Though flooded with data on increasingly minute and isolated aspects of our world, we struggle as a culture to perceive the wholeness, integrity and intrinsic value of the dynamic living systems we are woven from. The ecological and social crises we see and experience in the world today are reflections of this essential disconnect. To access meaningful understanding - the kind that fosters a sense of belonging, of wonder and of kinship - we require new ways of seeing. In my experiential classes and workshops I aspire to foster these new ways of seeing by combining the rigour and discipline of scientific observation with practices to develop our natural capacity for insight and empathy. This approach can give rise to transformative experiences of learning that expand our perceptions of self, and slowly but surely begin to change the way we live and work in the world. |
Through the wider Self every living being is intimately connected, and from this intimacy flows the capacity of identification and, as a natural consequence, the practice of non-violence. No moralizing is needed, just as we don't need morals to make us breathe. |
