Introduction, continued
As a child in New England in the 1950s and 1960s, playing in nature was my raison d'etre. My life revolved around outings of all kinds: canoe trips, mountain climbing, bike adventures and rambles through the woods. I loved the feeling of being all tuckered out from a day well spent in the fresh air.
I was grateful to have an opportunity to pursue my love of nature in high school through an innovative program in environmental science. Each week we would visit various sites along the Ashuelot River in southern New Hampshire to determine the health of the river. Like real scientists, we waded out in the water to measure dissolved oxygen and various pollution indicators with our new Hach Kits. I was hooked on this emerging field of environmental studies and followed my interests throughout college. My love for nature grew deeper as I watched it disappear before my eyes: forest clear-cut, rivers dammed, farms gobbled up. I feared for nature. In my own life, nothing was more central, but most people seemed unmoved by this destruction. They did not see what I saw.
I was frightened that we were destroying our Earth in vain attempts to aggrandize ourselves and I wanted in some way to transmit to others my sense of the preciousness of nature. When I graduated college, I taught high school biology. But the scientific information I tried to impart was not enough to motivate my students to care. Facts and figures got in the way of love and meaning, of genuine connection.
So I abandoned the traditional textbooks and, instead, introduced my students to the great nature writers. I designed a curriculum to teach various ecological and biological concepts using the stories of Annie Dillard, Loren Eiseley, Aldo Leopold. It worked; my students were captivated. The stories were the flesh and blood experiences that could bring the dry scientific bones to life. Stories and personal experiences, I discovered, find their way into the body and the heart, into the places that "information" alone will never go; and they stick. Learning becomes effortless through stories.
While I was teaching, I was on my own spiritual quest. I understood my relationship with nature as a kind of religion and I wanted to see what wisdom I could find from sacred texts. I had left behind the lackluster Judaism of my youth and had experimented with a variety of eastern practices and paths, but thought that I should revisit the Hebrew Bible to see if perhaps I might have missed something in my childhood. Reading the Bible afresh with ecologist's eyes, I was amazed to find the distinguished place that nature holds in the stories, poetry, celebrations, holidays, law, and prayers.
I realized that ecology and the Bible were using different languages to describe the same thing. The Bible and ecology both teach humility, modesty, kindness to all beings, a reverence for life, and a concern for future generations. They both teach that the earth is sacred and mysterious. They both describe an interconnected universe, bound together through invisible threads. They both speak of life flowing in spirals and cycles and hold that all actions-no matter how small-yield consequences.
I began to see churches and synagogues, which hold the Bible sacred, as natural places to raise ecological consciousness. If you consider the fact that the Bible is still the most widely read book in the world, touching the lives of millions of people every day, and that it has served humanity as a guide for living for the past three thousand years, it becomes clear that religious institutions could take a powerful leadership role in environmental repair. If churches and synagogues could teach people to read the Bible with ecological eyes and see spirituality in ecological terms, then we 'd have a built-in infrastructure for expanding environmental awareness and practice. And since religious institutions also strive to teach people to "care," I dreamed that maybe they could inspire their congregants to care for nature.
Part Three >>>
