Comments on: Ode to the Map http://legion.matinic.us/2009/05/28/ode-the-map/ An amalgamated journal Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:29:25 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: joel hanes http://legion.matinic.us/2009/05/28/ode-the-map/comment-page-1/#comment-1339 joel hanes Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:23:46 +0000 http://legion.matinic.us/?p=642#comment-1339 I'm afraid that easily-understood graphics to explain the threats to the environment will not be enough -- at least in America, the mass of people have forgotten or unlearned that we are dependent on the natural world, and no longer see the a healthy environment as essential. As Mark Slouka put it:<blockquote>... Starting in the industrialized West, we migrated indoors, into mediated environments from which the natural world in all its mystery had been seamlessly removed. We were enough for ourselves. We exchanged "information". We worried about our equity.</blockquote><blockquote> We spent large portions of our lives watching people we didn't know pretending to be living lives that were not their own.</blockquote><blockquote> The high wind tossing the continents of trees, the paper-wasp tending its soft, masticated nest, the blossom trembling in the sun -- these had nothing to do with us. The Other had become merely other -- an afterthought, an irrelevance. If it got in our way, or troubled our oversensitive skin, we killed it. If it didn't work the way we wanted, we shaped it to our needs.</blockquote></blockquote> Wonder? What was there to wonder at ?</blockquote> --- "Eclogue On the rich sin of meddling" Mark Slouka Harper's July 2009 p47 I’m afraid that easily-understood graphics to explain the threats to the environment will not be enough — at least in America, the mass of people have forgotten or unlearned that we are dependent on the natural world, and no longer see the a healthy environment as essential.

As Mark Slouka put it:

… Starting in the industrialized West, we migrated indoors, into mediated environments from which the natural world in all its mystery had been seamlessly removed. We were enough for ourselves. We exchanged “information”. We worried about our equity.

We spent large portions of our lives watching people we didn’t know pretending to be living lives that were not their own.

The high wind tossing the continents of trees, the paper-wasp tending its soft, masticated nest, the blossom trembling in the sun — these had nothing to do with us. The Other had become merely other — an afterthought, an irrelevance. If it got in our way, or troubled our oversensitive skin, we killed it. If it didn’t work the way we wanted, we shaped it to our needs.

Wonder? What was there to wonder at ?
—
“Eclogue On the rich sin of meddling” Mark Slouka
Harper’s July 2009 p47

]]>