Re: Suitable subjects for this [DE] list ...

At 14:17 18/06/99 +1200, David wrote:
>**  Some subjects _I_ will not be writing to the list about, from now
>through at least the 12 days after our winter solstice, include economics,
>income and its taxes, and transport and purchase of 'ecological products'.
>I see such things as having little to do with DE anyway. 

**  Here's some recent thoughts about the relationship between humans and
Nature. By the way, I suspect some (many?) deep ecologists have a romantic
view of Nature, different from mine. That is 'romantic' in the English and
French literature sense (of, was it 18th Century?), probably the same as in
the other arts such as music and painting.

**  The New Zealand I grew up in was "under-populated", so people were used
to lots of Nature around, and at these latitudes, there was an awareness
that there was _lots_ of living being done just outside your doors.

**  When we moved in to this sleepy outer suburb of Auckland on an inlet of
the sea in 1980, there was a similar attitude - let the natural world do
its own thing - , plus a real tolerance for different ways of living, human
as well as in Nature.

**  I decided to let the grass grow un-cut many years ago (after we all
stopped using the 'back lawn'), partly to stop 'pushing back' nature to
outside the mowed area. Recently I was visited by a Council officer (on
behalf of neighbours), asking whether I had any intention of cutting it; I
said no.

**  These new-comers seem to me to have the attitude: 
we _should_ remove/exclude natural/uncontrolled life. 
Natural stuff is messy.

**  I describe this as part of the 'making familiar' process: from deep
forest to woods to pasture to fields to subdivisions to city over-building.
Excluding the unfamiliar and possibly threatening.

**  I know quite a lot about the sea (under and on the surface), and revel
in its uncontrolled-by-humans nature, but I'm sure most people are scared
deep down by the sea's ability to kill you. I love seeing the tide come in
and out, as it was doing even before there was life on Earth. Totally out
of human ability to control.

**  We are small, and must live in that knowledge.

David.
(David MacClement) mailto:d1v9d@bigfoot.com 
   http://members.tripod.com/~davd/index.html
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