Eco-Ethics

I really enjoyed the chapter Sitting in a Circle, especially how it reflected on the multiple uses of plants for humans' needs in terms of plants' needs and adaptations, as well as the reflections of what is owed in reciprocity and how gratitude might be more than mental. Storage, structure, and defensive self-soothing and sustaining mechanisms all come into view in the translation from cattails' adaptive tools to our resonant uses. The "spongy, air-filled tissue" in the leaves that keeps the nutrients from dissolving into the bodies of water they grow in translates to seasonally aware structures that expand with water and shrink in the sun. The gel which the plant uses as "a defense against microbes and to keep the leaf bases moist when water levels drop." is a natural antiseptic and seems similar to aloe vera in soothing and treating sunburns or itchy bug-bites, where "the cure grows near to the cause." as "gathering cattails is guarante...

I wanted to focus on breath and reciprocity for my last environmental reflection, so I chose to do a variation of a breath-visualization meditation I originally learned in high school but have run into a couple times since then. The original focuses on feeling your breath go in and through your body, usually downward area by area, and the version I prefer starts with that process of feeling the energy be produced and move through to the edges of one's body, then moves outward to visualizing the incoming sources of one's breath, and also visualizing one's own breath as almost a dispersive speech bubble reintegrating with the received wind.  The main thing I noticed going inward was the way a body supports itself, I could feel my shoulders and elbows passively working to hold my arms and forearms, and my legs and waist bearing the weight and holding by back and torso in place. As I move outward, I try to visualize the wind moving close to the ground and being held near it, wh...

 I've always enjoyed watching clouds, so it seemed like a fitting space for reflection. My family was a road-trip family, so once the conversation had tapered off and we retreated to our MP3s, DSs, or phones, I would always end up watching the clouds for some time, either seeing a random array of objects and beings, or trying to create some narrative or scene for the collection to come together. It's very different, watching clouds while stationary, not moving with or against them.  Today, one cloud kept drawing my attention as it transformed with each return and minor shift. It started off as an amorphous blob; the closest thing I could picture it as was either a fist or some type of putty you'd see a kid playing with. I looked briefly at a smaller bird-shaped cloud that looked like something you might see on a coin or a crest, and returning to the blob, it looked almost like a pig you'd see in a cartoon roast, the front having rounded off in snout-like fashion and a s...

     One example I remember, which seems to have grown even more complicated since I learned about it, and which embodies the complex relationship between tribal practices and modern structures, comes from the Tohono O'odham Nation which spans southern Arizona and parts of northern Mexico dealing with the border wall. Since the initial plans of the border wall there seems to have been a minor agreement to help protect ecological life through a slightly less imposing wall than other parts of the border, looking more like a wooden fence with some barbed wire & reinforced structure in some spots, but still stops cars from passing the internal border, making movement within the Nation's land even more difficult with CBP checkpoints, officers roaming generally, and the often gendered harassment from each. The complexity stems from the cooperation with border patrol, which while the Nation tries to help guide asylum seekers to proper checkpoints, there is still a securitizi...

    I started my reflection looking at one of the small trees behind French house, trying to visualize it breathing, with the wind, with its cycles, and then tried to visualize the connections it had with the field I was sitting on, to feel the nutrients in the dirt and taste the air. I'm convinced we are trained to limit our senses, we're afraid to admit the full force and implications of haptic energies, of buzzing and humming, of tics and ticks. The head of the tree is shaped like a drop of rain or dew, it seems to move in unison when it receives the wind, each branch individuated then brought back into the whole, a synecdoche of form & content that pierces any attempt to partition its self-evident meaning. What would a tree feel, what would it think, what would it desire? Many humans desire a tree-like stillness and near-stoic affect, but we speak too much, we buy too much, it almost seems we are too much for nature to handle or care for. It whispers to the grass that ...

      Thinking Like a Mountain was my first introduction to Leopold, and the essay has always held a lot of weight for me, in the territoriality of the call & shifts even in its absence, the mountain and the wolf's hidden knowing, and of course, Leopold's consistent poetic ability to reflect on his relation to his surroundings. It's interesting how he frames the relationship between the mountain and the wolf, that the wolf protects the mountain by keeping the herd from overrunning it. Leopold consistently makes note of how humans attempt to 'design' nature in different ways through what seem like small interjections that tend to have system-wide repercussions, in this example unnecessarily killing a wolf family to help create 'hunters' paradise,' and realizing just by looking in the eyes of the mother that he has in some ways ripped the wolves out of a sacred relationships and dialogue with the world, a larger design that is often self-correcting in ...