For Earth
Day, April 22, any year
Greetings:
A half a century ago, Walt
Kelly, through his cartoon character Pogo, said "We have
met the enemy and he is us."
But what part of us is the
enemy and how do we deal with that misled part of us?
Planet
Earth and its people continue to face this profound problem today,
along with its detrimental effects. Its solution eludes us simply
because it threatens, and thereby shuts down, the part of us
that can understand the problem and provide the solution.
This Proclamation is to announce
that the problem has been identified and solution to it has been found. We must immediately
apply it for studies by renowned scientists show that 55 years after
Fairfield Osborne alerted us to our fate in the best seller Our Plundered Planet:
-levels of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere have jumped abruptly
-marine "dead zones"
are on the increase
-mental illness* ranks second in the burden of disease in market
economies
Neither natural systems nor
nature-connected societies/cultures produce these and many
similar problemsmany
similar problems. We produce them.
Our thinking is our destiny.
We must learn to genuinely connect it with natural systems and
their renewing powers so that we, as part of the global life
community can reduce these problems we cause. Over a half a billion
people now have the internet and an internet-based tool
that enables us to accomplish this is readily available.
WHEREAS:
You and I and
all people are part of nature and vice-versa. (The flow of nature's
water, air, minerals and vital energy
through us as all of our living planet demonstrates this. We
are a seamless continuum of natural systems and their ability
to sustain wellness.)
There is no
known substitute for nature, the real thing, with its eons of
growth and development of its natural systems. These systems
contain nature's self-organizing, regenerative, self-perpetuating
powers. They produce the perfection of nature's optimums of life,
cooperation, renewal and diversity in balance. They accomplish
this wellness without producing garbage such as pollution, abusiveness
and environmental deterioration. They don't produce our excessive
stress, crime and mental disorders.
Substitutes
for nature, including abstract thoughts, books or images of nature,
omit much of nature's restorative power to sustain the purity,
equilibrium and beauty of natural systems in and around us.
Because substitutes
for nature are not the real thing, their imperfections produce
the detrimental side effects that deteriorate natural systems
in people and places
To be part
of any system both our consciousness and thinking have to be
in communication with and guided by the system. As part of nature,
we inherit the ability to communicate with nature and it with
us. When we don't communicate and respond, we grow in uncontrolled
ways, similar to cancers.
AND WHEREAS:
We don't expect a natural born
rabbit or other organism to function normally if we cut it in
half or confine it to a closet.
Our ability to think and feel
is part of nature and produces our destiny.
It is normal in our nature-separated
lives for our natural abilities to be disconnected from nature
over 99% of the time. We learn to spend over 95% of our
time indoors, closeted from authentic nature. This extreme
disconnection from including natural system's messages in our
thinking causes nature and its beneficial attributes to disappear
from our conscience. Our relationships with ourselves, each other
and the environment suffer.
Like a disconnected rabbit,
the separation of our mentality from our restorative origins
in nature deteriorates our wellness and ability to make sense
of our lives.
The loss of nature's restorative
spirit and wholeness misguides our thinking and senses. Like
opening a destructive floodgate, without the awareness and the
use of nature's everpresent guidance, the disconnected way we
think produces our great troubles along with progress and its
discontents.
Our disconnection leaves us
believing that our problems and nature's absence are normal for
humanity, for we find them everywhere we are.
We have lost contact with the consciousness and self-correcting powers of nature's grace that
we need to sustain wellness in ourselves and the environment.
It can be regained.
THEREFORE BE IT KNOWN BY ALL
THAT:
Because our nature-disconnected
mentality is the part of us that causes many problems, we must
invoke and use readily available organic activities, education
and psychologies that help our thinking re-connect with nature.
This enables us to reduce our dysfunctions and prejudice against nature while improving the
wellness of natural systems in ourselves and the environment.
Nature-reconnected ideas, activities
and creativity help us to consciously bring nature's restorative
powers back into our thinking, psyche and spirit.
Nature-reconnecting activities
help us transform our detrimental bonding to nature substitutes
into constructive relationships with authentic natural systems
inside and around us.
Today's increases in global
warming, oceanic dead zones and mental disorders demonstrate
that the nature-detached environmental and psychological mentality
we have used for the past century is not able to do the job we
need to do now.
Because we are part of nature,
nature itself has the power to help us modify our harmful conditioned
bonds to our nature-conquering, prejudices, addictions and their
questionable rewards. This is because we inherit from nature
our ability to build bonds. The natural attraction bonding ability of all elements
in nature is what produces the unified, yet diverse materials,
relationships and energies of the natural world.
Bonding to the
whole of nature through any local natural area helps us produce
balance.
Without enlisting nature's
help to transform our detrimental bonds into constructive relationships,
it may not be possible for us to produce the social and environmental
wellness we need, the health that supports all of life on Earth
and Earth's life as well. It is our mentality's sterile isolation
from this natural process that underlies our problems.
The separation of our thinking
from nature is rectifiable via thinking that chooses to use tools
that genuinely reconnect our mind to nature. To knowingly omit psychologically based nature
connecting activities in self-help, education, therapeutic,
environmental or social programs is like trying to build a life
boat without the instructions as to how to do it and with one
hand tied behind our back. Even Pogo might agree that the
thinking of those of us who omit these activities is the point
source problem we are trying to solve, the "us" who
is the enemy.
"It is difficult to get
people to understand something when their salary depends upon
them not understanding it."
............-Upton Sinclair
CONCLUSIONS:
Our great challenge is to overcome
our nature-disconnected conditioning. It tells us, falsely, that
we cannot meaninglfully connect our psyche to the beneficial
ways of natural systems, that we cannot learn, grow and heal
through that ecologically sound union, that we can't form communities
that through this process co-create with nature. This conditioning
is dangerous and criminal because the tools to make this connection
are readily available.
It is urgent for us to use
nature-connected thinking tools and their ability to help us
restore ourselves, our relationships and
our planet. To this end, in honor of Mother Earth, Project
NatureConnect, on its Earth Day website,
makes these methods and materials available.
For Peace on Earth through
Peace With Earth,
Michael J. Cohen
Director, Project NatureConnect
NOTE: This proclamation has
been sent by e-mail and certified postal mail to appropriate
organizations. Encourage your organization to utilize the easily
obtained basics of Organic Psychology
and Natural System Thinking. If they don't, you and Earth can
benefit by you learning them on your own
and helping others learn them, too.