Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [30]
Love the Things We Love
LARRY SANTOYO
To prepare for the future, we can love the present!
Acting and reacting from a place of fear of the future will only lead to the worst of our collective mistakes of the past. I am not being naïve about earth changes and oil—I just don’t see the point of fearing the future, because you can never make good decisions based on fear.
Right now I am a permaculture teacher and designer; before that I was one of those hippie back-to-the-landers, and before that I was a cop—yes, an officer of the law. In my years as a peace officer, I was trained to respond to all types of stressful situations with a certain protocol that included calm, clear thinking. Those people who were in distress, who I was trying to help (or subdue), usually were not thinking clearly, could not help themselves and were, in fact, a danger to themselves and to the proverbial others.
I only had the upper hand in any of those cases when I was thinking clearly, calmly, and observing the patterns around us. I was almost always injured or lost control when I reacted out of fear or anxiety.
My experience is that when you are reacting from fear your adrenaline is pumping, you lose peripheral vision, and you can’t keep up with individual thoughts as separate signals—so you blur them, and your responses become blurred too, into general sweeps of thought, speech, and action. Some of us default to victim and maybe react or don’t react (as the case may be) like “a deer in the headlights.” Some of us might overreact—responding with too much information, aggression, or violence. I think that anxiety affects us in the same ways as fear.
The spread of the new eco-anxiety disorder has as much to do with the environment as acrophobia has to do with architecture or geology. It is simply an example of how some of us react under stress. Uncertainty, change, and even anxiety are stressors in the human environment that will shape us, but we can choose what form we shall take. Practice slowing down—for example, time in the garden or quiet observation in the wilderness—and meditate on the things that make you happy. Do whatever you can to learn this skill set well.
If we choose our actions based on what we love about the present, we then have a solid foundation upon which to build our coming lives. What do we want to see in the world? This should be the question we ask ourselves, not what do we not want to see.… Do we love eating fruits and vegetables grown without toxic chemicals? Then let’s work toward creating the conditions for organic crops to flourish. Do we love waking up to the song of birds in the morning? Then yes, let us create the conditions for that to happen too.
There is actually very little reasonable evidence (without a premise of fallacious speculation) that total catastrophe is coming. Change is coming for sure, but the casualties, destruction, and despair we read about is the doomerism of old. I also see very little evidence that the world will be abruptly brought to a doomerist halt—a bigger bang is not in the equation.…
Yes, change is coming, but then, change is always coming. People/culture/humanity have clearly shown the capacity for resilience, for adaptability, and for enduring ingenuity. I have an immutable trust in our abilities as humans for compassion and am grateful for my experiences over the years, where I have seen anonymous acts of true heroism that made me (a grown man) cry. I believe that most people are just waiting to be called to rise to their highest abilities, and that the trumpet call of that challenge is just now reaching their ears.
Living lightly, going green or sustainable, doesn’t actually mean giving up most things—it just means changing the way we get them, what they are made of, and by whom. As we focus on the realities of energy “use” itself, we quickly arrive at the conclusion that local is more economical and more sustainable. Thus