Category Archive

By Mike Mercer, Executive Director of the Northwest Earth Institute

One of my favorite NWEI course excerpts is found in the first session in Menu for the Future.  Organic farmer, Zoe Bradbury, troubled by her inability to make a decision while shopping for eggs, chuckles and wonders if the “quiche sample in the last aisle has been laced with something” causing a sudden onset of indecisiveness.  Free range, cage free, local, Omega-3, organic fed, Grade A, AA, natural… the list goes on.  No wonder so many people find developing new habits so challenging and give up; all the jargon is just too much to think about.

I recently took my sixteen year old daughter to Japan for two weeks.  In case you are wondering, I flew.  Deciding how we would get there was relatively easy, but making the decision to go was much more complicated.  The full struggle with that little voice in my head and then the conversations with my daughter can’t really be captured in this space, but here are a few insights: 1) According to the carbon calculators that I looked at, for the two of us, the carbon emissions of traveling to Japan were the equivalent of driving my car 24,000 miles.  2) My son and I kayak, cycle, backpack, etc. but these activities are not my daughter’s thing.  3) Being sixteen, my daughter thinks I was born with only half the tolerance and brain capacity of any other adult in her life.  We needed a little father/daughter bonding time focused on her interests.  4) As the Executive Director of an organization working to reduce consumption, getting to Japan via airplane seemed squarely at odds with my professed values. 5) Do carbon offsets really help, or just make us feel better? 6) Could we go somewhere else, resulting in fewer emissions and gain the same bonding experience?  And so on…

What to do?  I weighed, pondered, debated with others, guilt tripped myself, bought the plane tickets and went.

My daughter had the trip of the lifetime and we shared a terrific experience.  She even said thank you (and anyone with teenage children know that this is monumental).  We experienced firsthand what an efficient and convenient rail system looks like.  We were shocked by the plastic wrapping on every napkin and disposable chopsticks at every meal.  We met some of the most conscientious, honorable people.  In Hiroshima, we also saw the horror of what humanity can do to one another and the power of forgiveness.  Would I do it again? Under the same conditions – in a heartbeat.  Will I venture to another corner of the world in the future?  Oregon has so much to offer, but only time and circumstances will tell.

As Zoe concluded, conscientious decision making is “simply not so simple”.  This may be true, but perhaps the act of wrestling with the complexity of systems, weighing competing values and, in the end, maybe making more positive choices is what being fully alive is all about?  Enjoy the wrestling!

Guest contribution by Jeffrey Noethe, Ph.D., this piece was first printed in the EarthMatters print newsletter, Winter 2010

The idea of an “ecological self” may sound confusing and even contradictory, but to me, it is simple shorthand for the aspect of self that is completely interconnected and interdependent with everything and everyone that surrounds us. We humans often feel small, separate, and powerless; but that is never the ultimate truth of our existence. The truth, if we can learn to see it, is that we are part of everything, never separate, and directly “plugged-in” to all the power of life and the universe. This doesn’t mean we have super powers, but it does mean that we always have access to a wonderful resource for nurturing health and wellness.

As a Psychologist in private practice, my work frequently involves helping people reconnect with their ecological selves, even if I do not always use that language. More often, I simply talk about the value of connecting with self, others, and surroundings. Whenever I do an intake with a new client, in addition to asking about symptoms and presenting concerns, I always ask about self-care, which I see as the foundation of a person’s sense of connectedness. If this foundation is strong, then one may be better able to create and maintain a happy, healthy existence. On the other hand, if this foundation is weak in some way, then no amount of determination, personal reflection, or therapy may ever be enough to create real and lasting change.

When addressing self-care with clients, I ask questions about obvious behaviors such as nutrition, hydration, substance use, sleep, and exercise. However, I also ask questions like, “Do you make time for fun or meaningful activities? Who are your supports, and do you use them? Do you have any creative outlets? Do you place any value on getting out into nature? Do you grow anything? Do you have any pets?” Taken together, these self-care questions help me understand where a client’s foundation is strong and where it may be weak. These questions also provide an opportunity to encourage small changes that might have a significant impact on the progress of therapy. For example, in addition to attending therapy on a weekly basis, a client may agree to work on eating better, exercising, utilizing supports, or getting outside more regularly. These changes not only help the client feel better physically, but they also tend to enhance the client’s sense of self-efficacy and confidence.

It rarely surprises anyone when I suggest that getting out into nature is an important aspect of self-care. In the same way that sleep and exercise are important to our well-being, so too is having a sense of connectedness with the real world around us. After all, we are born of the earth (like all creatures) and live in a constant state of interconnectedness and interdependence, whether we realize it or not. When we are aware of that connectedness, we tend to feel more solid, stable, and secure. We tend to feel more real ourselves, just as we do when we connect more deeply with ourselves and others. With these feelings comes the possibility of symptom relief, especially in the areas of anxiety and depression. Improving a client’s sense of connectedness will not necessarily cure or even reduce symptoms, but I believe that ignoring connectedness will always make such changes more challenging than they need to be. Time and again, I have seen the healing effects of improved self-care, and on several occasions, I have seen symptom relief so profound that professional help was no longer needed.

Clients don’t always understand that connecting with nature does not require moving to the country, hiking through the wilderness, or sleeping in a tent. It can happen at any time and in any place. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest contribution by Stephanie Moret, Pacific Earth Institute. This piece first appeared in the Winter 2010 EarthMatters Newsletter. Stephanie Moret lives in Santa Barbara, California and leads the Pacific Earth Institute.

Southwesterners are bonded by our recognition that water is a precious and scarce resource.  Our climate ranges from semi-arid in the north, arid in the central and southern regions, to Mediterranean along the Southern California coast.  As a people, we share common stories shaped by our reverence of water, by living with a dynamic hydrologic regime, and by the successes and failures of our forebearers to reshape an arid landscape to include water.  The complex system of physical, biological, and social interactions influencing water resources has modified our fragile western ecosystems, where recovery from degradation can take hundreds to thousands of years; and where expectations of what is ‘normal’ change with each generation.

In spite of the parched surface that constitutes much of our region, our mountains are blessed with precipitation; and, beneath us, water that has percolated through the land for millennia moves through vast underground aquifers.  While we may only get a few inches of rainfall each year, it often comes all at once, prompting both disaster warnings and gratitude that our reservoirs and aquifers will be partly replenished and another drought staved off.  Our civilization has been created by harnessing mountain streams behind dams, pumping our limited groundwater, and conveying these waters vast distances to support expanding populations.

Mark Twain is believed to have penned the West’s signature quote, “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.”  The original brawls over agricultural water rights have evolved into legal challenges to balance the needs of agriculture, industry, development, and natural habitat while maintaining a clean, sustainable water source.  As we realize that many of our successes in controlling water have resulted in environmental losses, Westerners’ actions, as individuals and as a society, are beginning to focus on understanding and working with the natural system to capture, store, and safely release water to mimic natural processes as best we can.

Water awareness is a conscious and evolving dynamic in Southwesterner’s lives because our lifestyles accommodate a landscape that is characterized by drought, flood, and fire—and an ecosystem that has evolved to adapt to these conditions.  We revere water bodies as our gathering places, be they lakes, reservoirs, rivers, oceans, or swimming pools.  We share food with friends amidst the sound of splashing as we seek respite from the heat with a cool, delicious dip.  For many of us, our natural water holes are dry by June.  My childhood friends and I would rescue tadpoles from the same drying streams that we built dams and swimming holes in during the spring; and then watched swell in the winter, muddy and laden with scoured vegetation.

Water-wise Southwesterners carry water on their person, conserve water in their homes, plant drought-tolerant landscapes, and know that a storm in distant mountains can ravage a sunny plateau in seconds, easily filling an arroyo or a graffitied storm channel.  We are aware that we live in a dynamic landscape and that our ability to control Western water is tenuous.  Perhaps because of this, water is our common bond.