• The American Southwest is on fire.
• Mister Softee theme echoing through neighborhood.
• Wrist rests on the iBook suddenly feel really hot.
• First chance to take the iBook to Bryant Park and use the free wifi.
• Lazy cats lying where they can catch a breeze from the ceiling fan.
• Gotta carry the umbrella every day -- never know when one of those late-afternoon thunderstorms will pop up.
• I saw the first lightning bugs of the season last night!
The lightning bugs are pretty much when I feel like summer has arrived... they make me think of warm carefree evenings when you could stay up late because there was no school the next day and wouldn’t be for months. When it either wasn’t actually as hot as it gets today or it just felt that way because you were a little kid and getting all sweaty just wasn’t as uncomfortable as it is when you’re a grownup.
And I saw the first fireflies on the solstice this year, which is kinda cool. I’m not a Wiccan, but the cloest I get to any kind of religious observance is acknowledging the change of seasons, and I’d have loved to be at Stonehenge last year -- as yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day depicted -- when it was open to the public and a group gathered to watch the sun rise over the stones on the solstice.
So I got to thinking about whether it might be possible to create a new sense of, well, reverence, for lack of a better word, for the Earth as part of a new environmentalism. (And it might truly be new, too: how much of the supposed reverence for the Earth of ancient human cultures was really simply a lack of the technology to trash it, as we started doing as soon as our technology allowed us to do?) Some people, from rightwing religious conservatives to liberal atheists, have called environmentalism a religion, called recycling one of its rituals, and maybe that’s true, in a way. Perhaps as religious structures and organizations train people to think and behave reflexively, we need to create new Earth-friendly thinking and practices that can be taught as habits in order to save our planet instead of our souls.
For me, though, unthinking rote behavior and mantras are not satisfying, whether it’s taught by a priest or Al Gore. So I searched around a bit online trying to see if there was any cohesive philosophy that approached how I feel about these things: not just spiritual but respectful of nature, one that replaces prayer and meditation with practical action and utilizes modern technology. I was momentarily hopeful when I came across the term “technopagan,” but even that seems to be about “magic” and jokes about cleaning candle wax from the keyboard. (Hey, I love candles, but what kind of idiot puts one near the computer?) The environmental credo of the Universal Pantheist Society sounds pretty good, but it’s still full of those pesky ideas about deities.
And then I found the blog WorldChanging, which offers posts from contributors all over the world, and it’s full of interesting and geeky news and commentary about bike lanes in China and solar power in Portugal and water-efficient showers Boeing is installing on its planes and brainstorming ecocities and thinking along the lines of “We need to learn how to get the lives we want while using a fraction of the energy we use now.”
Okay. And I realized this was more of the geeky Neo Green thinking Wired has been talking about. It’s too soon to call it a movement and maybe even too soon to call it a philosophy, but we can see it developing before our very eyes. Cool.
(Technorati tags: summer, environmentalism, Neo Green)
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