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Thinking With Nature: Today's Rendezvous
with Destiny.
Michael J.
Cohen, Ed.D.
Part Two: The Challenge
Most of us are aware that the thinking process that produces
and sustains industrial society has unthoughtfully placed the
environment and people at risk. Our thinking is missing many
senses. Often it can't make sense. Most of us feel and succumb
to the stress our thinking produces. We must use a more sensitive
thought process to think our way out of the runaway problems
we have thought our way into.
The natural environment governs itself with an intelligence that
sustains it in balance and a wisdom that prevents it from producing
our unresolvable problems. As natural beings, we genetically
inherit the ability to think and feel with this global intelligence.
However, from birth and before, we envelope our mentality in
a process and society bent on conquering nature. Our underlying
problem is the attitude of industrial society. It teaches us
to think in stories that emotionally know nature's intelligence
as an enemy that exists in people and natural areas. Deep down
we know and fear nature as evil. For example, we often portray
Satan with a tail, claws, scales, fur, horns, hooves and fangs.
He is nature. To our loss, as our thinking assaults and conquers
nature within and around us, we deteriorate our lives and all
of life.
Throughout the seasons, I have enjoyably lived the past 37 years
in natural areas, researching and teaching how to responsibly
relate to them. During this period, I have observed that when
people feelingly make thoughtful contact with nature, they become
more sensitive to life. They think, feel and build personal,
social and environmental relationships in more enjoyable, caring
and responsible ways. Their runaway problems subside. This is
not a surprise. It results from the intelligent way nature has
"wired" us and all of life to relate in supportive
balance. For those who are wise enough to desire and teach life
in balance, I have developed unique, nature connected, sensory
techniques. They are methods, materials, courses and independent
study degree programs that enable anybody to beneficially reconnect
with nature and teach this skill. They enable people to release
themselves from their attachments to the destructive stories
of industrial society. Uniquely, my techniques allow youngsters
or adults to feelingly tap into nature's intelligence and think
with it. The beauty and integrity of nature inspires them. Their
spiritual relationship with nature empowers and guides them.
They let natural areas nurture them. The process has proven to
reverse our runaway troubles.
As you read on, you will discover if the propaganda from our
conquest of nature has affected your thinking. You will see whether
your mind and heart have room for you to validate and enjoy nature
reconnecting techniques and their effects, help others to do
so, and reap the benefits thereof. As the following incident
shows, on the ability of you and others to do this may hang your
happiness, our destiny, and life on Earth as we know it:
April 18, 1972. Today, Karen, a high school junior, said to her
principal: "Dr. Miler, you can't teach me what I want to
know because what I want to know is how not to be like you."
Karen's words come to mind more and more as I watch well intentioned
folks I love, hurt themselves, each other and Earth. Their best
thinking about how to solve our runaway problems has proven not
to be as thoughtful as it needs to be.
Karen, after many attempts to "adjust," had decided
to drop out of school. She was an excellent student and Dr. Miler
pleaded with her to remain. He pledged that he would teach her
anything she wanted to know. That's when she told him he did
not have the ability to do that. She explained that the effects
of his thinking and relationships depressed her. They showed
that neither he nor the faculty knew what she wanted to know,
no less how to teach it. That knowledge was unavailable to the
public in 1972. It is, however, available today.
Although they played their role well in school, Karen's faculty
was a cross section of society, then and today. For example,
30% of them smoked cigarettes. Because they protected others
from the smoke by providing themselves with a smoking area, they
were within their legal rights. Smoking was not, and is not,
illegal. It is encouraged. Parts of agriculture, industry, health
care, advertising and the government budget depend upon tobacco
and its effects to sustain their existence. Karen felt that if
cigarettes became illegal, smoking and its adverse effects would
not stop. In her social studies paper she wrote "It would
be like deer hunting. In many states more deer are poached illegally
than are legally killed during hunting season." In that
paper Karen also said "We can't make sense of how society
educates and governs us because it is not sensible." She
was fed up, and she was fed up with being fed up.
Karen discovered what most people tell me they know. With respect
to helping us sustain happy, responsible lives, the education
we receive, in and out of school, is no more effective than the
warning label on a pack of cigarettes. Karen was different than
many students. In counseling she learned something extra. She
discovered that she wanted and deserved more than what school
provided. She began to realize that the world and its people
were at risk. Her paper said "We are in jeopardy. We don't
just need information, we need a process. We need the community
experience to promote personal and global recovery. I want to
learn how to build responsible relationships. That is not happening
in this school" she wrote, "To teach it or learn it,
you must live it. I have tried, in vain, to make that happen
here."
At a meeting, the faculty pleaded with Karen to stay in school.
"I'm afraid to stay," she said. "The abusiveness
in the world scares me." She choked, "We are on the
brink of nuclear war. And the natural environment is deteriorating
so quickly there may not be a world for me to live in."
Her tears flowed freely. "There is nothing abnormal with
me feeling depressed at times. The hurt I feel is real. It comes
from knowing and watching people being killed or bird species
decline. I am tired of putting band-aids on that hurt in counseling
and thinking there is something wrong with me personally. That
hurt will only disappear as abusiveness disappears, as sensitivity,
peace and birds reappear. That is not happening here. This school
is contaminated, It's a breeding ground for our problems. It's
not healthy for students to learn here."
Mrs. Cook tried to speak. "Let me finish please," Karen
said, and continued: "The school has just bulldozed the
natural area on the building's west side to build still another
lawn. That area was not only a nesting and feeding habitat for
birds. It was a womb for all forms of life, a place that I loved,
where I could find peace at lunch time and after school. Compared
to being in class, or even in counseling, that place made sense.
It was beautiful, it felt right. I could go there depressed about
my life and safely feel all the beauty and life that flourished
there. In just a few minutes, I would feel much better. I refuse
to be touched by the thinking here that has been bulldozed into
such stupidity as to bulldoze that wild area." she said.
Dr. Miler interrupted, "Karen, there was no choice. That
was part of a legal contract from years ago. We had to fulfill
that contract or be sued. And some students smoke marijuana in
that area."
"I don't smoke marijuana" said Karen, "I feel
sad for those that do. I feel even sadder that the law says that
I must spend 1/2 of my waking life in school. This environment
is bulldozing paradise to make still another lawn. Dr. Miler,
you once told me that we learn more from the world around us
than we do from books and lectures. I simply refuse to trash
paradise or learn to do it. I refuse to let you rub off on me
any further. What's wrong with that? It makes sense to me."
She seemed stronger for her statement and its intensity. "Earth
and its people are at risk," she said, "Every year
in this country, five thousand square miles of nature are being
bulldozed into oblivion. How can you possibly teach us to deal
with that massacre when you are engaged in it? What are you thinking?
What sense is there for me to sit in Social Studies class to
discover that our nuclear generating plants are dangerous yet
their total electrical output equals the energy this country
uses just to run hair dryers? That makes no sense. What do we
learn here that helps us stop using hair dryers? To be accepted
here, I feel pressured to use one, not to decease. Where is the
sense in that? In Biology we learn that two decades ago Rachel
Carson showed the danger in using pesticides and chemicals .
Since then we've introduced thousands of new chemicals every
year into the environment. What are you thinking when you use
these chemicals on our lawns here? I don't want to learn to think
like that. What kind of a world are you teaching my mind to build?"
she asked passionately.
Dr. Miler calmly advised Karen that the school did the best it
could. If she left, she would be truant and there would be consequences.
Karen replied: "I don't care. I choose to learn elsewhere.
It's too stupid here. Here, society sentences me to live in an
irresponsible mold, an indoor learning environment that assaults
the natural foundations of life." This environment is so
boring, controlled and stifling that most students are drugged
out or into something that is self destructive or socially harmful.
Mrs. Cook, the English teacher, objected, "I, and other
faculty members, have taught you repeatedly that these things
don't make sense." "Not really," Karen retorted,
"You merely say these things don't make sense. What you
really teach me by forcing me to be in this unchangeable setting
is that I must adopt to being part of a runaway stupidity. You
don't teach me how to successfully deal with it and I don't want
to put up with it. Wake up, Mrs. Cook! You don't know how to
stop it so how are you going to teach that? Am I supposed to
just accept your belief that the communists and minorities cause
our problems? At church we have a conflict as to whether it is
right to subdue the Earth as the Bible says. Isn't there a separation
between Church and State? You are not compelled here to subdue
the Earth, so why do you do it and teach it?"
"This has nothing to do with religion" said Mrs. Cook.
"Maybe not to you." Karen replied, "I have friends
for whom that woodland was a cathedral. Weren't the lives of
our greatest spiritual leaders shaped by profound experiences
in nature?"
Smiling, Mr. Langely, the social studies teacher said: "Karen,
cheer up. You are going to be the first woman President of the
United States." Wiping her tears, Karen stammered "Oh
sure, the first president with a prison record. State laws say
I will go to prison if I am truant. That sucks! I don't care,
I'll take my chances. Go ahead, turn me in. The law has me jailed
here right now anyhow. The big advantage to being in this jail
is that I can walk out and find a better way to learn. That's
what I'm doing," she stated confidently.
The following semester, Karen enrolled in the outdoor school
I founded. So did Mr. Langely. The curriculum I designed let
contact with nature and nature-centered people teach students
of any age how to be more personally, environmentally and socially
responsible. In the process, they learned the academics they
needed to make it happen.
Karen's words bring to mind a study done by a sociologist in
Maine. It shows that the students' level of moral in a high school
is the same as the prisoners' level of moral in a state penitentiary.
My research shows that this does not happen if you teach people
techniques that enable their thinking to tap into nature's wisdom.
Was Karen foolish to leave her school? She finished her education
through courses that taught her how to reconnect with nature.
Today, those courses and degree programs are available to any
interested person through guided home study activities, workshops,
and internships. Mr. Langely facilitates some of them. You can
learn the process through the activities in this book. Karen
went on to become a successful environmental lawyer, professor
and advocate for sustaining responsible relationships.
Part Three: The Process
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Thinking With Nature Article Part 1 ..Part 2
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