Invasive Species and other thoughts.

How do we learn?
What do we pay attention to?
How do we change our ways?
How do we maintain best habits?
How do we support a healthy environment?

When you move from one area to another, as we all do at some times in our lives, we need to adapt, and to learn new ways of doing things. Here in Oregon, with so many rivers, wetlands, beaches and forests all around, people seem incongruous.  We are the invasive species.

It's good to find maps and instructions everywhere.
It's good to learn best habits.

Islands.

 (Picture from the web-some interior decorator blog. I have  forgotten its provenance, but have loved it and kept in my dream file. Please forgive me for not knowing to whom this belongs!)


In interior places as in this lavatory, we peek at the outdoor world, the ever-changing environment that surrounds us and demands our attention now and then.  We are entities to ourselves, our needs primary and basic, our survival high on our list. We forget that we are part of a larger environment.

I'm thinking of how we shut ourselves from the world in our dream houses. We forget hunger, cold, extreme heat, thirst, wind. We see the world trough windows we create, and we manage, sliding our drapes over a bad view, turning our heaters on cold days.  We don't know hunger any more, and we don't understand anyone who might be hungry.

Surrounded by features we install, mirrors to show off our best features, we are in caves all day long, year in and year out.

It's too easy to become islands.

You say you're not political?

You can't live in these woods and not be concerned to what happens to them. You'd want them to remain this way as long as you live. You hope your grandkids have the same feelings.

But you also know that things change; that someone will offer your grandkids a few million dollars to clear this land and put up a few condos one day. Your grandkids will think of you then, how you loved coming here and smelling those pines; how they and you foraged for mushrooms here; how you pitched tents and stayed up all night counting stars; how the silence and the grandeur hushed your thoughts and theirs and your sleep was never this peaceful.

We can't shut ourselves in ourselves and count our blessings when greed and corruption are running rampant, riding through the land counting happiness as though it was a concrete product listed on the stock exchange.

We have to think of what counts for the long run, for our grandkids and their great-great grandkids. Saving the forests and the rivers and the lakes form pollution and industrial waste will assure that seven generations of your family will continue to appreciate the same things you did.

And that's one of the reasons for staying involved with  local and national political issues.

Politics is everyone's business; it is the collective ethos of a people who are bound together by place and time. You read papers, watch the news, listen to people. You know that information is available in many places. Are you doing your part in gathering facts and analyzing trends on your own? No single party or single person holds all the answers.

We need to keep informing ourselves all the time, and MOST OF ALL, advise our representatives of the values we hold dear. 

What we do today...

We are footsteps on the sand, soon to disappear, less weighty than flotsam. 

Every step we take, every bite we eat, every thing we generate,  everything we purchase will  impact others.


Step lightly.
Leave no footprints.
Consume only what you need to survive.