These past weeks, I have been reading David Barnhill’s multicultural anthology, At Home On The Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place. Essay after essay by N Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Wendell Berry, Bell Hooks, John Haines, Thomas Berry and Terry Tempest Williams, and more often than not they say that the cause and effect of the environmental crisis is our spirit. Distanced from the land and moved to cities, the anthropocene and capitalocene have placed physical and metaphorical “walls, bars, gates” (Solnit 2001, 11) in between us and the land. The simple movement of walking that Edmund Husserl describes as the “experience by which we understand our body in relation to the world” (27) is less and less, and where are we to go from here? Bell Hooks writes, “when we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully” (1999, 51) and yet how we can love earth when we aren’t able to touch, feel, and experience the earth? If we cannot love the earth, then can we love ourselves?

In this spiritual crisis, we cannot conceive of environmental health outside of human health; we cannot conceive of bodily health outside of spiritual health; and we cannot address one without addressing the other.   

Works Referenced: 

Barnhill, David L, ed. At Home on The Earth, Becoming Native to This Place: A Multicultural Anthology. University of California Press, 1999.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Penguin Random House, 2001.