After a lot of holding the breath and focusing on various problems and issues, I find it useful to release for a moment and just breathe and open up again.
First: ideology is always a combination of reaction and creation.
This focus on our current relation to ecology is very much seated in reaction to what we have been doing for the last couple hundred years, and there are of course good reasons for this. If you're holding your hand over a fire and it begins to burn, it is probably a good idea to pull it back and reflect on that burning, and perhaps move to stop doing it in the future. And so as the various old life systems disintegrate under our collective political economic activities, it is certainly prudent to examine that process and consider how we can do better than the present course.
But observations and their corresponding judgments can easily run away from you, and focusing on them steadily increases their intensity and visibility.
For example, many things pummel the environment in various ways. I had mentioned that elk are good trail blazers, and indeed, they lumber through the forests crushing understory over and over again, tearing apart the surrounding foliage as they feed, and this is very much a normal process, at least within the current epoch, just as it is normal for geological events and the passage of wind and water to carve and transform the landscape over and over again as patterns shift.
So why the focus on our own violence to the landscape? As if we should play a perpetual game of "don't step on the hot lava," and tip toe around life systems in deep reverence to the lowest "weed" or insect or microbe, and then simply starve out and fade away as a result?
But our violence is a very different kind of violence as compared to the elk's. Its reach and its extent and its depth of material development is of a different quality altogether. And the sensitivity one strikes up to address this violence is all the more useful if one doesn't simply fill one's attention with it, and become lost in yet another ideology suspended and insulated from the underlying reality.
It is not necessary to shrink absolutely from the cycles of creation and destruction, and of life and death. But maybe shrinking a little bit is enough to adjust one's perception at least, and consider other possibilities.
And these observations themselves are very much cyclical. You can find all sorts of ideas like this throughout numerous writings over a long span of time. They tend to coalesce and become more visible, entering the mainstream and appearing more definitively in the collective consciousness in a given period, such as in the 60's and 70's, or the 10's and 20's further back, and so on, before being beaten back again and made dormant in their many isolated pockets. On and on it goes.
