This blog is a journal of my research and writing of a paper that I hope I can also present as a seminar. I don't have a title for the paper yet, and I suppose I could say that I've been researching it for many months now. I know generally what it will be about: something about the psychological relationship we human beings have with the Earth--its creatures, its structures, its processes.
I have been interested in such things since I was a child, though my experience of it and my thinking about it was surely carried on in different terms. I would have to place the most recent burst of inspiration to explore these ideas with my move to Tennessee, and my subsequent involvement in grassroots environmental justice work.
Most of my recent work in environmental justice has been in relation to coal mining practices that are threatening communities of people and nature in Appalachia. At the moment, nobody's planning to blow up the mountain I live by in order to extract coal. I got involved to prevent that from happening in the watershed community where I live. I wrote about this in my essay, Homeland Security, that was published last year in Coal Country: Rising Up Against Mountaintop Removal Mining.
Burrowing further toward the heart of my inspiration for this new paper is a question that, on the surface, may seem to be simple: Why is it that living, breathing beings--fellow human beings and creatures with whom they share the land--are being sacrificed so that mining companies can get coal out of the ground? And why are the rest of us not outraged enough to have put a stop to this genocide and ecocide long ago?
I think the answer to this question ultimately has to take us into an exploration of ourselves as beings with psyches, with souls. That territory of things known and unknown is huge.
Dealing with that vastness of the question is my first challenge. Sooner or later I will have to narrow what I discover down to a few thousand words. But for now I need to hang with the uncertainty of starting this project and not knowing where I'll end up. Just trust the process.
In this blog I'll track the journey.
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