*Good Morning.*
A gentle sunny day here in paradise, yellow grass meadow ringed by gleaming
white, strong-shouldered mountains. I apologize for living in such an
exquisite place, it is my good fortune for these few years. I've lived "out
there" too, and will again I'm sure when our landlady decides to return
from Maine.
We are halfway through this interesting week. I am quite pleased with this
discussion so far. A great deal of solid, in depth criticism and
exploration has been presented, by such people as Clifford, Nygren,
Wilding, Coon, Zimmerman, McGowen, Chu, diZerega, Evans, Barnum, Hollick,
Bajard, and McFarlin, to name just a few that come to mind. I wish I could
really take up the points these people have raised, and respond in detail.
I will try to touch on a few things later today. The material deserves no
less. But I cannot possibly address it all. There's so much! All these fine
people will have to let their words speak for themselves, without benefit
of support, argument or further elaboration from me. Many of you respond to
each other in these ways, and that is good enough. We will sift all this
out in the proceedings that will follow.
*Discovering Self in Discussion*
The atmosphere seems to be one of great caring and sincerity, with enough
humor and lightness on the side to keep us awake and glad to be here.
Everyone seems to speak from that place in themselves where these questions
most deeply reside.
Ultimately, these are not only academic and theoretical questions, but
extremely pressing, personal issues for each one of us. Our answers to
these questions determine how we live our lives, and feel about what we
have been given, the world, each other, and so on.
Our lives of course manifest the kind of understanding we have arrived at
already. I don't mean just where we live or what we do all day--we don't
always have control over that. But in the way we look at things, relate to
the world around us, and feel and behave in our hearts and bodies.
This is why it's so interesting to catch glimpses of who we people really
are, where we are, what we are doing today, what the weather is like at our
spot on the planet. Please continue to enrich the record with these brief
field reports.
This list is not just a closely focused academic discusision, although that
end of things is surprisingly strong and good so far. But we have an
experimental, expansive feeling going here, which I would like to continue.
I think this approach is appropriate to the full elucidation of the subject
matter at hand, which is that of *eco-logy*, the knowing relationship
between self and world, set in the context of today's explosive and
troubling landscapes.
What we are trying to do in this gathering of minds and keyboards is not
only establish a sound theoretical understanding of deep ecology. We are
doing that, and it seems good so far. But we want to go further, and create
an atmosphere in which every subscriber, lurkers and posters both, can
evolve and develop *their own* understanding and relationships in this
area. So I apologize to the many fine academics who are present here, and
others who prefer a more strictly cognitive approach. But we are inviting
additional creative energies to help us here.
*Report on The Experiments*
So, in addition to careful, analytical thinking about deep ecology, our
experiments so far have included
1) Brief personal field reports. (A success so far.)
2) The 100 word essay on The Deepest Ecology. (Please keep these coming,
everyone will benefit personally from giving this a try, and a good mosaic
needs many tiles.)
3) A call for jokes. (Not too many please, and good ones.)
4) A general receptivity to personal feelings and uniues direct
perceptions, including the submission of sutras, poems, and relevant
quotations. (So far just right. Not too many, but enough--send more.)
I would like to add another:
6) Does anyone have a _brief_ (brief) example of written work on Deep
Ecology which they would like to submit to the record? I know that many of
you do have such things. PLEASE keep this to one page or so, or our Host,
Don Roper, who runs csf for us, will never forgive us. It should be quite
directly aimed at Deep Ecology too, please, or we will lose the focus we
have so far miraculously managed to maintain.
I will submit something myself, to set a good example. Give it the Subject
heading Deep Ecology Writing, so we can recognize these items and sort them
out from the rest of the discussion.
In hope that we can enrich this record further,
I remain yours truely, John McClellan
1567 Twin Sisters Road
Nederland, CO 80466
(303) 449-1346