The things we do have ripples that travel far beyond our sight. Sometimes we get news back that the vibrations have reached someone. Like an answer to a message in a bottle.
The Caring for Creation series has had ripples traveling through the digital pond to spaces both known and unknown. Here’s a Twitter conversation from the last class of Caring for Creation. The broadcast reached to a dinner table where Giulia Forsythe from Brock University was sharing #ds106radio with folks who had attended Thompson Rivers University’s Canadian Network for Innovation in Education conference. Then GNA Garcia tuned in from Oakton Community College in Illinois, and Zack Dowell from Folsom Lake College in Sacramento came in at the end, tempted by free seeds!
This is in addition to the known audiences who have been with us for all the gatherings we have been able to broadcast.
Just goes to show that you never know who you’re going to reach. So next time you’re wondering, write that note, shove it in the bottle, and send it over the waves.
I enjoyed reading all your tweets.
In Victoria our last session was humming with joined caring and also crying one of the young women is from the Yukon, her home area is dying..the borers forest is disappearing..
Lennor
That is exactly how I read Aldo Leopold’s land use ethic. When our empathy connects with the natural world and we can feel the pain we inflict upon it. Right relationship, with any system (human, nature etc.) is not easy.
During the Spirit of the Land course at Augustana in the fall, I was also taking a course on Ecology, Sustainability and Traditional Cultures through Athabasca. The combination of the two led to a powerful experience. I was reading about the Evenk people of Siberia and the challenges they face on their land. I learned about a particular pulp mill on lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake. At one time the mill was shut down as the owners would not upgrade the mill to new environmental standards. Recently, the regulations have been relaxed, allowing the mill to reopen, pumping waste chemicals into the lake. When I read about this, it touched me in a way I had not experienced before. I felt physically ill. A churning in my stomach about the disregard for the health of not only the fish and birds and plants and animals of the area, but for the lake itself. It was as if someone had poured acid directly into my own stomach. Of course, if you consider that we are all a part of the same system, and that damage to one part is damage to all, that pollution of the earth is a sort of pollution of my own body.
When we can feel this connection, and share that with others, inspiring them to feel as well, we may begin to move in the direction of true solidarity with the earth and her creatures.
Here is a video I made about the Evenk people. It was a wonderful journey last semester and this one as well!!