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NATURAL EPIPHANIES "Find the Earth Beneath the Pavement" IN THE TURBULENT sixties, rioting French students chalked the walls of Paris with a memorable battle-cry: Dessous les paves la plage. Beneath the pavement, the land! During the troubles of 1968, paving stones were torn from the streets as if the protesters might be trying to repeal the city itself. As it turned out, Parisians being Parisians, (and Marxists being Marxists), the students were mainly concerned about political, not ecological issues. But their slogan anticipated one of the deepest countercultural insights of our time. The environmental crisis is a crisis of the city.
Unless the planet decides to shrug them off as too great a nuisance, cities are clearly here to stay, at least for as long as any of us can see into the future. For most people, cities are where the action is -- or at least so they think. In the words of an old American tune, "How're you gonna keep em down on the farm, after they've seen Par-ee?" If we are to find a sustainable balance with the environment, it will have to start with cityfolk. But how can a population so uniquely isolated from the more-than-human world undertake the great changes that are required of us? Can those who inhabit the urban empire come to see the rebalancing of our relations with the planet as the ultimate form of progress? No question but that knowledge -- the exact knowledge of the physical and biological sciences -- has a significant role to play in educating us to the ecological facts of postindustrial life. But that kind of knowledge may not be enough to do the job. There must be something more -- a knowledge of the heart, an emotional affirmation that reconnects us with the Earth on whose subtle rhythms and stately cycles even the most technologically advanced society depends. We cannot live against the planet just as surely as we know we cannot live without breathing. But can we find the prudence to live gracefully within the limits of the Earth's bounty? In this issue, we offer some highly personal statements by writers and students who live and work in the empire of cities. Yet each -- whether in the course of journalistic assignments, or on a vision quest in the Wyoming wilderness, or pondering a doctoral dissertation, or waiting in an airport in Rio de Janiero -- felt the Earth beneath the pavement. And in that moment each discovered the experience of connection poet Roxanne Lanier recalls finding as a child in the asphalt wastes of New York. As a child in the Bronx We call an experience like this -- a sudden flash of empowering insight that reveals the "whatness" of things, as James Joyce once put it -- an epiphany. Ecopsychology is grounded in the conviction that there are natural epiphanies that can still remind the distracted urban millions of their most basic loyalty and inspire them to take on the hard political work that sustainability demands. | ||||||||
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© 1997 The Ecopsychology Institute |
In the course of the past two centuries, it is almost as if the Earth has been stricken with "city pox," a
spreading contagion of industrial waste, pollution, and resource-depletion that began in the
factory towns of England. The great cities of the modern world may be among the glories of
our age; but we pay a heavy price for their cultural vitality. The price is ecological ignorance, an
ignorance as lethal for the city as for all that may still survive outside the range of its power.
Our worldview stops at the city limits. Urbanites have cut themselves off from the natural
continuum in ways that leave whole populations ignorant of the most basic biological
patterns.
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