This wasn’t just any essay. This was the laying out of an ecological ethic. It wasn’t just about my writing, but about my living too– a deep dive into my own moral responsibility as a participant myself in the cycles of life.
I am a big believer that you gotta walk your talk. This meant that my every choice of a word, every sentence that I settled, echoed an implication for my own life. Of course, I was writing about stuff I have already been living and experimenting with. But with the polishing of paragraphs it became clear that I still had a ways to go.
So the last two months have been a mix of writing about the importance of ecological disclosure… And coming up with my own!
Ani and I have thus undertaken a full biodiversity accounting for our home food forest.
We’ve also undertaken a full accounting of our ecological impacts, in terms of carbon and plastic, over the last year.
I am really excited about this one. 😀
This essay sums up the five other ethics that I have written about over last year into a comprehensive vision of ecological disclosure. The basic idea: it is important to account and disclose the green and grey impacts of our processes and projects.
To do lay out this ethic, my essay draws on the latest scientific revelations around mycellial forest networks. And also my experience playing in the forest behind my childhood home.
You see, I didn’t play in just any forest.
I played in the wilderness!
Growing up in the Yukon, in Northern Canada, our home lay on the outskirts of town. The Yukon is a vast, sparsely inhabited place. That meant that the forest of our backyard extended hundreds, even thousands of kilometers to the North and West until the Arctic ocean. We built forts, climbed trees, dug holes, ate berries and picked mushrooms to throw at each other. We saw lynx, cougars bears and the bones of their kills. We peered under the moss, pull up roots and revelled in the sights and smells.
Writing my essay, I read the latest research on mycorrizal fungal networks. Researching the monumental discoveries of these unfathomably vast and complex entities that underly forests like the one I played in…. I understood it all readily. I got it. Indeed, I already knew it in a deep and primal sense.
The trees that were my literally my friends and companions. The mysterious mushrooms circles. The white threads under the moss. The feeling of never being alone. It all makes sense.
Of course the trees are connected. Of course they are whispering to each other.
Of course there are no secrets in the forest.
Our growing understanding of mycorrizal networks is a slow moving tsunami of implications for human civilization. The shattering revelation of a vast distributed intelligence under the forest floor, coupled with the knowing already embedded in indegenous wisdom, will change not only the way we see forests, but the way we look at ourselves and our place on the planet.
