Earth thoughts 139-147

Earth thought 139 of 365: In the drama of most people's lives -for instance, the South Asian worker on the lift for the sixth straight day of work at 10-12 hours joining bolts to girders in Dubai- I just cannot fault our blindness to the environment. And often people outside the five star hotels like this, people know that we are wasting the planet. But it is powerlessness, a lack of political access that shuts the way. Then education happens -some are lifted up, up the economic gridwork of our world. And? Why do we forget? In the place of our former awareness comes a search for status and money. The missing link, education, has misled us. They went in paying large amounts to earn a better job. It was all about jobs, and -rubbing shoulders with their competing classmates- they emerged full blind to our wasteful life. Education, sadly, is the anti-ecological thing for many, blocking the way to politics by changing the focus of our minds. Then, the uneducated often know better, but lack the education to know how to better. And the educated, near to power, know worse.

Earth thought 140 of 365: I watched French cinema last week -Bob le Flambeur, Cours Toujours, Carnages- three very different films made decades apart from each other. Then, I realized that they all showed a keen awareness of chance, or luck, and of the way it intertwines us in happenings. Such a sensibility, I think, is key to grasping evolutionary life, is -you might say- a basic ecological sensibility.

Earth thought 141 of 365: End of semester grading, with its misshapen papers, academic dishonesty, appeals, emails, phone calls, running out pens, sore necks, weak eyes, lack of exercise, distraught students, angry messages, fine-grain policy, stress, and deadlines -is as messy as carnivores hunting on the savannah. Carnage!

Earth thought 142 of 365: "Let me shower, meditate, and get on with my day." Once again, like weather.

Earth thought 143 of 365: When's a home overlapping like an ecosystem? -When the papers lie on top of papers here, clothes hung there, a chair shifted to fit, and the fine sift of dust shades a corner. When it's lived in.

Earth thought 144 of 365: What is an ecological school? It is a school where the outside is in the inside, and where school time rests -self-aware- in seasonal and then geological time. Students must live with rock patterns in their hearts, and with the rise and fall of species. The school's design, too, is inside out -students and teachers alike confront the energy patterns and production histories, the choices made and missed of a purely recycle-able structure, roof to ground to power-lines to cups in the kitchen. An ecological school, in other words, is that first by the manner of its organization and the being of its materials -how its life itself is made self-aware of its indebtedness to the wider order.

Earth thought 145 of 365: I cannot imagine the aesthetics of loss that the sixth mass extinction deserves. I imagine a museum of foregone life, but it is just a museum of natural history. So, what, then? A day out of every school year, like Earth day? More tokenism, and then we return to exploitation. Perhaps the best way to evoke loss is to work on preserving life at risk of extinction. Then the struggle becomes clear, the complication, dense matter, difficult politics.

Earth thought 146 of 365: There is utopia in a million year old form of life. Look at it, how it has weathered and been weathered.

Earth thought 147 of 365: A religious person would say we have responsibility *to*, not *for*, Creation. There's a lot packed into a preposition.