Recently my friend Jose Miguel Yturralde sent me an Easter note from the Ecuadorian jungle where he works for an oil company. Jose Miguel has written for this blog before here and here. As a Catholic and environmentalist, he is in a tough position. Now it is the ‘human ecology’ that is being disturbed, with […]
Category: Romanticism
White Wild Whale
A wild white Killer Whale (Orca) has been spotted in the wild. This is the first of its kind to be seen. Below the BBC article. One wonders if, despite this not being the Sperm whale species, if Captain Ahab and Moby Dick add to the fascination of this siting. Scientists have made what they believe […]
Is it possible to be happy with this life?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71HzYChzTbA] The question: “Is it possible to be happy with this life?” is a line from a video produced by Gnarly Bay productions. I don’t know much about Gnarly Bay, except that they produce excellent narrative and visual material. The answer to the question seems to be: yes, it is possible, in NATURE fundamentally, through […]
Man vs. Wild
For those who hold fast to a Romantic view of nature, watch this… http://youtu.be/n_A1WoUMcqg
American Identity and Environmentalism
Catherine Albanese published an interesting book many years ago, “Nature Religion in America”, where she shows the relationship of the religious status of nature in the American context. She has some provocative and insightful quotes like the ones below, that make the case of how distinctively Americans view nature: “Americans learned to understand the sublimity […]
B XVI in Spain I – Truth and Freedom
The Pope’s recent visit to Spain has been filled with much content pertinent to environmental questions and issues. In the beginning of the trip a theme emerged that seemed quite clear: freedom, and it’s relationship to truth. In his inaugural address (1), then at the tomb of St. James (2) and finally the homily in […]
Paul’s legacy lives on – skill
Paul may have died but his legacy lives. Here is a serious post by a policy analyst that usually concerns himself with disaster forecasts and their relationship with climate change, but talks about Paul’s predictive powers. I posted on the cultural significance of Paul during the world cup, connected to some philo-Emersonian form of knowledge, […]
Paul is dead!
Paul, the Octopus, that is. Remember Paul, during World Cup, and how a crustacean was taking a leading role in divining the future, getting the masses riled up, even generating death threats. Well, Paul is gone. He passed away and the football community mourns. Nature seems to have stepped its bounds, but now it has […]
Muir’s concession…
Some of you may have seen these pictures in an email that circulates around. To wilderness lovers this may come as a heartbreak, but not all the pictures show a natural phenomenon, some are man-made (read below). The explanation is from snopes.com. My greatest interest however are the pictures themselves and what they communicate. Lately […]
CS Lewis on nature
CS Lewis has some pointed remarks that challenge the Romantic view, still very prevalent today, that wisdom and knowledge can be found in nature. I gave an example of this, with some cynicism it is true, in the post on ‘Faith in nature and psychic crocodiles’. Lewis says something quite different about what people find […]