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Nature Worship as Lifestyle

by Kate Farrell

How do you worship nature when you're not worshiping nature. What are your unconscious icons, the gods of your unholy acts?

Every day industrial icons are fed into our lives, even if we are Veegan, cyclists with organic gardens and compost piles, living in solar houses made from sustainably harvested timber. Even if you offer a room share for VEGETARIANS WITHOUT TV'S ONLY, everybody lives downstream. Industrial icons like dioxin and uranium are in all the streams at this point anyway.

Separatism's been done and it doesn't work. Every invocation of the powers of nature is a condemnation of the acts that are slowly killing our connections to that power. Every effort to build nature worship into your life is a recognition of how far away we've strayed,' as a species, from a real relationship with nature.

A few years ago I met a Native American environmental activist from Wisconsin. He talked about the relationship between nature worship and the environmental crisis. Surprising. He wasn't worried about the earth. She's healed herself before and she'd do it again, when she needs to, he said. He was worried about us. He wondered if the whites were ever going to take their appropriate role of newcomers and begin learning how to care for the earth and prosper from it.

Unfortunately a lot of people think that environmental alarmism is just like Chicken Little running around shouting the sky is falling, the planet's dying. But the sky's not failing, the planet's not dying; we are. This planet has a bad case of the stupid humans.

Most of us have no clue how to live with nature.

If you've made an effort to build nature worship into your lifestyle, you may want to take another look at what that really involves. As a lifestyle it's more than tree hugging and self-purification. The most conscientious of us breathe contaminated air and drink poisoned water (yes even Evian is toxic) from millions of pounds of toxic chemicals.

Changing the way you relate to nature does make a difference. But it's piss in the ocean. If you're really about worshiping nature you've got to be doing more. Hip someone eke to how it is. Bore your mends with explanations of why you do the things you do to worship nature; hassle people at work about petty little environmental shit like recycling their paper. Do something that really honors nature- stop someone else from mistreating her. Maybe they'll think you're an asshole, maybe they won't listen, maybe they'll hear anyway.

TEN EASY THINGS YOU CAN DO TO STOP SOMEONE ELSE FROM WRECKING THE EARTH

1. Randomly launch into frantic environmentalist diatribes on unsuspecting friends and strangers.
2. Harass people when you see them throwing out recyclables.
3. Buy canvas grocery bags for your mends and neighbors.
4. Tell a store manager you won't shop there if they don't carry non-toxic products like chlorine tree paper and washing soda.
S. Change your long distance phone company to Working Assets. (1-800-788-8588) They'd give 1 % of your charges to non-profit action groups, automatically, no hassles.
6. Take a whopping twenty minutes out of your terribly right schedule to: call your local town hall, find out who your congressional representative is, write a letter urging them to support HR 2898, (the Richards & Waxman Chlorine Zero Discharge Act), and mail it. This bill will stop American paper companies from adding chlorine, a toxic poison, to our paper products.
7. Coerce someone you know into writing to their congressional representative, urging them to support HR 2898.
8. Write a letter to your local paper or favorite publication, talking about your favorite environmental issue.
9. Fork out the $25 membership fee for your favorite environmental organization.
10. Call Seventh Generation, an environmentalist catalog, (1-800-456-1177) and send catalogs to people you know who might buy something if they got one.

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