By Isaiah Ritzmann
Published in December 2018
Last year our Finding Our Place series fostered meaningful reflection in our community on what Wendell Berry calls “the present fact of Creation.” Berry, in the thoughtful word craft of his essays, explored the complexity and urgency of the environmental degradation that we face in our time.
The environmental crisis, he repeatedly pointed out, is not simply a problem to be solved. Environmental issues are not out there, separate from us, fixable from a distance.
Instead we are in relationship with the environment, in community with the earth. The air, the water, the soils are to be respected as community members and to be treated as neighbours whom we are to love as if ourselves. Seeing the damage humanity has inflicted on the earth as a violation of kinship and community can bring us to great grief. Yet this same recognition can call us towards something new, a way of living that repairs and restores relationship.
Perhaps we find it difficult to imagine the air, the water, and the soil as members of community because of how hidden and subtle these relationships are in our everyday life. We enact these intricate relationships all the time. In what we eat we relate to the soil. In how we clean we relate to the water. In how we get around we relate to the air, and to the climate. The list is endless. It is our deep misfortune that our business as usual is often deeply violent in these ecological relationships. A quick internet search or regular read through the local newspaper will make this abundantly clear.
If violent relationships run like a thread through our lives we are left with the task of re-weaving our relationships with the earth. The metaphor of weaving generously illuminates. In weaving two distinct sets of threads, the one called the “warp” and the other the “weft,” are interlaced to form a fabric or cloth. To weave by hand is time-consuming, attentive, hard but good work. It is meticulous. It is also beautiful. It is art and it is craft. In weaving the warp and weft are at right angles to each other. In a similar way our social and environmental challenges, our human and ecological relationships, seem to be perpendicular to each other. There are so many relationships, each like a strong but narrow line of thread. In many of the ways we live these threads do not overlap, do not come together. Our challenge is to find how these relationships can be integrated, woven together.
In his essay “Solving for Pattern” (1980) Wendell Berry talks about how the dense interconnectedness of our ecological and social relationships means that problem solving is not straightforward. We can solve a problem in one area only to multiply problems in other areas. Yet we can also have what he calls a “ramifying series of solutions,” a solution to one thing that becomes a solution to many things. This is what weaving ecology is all about. It’s about the thoughtful, skillful reworking of one relationship that then, happily, reworks many more as well.
For example say you decide that you will ride your bike to work instead of driving. That’s good for your relationship with the earth. It’s also good for your relationship with your bank account as it is cheaper to bike than to drive. It’s also good for your health, your relationship with your own body. In fact some companies will pay for their employees to bike to work as they find it reduces their health insurance costs. So riding your bike is good for your relationship with your company and society, whose health car costs shrink. Biking, even if it initially takes more time commuting than a car, ultimately saves you time – time you can now invest in relationship with family and community. So many threads of relationships are brought close together, woven in a fabric of coherence.
This coming year The Working Centre plans to host a variety of educational initiatives – a film series, new Fermented Thoughts, book clubs and Roundtable Discussions – as part of our Weaving Ecology series. Our aim in this series is to host an expansion of our community’s ecological imagination, seeing the kinds of work needed to reweave our relationships with the earth and supporting people in doing this kind of work. Our hope is that through many and diverse conversations and study all of us can deepen our understanding and commitment to living sustainably and making the sacrifices, personal and collective, that this requires.
We trust people will feel invited to join in dialogue and learn from one another how to repair and restore our relationships with our closest and oldest neighbour – the earth herself.
