The events of September 11th have many U.S. residents regarding our boundaries with more fervency. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Terry Link wonders if it’s time that we stop and reflect on the nature of the boundaries in our lives. Perhaps as he suggests, it’s time to reconsider those boundaries from a new perspective:
Transcript
The events of September 11th have
many U.S. residents regarding our boundaries with more fervency. Great
Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Terry Link wonders if it’s time that we
stop and reflect on the nature of the boundaries in our lives. Perhaps as
he suggests, it’s time to reconsider those boundaries from a new
perspective:
I live in a mid-Michigan rural
township. You know, the brainchild of the Ordinance of 1785, which
outlined the development of this region by creating six-by-six square mile
boxes for townships. Despite its relatively sparse population, our little
township is carved up into 4 school districts. The boundaries are
irregular in shape. Just a mile to my east is a county line. My kids
attend a school in that county. My next-door neighbor’s children attend a
school in our county. Our state and national boundaries have interesting
stories as well. Like these, most of the boundaries that separate us are
human creations.
The events of September 11th have
many of our citizens focusing on boundaries – national, ethnic, religious,
political, and more. We distinguish between those who live on the other
side of the boundaries as being somehow separate or different from us. We
rally around symbols of those boundaries – our flag, our national anthem,
our church, and so forth. But I think you would agree that it would be
silly for me to consider my next door neighbor who happens to reside in a
different school district as “different” from me simply because he’s
across an arbitrary boundary? Or think that kids who live in the adjacent
county who nevertheless go to the same school as mine are as a result,
“different” than my own.
Nature’s boundaries are much more
seamless. Some birds migrate seasonally from one continent to another.
Monarch butterflies that grace our backyards during summer, retreat to
Mexico for the winter. The air that I am breathing as I speak to you will
travel the world and be breathed in by plants and animals and other
humans, perhaps in Pittsburgh or Paris, undergoing numerous chemical
transformations along the way. The hydrologic cycle that keeps us alive
moves water from the Great Lakes around the world – flowing into the
Atlantic Ocean or evaporating into the atmosphere to be part of rain in
North Carolina or Quebec. How could we think for a moment that we are
separate from nature?
I believe we spend way too much
of our psychic energy focusing on what sets us apart from each other, what
makes us different. We use artificial boundaries to separate “us” from
“them,” “I” from “Thou.”
We need to learn from nature. If
you look at the pictures of earth from outer space you notice this
beautiful blue sphere. It provides us life; in fact it is teeming with
life. We can’t see boundaries between us from that distance. We see a
system of life that is connected and interrelated. In fact it’s dependent,
wholly dependent, upon relationships.
When we can begin to look at all
of us humans as being interrelated with the rest of the biosphere that
provides us with air to breathe, water to give us life, and food to
nourish our development, perhaps we can dissolve the artificial boundaries
that divide us from each other.
Maybe if we could see that we are
not separate from nature, but part of it, then we will learn to treat our
home with more affection. And maybe, just maybe that affection can spread
from human to human, with less reliance on violence, and more on empathy
and compassion. Maybe it’s time to rally around the earth flag, that
honors the home we all share.
Host Tag: Terry Link is Director of the Office
of Campus Sustainability at Michigan State University.