Where do you live?

Climate change. The environment. Oft-bandied words verbally thrown about in today’s ecologically curious, or at least somewhat sensitive, age.

These commonly talked about issues are more often spoken about by politicians, media actors, and you and I as though they are one thing, rather than monumentally complex processes.

Doing so leads to the looming global ecological crises looking more like a set of problems to be solved, rather than a massive affront to how many human beings interact with the planet which sustains them.

Such reductions - though helpful for ease of conversation - can run the risk of delineating what is meant to be encompassed by those who ascribe to an (or many) environmental, ecological or ‘green’ movement(s) into nice, neat and simplistic forms of thinking.

Seeing the environment as something ‘out there’ or the ‘natural world’ as removed from the human social, political and cultural world is a massive step in the wrong direction.

A step in the right direction is beginning to look at how you interact with the physical world immediately around you. Whether in a city or elsewhere, consider how you stay warm, how you move from one geographic space to another, what you ingest, where your waste goes, etc.

Considering the minutiae of daily interaction with the physical world - both naturally occurring as in a plant, or constructed as in a slab of concrete - is a very thought provoking experience. It puts one in the proper mindset to move from thinking about how you personally interact with the physical world to how other humans do as well.

I raise this not out of arrogance or some lack of consideration of the readers’ ability to recognize that they live within a geographic, physical space. The goal of this blog post was instead to point out what should be obvious but too often isn’t considered.

The way that many live in the advanced capitalist West - you and I and anyone else on the Internet, for instance - leads to an overlooking of such interactions and dependencies.

The overarching necessity for an environmental movement, a starting point to even consider the possibility of solutions or copings with ecological crises, is to re-consider how we all interact with the planet and the geographical patches of it that we inhabit.

On a somewhat related note, don’t miss ecological thinker-extraordinaire Adria Vasil when she comes to the U of W on February 3. She speaks at 7:00 in Eckhardt Gramatte Hall in conjunction with the Grass Routes Sustainability Festival.