Dendrias wrote:I think, well, I imagine that coming to Druidry is a change in lifestyle.
Seeing human "as just one part of the wider family of life" could render the question, whether 'we' should protect something against our actions, useless, because 'we' are part of 'nature' and our cities are part of 'nature'. What seems to be a damage in one place, can be a gain in the other.
I wonder, how real ecofriendly living, without harming what is usually called 'nature', would look like. It's certainly not about everybody living in a hut with a logfire and a little garden around it. Our lifestyle to a certain extent has to be as it is now. I can't imagine a 'rollback' to another lifestyle, for the masses. Or could You imagine 7 512 400 people peeing into the Thames just in the area of London. Wood would soon be very short, the air even more polluted because of the logfires. That would be harmful, don't You think?
It is interesting to speculate on how a globally sustainable and equitable lifestyle would look. According to some articles I have read everyone on earth could live like contemporary Scandinavians (or the British lower middle class) if we used green forms of power generation and environmental best practise at home and for industry, didn't fly and ate bioregionally.
As you say we couldn't have roll back time and have 3 million log fires in London, but it is a mistake to think that there aren't fires somewhere kicking out CO2 and particulates (smoke) as things are. The energy that Londoners are using (excepting gas and oil bunt for central heating on site) is generated by really big fires burning coal, oil and gas (and a bit of uranium) somewhere else in the country. Every time you flick a switch a fire burns somewhere on your behalf.
If we were to switch to sustainable power generation then those fuels would be replaced with coppiced willow, timber waste, wind, tidal, ground source heat, passive and active solar, saltwater osmosis, methane from waste and animal sources, micro-hydro generation etc etc. I wouldn't expect every Londoner to have a wood stove of their own! In fact it is unlikely that the average Londoner would notice any difference at all, since electricity would still come out of the wall. It might cost a little more, but then hopefully more efficient appliances would offset that. Wood stoves are really only suitable for people like me who live in isolated locations where timber is plentiful.
As for the wee, where does it go now? Into the Thames, via a sewage works.
Dendrias wrote:Isn't a city like London a special ecosphere, not more than half man-made. With the pigeons, sparrows and rats eating waste, the predators eating pigeons and dead rats, the special climate, and so on. Would that be a 'nature' worthwile to be protected, as well?
But that doesn't mean that I was against any change or effort. No way! I just cut my car-driving distance a lot!
I'm just thinking.
The problem with cities as they stand is precisely that they are
not ecospheres. London only exists because it draws resources from all over the world, often from places where the people who make or extract and sell those resources live very poorly, with far lower standards of living than the Londoner who uses the end products. It is a mistake to look at a city as an entity, separate from the complex global systems which support it.
Apparently London's environmental footprint, ie the area of land it would need to exist sustainably with current levels of consumption, is about twice the total area of the UK (
http://www.london.gov.uk/assembly/membe ... e_food.pdf)
It doesn't have to be that way, London, as other cities, could grow a lot of its own food and generate a lot of its own power with some thought put into it. Its really positive that lots of people are already working towards that. And don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with city life, it is in many ways possible to be greener in a city. We live in a village with almost zero public transport infrastructure and so everyday to do anything we have to drive. When I lived in London I didn't bother having a car. Thinking about our environmental impact isn't about rolling back the clock or trying to create some rural idyll, just practising joined up thinking about where stuff comes from and whether we need to use it.
Anyway to get back to Katie's original point, and not get sidetracked, personally I think it is essential to think about the wider world as part of our spiritual journey. Otherwise there is a danger that 'spirituality' or 'Druidry' becomes just another consumer object, a means of projecting and cultivating a self image that we think makes us more attractive or interesting. Or it can be a means to find a substitute community, a social prop. These can be good things as far as they go, but they are ultimately self centred things, and to have a a profound impact on the world and on our deep selves IMO Druidry needs to move beyond 'self' and change the way we relate to other beings.
I have found the most wonderful changes in me have happened because of my druidry. I could not practice druidry and be unchanged - in any way!!
