Selfish Environmentalism?

GUEST BLOGGER: Kirstin Waldkoenig, summer intern for LEEP


Ensconced in the first few days of summer proper, I have been meditating on this question: How can we persuade others to care about the environment? Since I began teaching for the environmental education program here the beginning of May this year, my purpose has seemed clear to me in helping kids experience the outdoors. But I realized a few days ago when walking Lutherlyn's Venango Trail that I have also a larger motive: to somehow encourage and convince people to care about the nature that I care about.

At first, asking this question seems obvious to me. Why shouldn't we care about the myriad of wonders around us? But upon second thought, I am struck by the real possibility that this question never even crosses the minds of thousands of people. I am concerned with environment and the living ecosystems around me because I take joy in these things. I love long hiking in sun or rain, basking in the sun, and napping underneath tall trees. I have to remind myself that not everyone finds such pleasure in nature.

As many of us who love the outdoors want, I want to encourage others to love the environment like I do, at least get a taste of the fantastic world around us. But do I want others to care about nature simply because I care about nature? I ask myself if my purpose is selfish, self-centered. Of course I want to justify my own experiences in nature and share the details about the world around us that I find so poignant, but I cannot help asking myself if I am selfish because I want everyone to love the nature that I love. Why, exactly, should anyone care at all?

The Venango Trail was striking last Thursday morning when I followed it. A red-tailed hawk cried overhead "keeeeerr!" and the songbirds resumed their chatter when the raptor passed. I have been on hundreds of walks similar to this one, just listening and watching and enjoying the tickle of leaves across my ankles. And yet, this small walk reached me as if I were experiencing nature for the first time. I breathed deeply and at peace among the birdsong and the fresh scent of spice bush.

I could hear human voices, too, which are a regular part of camp life. These also are part of nature - the part we so often forget. Humanity is inextricably intertwined with the nature around us. In fact, we are the nature. I sat watching campers canoe on Upper Lake, and the sounds of an airplane high above us and the splashes of the paddles in the water added to the symphony of nature. This is one playlist, I realized, that I can never get stuck in my head. It's too diverse, too intricate, a melody I cannot follow because it is so wide in scope and variety that my human ear cannot memorize it. Never do I have songbirds stuck in my head.

When I have kids sit and listen to nature, the youngest ones will always report that they heard human sounds. I remind them that those are sounds that we are used to hearing, and I challenge them to hear past the sneezes and voices of other students to hear the creek gurgling or the squeak of a chipmunk. The fact that humans are animals seems to really be the foreign concept for these kids. Paddle splashes and airplane motors may not be nature per se, but humanity certainly is not apart from the ecosystems around us, the vast web of life which is more interconnected and playing to a more elaborate melody than we humans could ever create for ourselves.

It takes practice to notice nature, to remember the names of plants, and to look for (and find!) signs of animals. It takes more than a few attempts for kids to sit and actually be quiet enough to listen to the sounds around them when I take them for hikes in the forest. It takes practice to notice ourselves as part of everything around us.

So perhaps caring for Earth is always "selfish" in that we care about it because we are inseparably a part of it. If for no other reason, we should care for the nature around us because we, too, are nature. We are interconnected in more ways than we realize, more integral to the water, the wind, the rocks, the trees around us, than we care to be truly conscious of. This is why it takes practice for us to really look at what is around us.

Today, take some time to slow down, to just sit and listen to the world around you. Listen to the birds, and breathe some fresh air that you share with all the rest of the earth.




Kirstin Waldkoenig is a senior philosophy / creative writing major at Susquehanna University. She has been working with LEEP's programming since the beginning of May and will continue through the start of August this summer. She has an intense interest in environmental ethics and loves stargazing, climbing rock faces, and sleeping outside under the trees in her hammock.