I'm going to go off on a tangent here.
I took a class - Human Ecology - during the Spring semester of my second year in college. I can honestly say, without exaggerating, that it changed my life. I remember telling my parents about the class after the first day. "The professor is one of those people who would go out of her way to not step on a bug," I said jokingly. Little did I know that I would be "one of those people" by the end of the semester.
There were two major assignments in that class that forever changed the way I thought about "nature" and Earth. The first assignment was to keep a nature journal, in which I had to write about and draw my daily observations of nature. Spending about twenty minutes just sitting outside each day really opened my eyes to the magnificence of all living things. Not only did I see the beauty of sunsets and wildflowers, but I also began to notice the more subtle things. I watched the ducks at a pond on campus and got to know each one of their personalities and duck behavior. I got to watch little ducklings grow older. I watched up close bees and butterflies moving from flower to flower. Instead of killing a spider, I would sit and observe it, trying to understand what its life was like. I learned more about "nature" from observing and experiencing than I have in any science class that I have taken.
The second assignment was to read the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Quinn says that most humans "...regard the world as a sort of human life-support system, as a machine designed to produce and sustain human life" (p. 59). Quinn discusses what he calls the two types of human cultures: The Leavers and The Takers. These two cultures have very different ideas about what the environment is. The Leavers have been around for a couple of million years, but are now a very small group of people - hunters and gatherers. They see themselves not as rulers of the world, but as just another species in the community of life. They would not understand the concepts of "nature" and "the environment." The Takers have only been around for about 10,000 years or since the beginning of full-time agriculture. This huge group consists of most of the people in the world today. They view the terms "nature" and "wilderness" as something you visit or a nice vacation spot, but usually not where you would like to live. The way The Takers live is not sustainable. Humans will not be able to live on Earth like this forever.
After reading Ishmael, I read some of Quinn's other books - My Ishmael, The Story of B, Beyond Civilization, Tales of Adam, and Providence. I changed my views on religion, education, culture, and environmental issues. I became really interested in geography, anthropology and traveling. I changed my major and switched schools. Then I decided to stop pursuing a degree and instead took the classes that I really wanted to take. My new ways of thinking also led me to homebirth, extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping, cloth diapering, elimination communication, homeschooling, gardening and simple living. More recently minimalism and radical homemaking.
There is a point to this tangent. ;-)
I was told by several people that my views on things would become more moderate and mainstream again once I had kids. And they did - slightly. I am still definitely not the same person that I was before taking that class, but I haven't been as passionate about it all. And I haven't been making much progress in the way of living lightly and working to change some of my Taker ways of thinking. I guess raising babies just took up too much of my energy. So, yes, I had heard about the oil spill, and I thought it was awful. But I hadn't really given it much thought up until a few days ago. I don't really know what it was that changed. Hearing people talk about it in the blogs I read and on Facebook. Seeing the pictures and videos of the spill on the Internet and television. Plus the fact that j is learning to entertain himself (that's right walking at 8 months!!) gives me more time and space to *think* and do things other than parenting for at least a few minutes a day. The combination of all of these things rekindled that passion I had a few years ago. I'm on fire again. ;-)
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