1998 Spring

A teacher in the Southwest told me he once asked the children in his class to draw a picture of themselves. "The American children," he said, "completely covered the paper with a drawing of their body. My Navajo Indian students, however, drew themselves quite differently. Making their bodies much smaller, they also included in their drawings the nearby mountains, canyon walls, and dry, desert washes. Because to the Navajo, the environment is just as much a part of who they are as are their own arms and legs."

The understanding that we are a part of something larger than ourselves, is, I feel, Nature's greatest gift. With it, one's sense of identity expands and, by extension, so does his or her concern for the well being of all. True caring for the environment comes, as Lao Tsu said, "when you love the world as your own self." Whenever we, as nature leaders, point out a bird or flower, aren't we ultimately hoping to encourage this type of loving respect?

Julianne Tilt wrote this article for The Lost Valley Book of Ecological Cooking and Living in 1995. Ariel and Matthew are a few years older now, but the spirit of this article still rings true. The Lost Valley children can often be found in the garden during the summer months, digging worms, chasing butterflies, and browsing the vegetables, and are able to identify and name more vegetables and wild plants than most adults. To the children, the garden is a magical place that always inspires joy and wonder. In this way, they are our teachers, and offer us continual reminders of what is truly important.

During my first spring at Lost Valley, I was working out in the garden with two interns when my inquisitive three year-old daughter came along. Having just finished prepping a bed, we began to sow while engaged in discussion about something lofty and ponderous. I acknowledged Ariel's presence by stroking her head full of curls.

She arrived on June first, the first day of the 1997 Deep Agroecology Apprenticeship. We were anxiously awaiting her arrival as she had warned us she would be pulling down our driveway in a freightliner semi-truck. She had been concerned about her ability to cover the expense of the Apprenticeship plus transportation since she was working full time to pay her way through college, so she hitched a ride with her truck driver uncle and spent two weeks on the road from Illinois.

As the program facilitators, Charlie and I had been excited about Jill from the time we first read her application to the Apprenticeship. She seemed highly motivated and passionate about pursuing her dreams, just the kind of person whom we wanted to attract to the program. When she jumped out of the cab of that huge shiny white semi, I wasn't quite sure this was the same person I had envisioned. She was heavy set, hair bleached blond, with sad eyes and her mouth set in a tight line. I was surprised and wondered if she had come to the right place. I thought, "This will be an interesting three months."

Every winter I spend hours in the office, thumbing through the files collected from the summer. Schedules, lectures, handouts, outlines, evaluations; pages and pages of information to assist me in planning next year's agroecology internship. Every year I try to include more information on gardening, herbalism, wildcrafting, permaculture, and biodynamics. More readings, more exercises, more field trips...so much to cover in three months. Then reality hits, as I leaf through the file marked canceled. Lectures never given, field trips never visited, exercises never completed. It's then I remember: "More is not important."

In three months interns only taste a piece of Lost Valley, a glimpse of farming, a peak into their process. This short season we share is about a lot more than lectures, seminars, or field trips. It's much more than growing our own food.

By Dolores LaChapelle The Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess, first differentiated "deep ecology" from the more prevalent "shallow ecology" at the Third World Futures Conference in Bucharest in 1972. He defined "shallow ecology as a fight against pollution and resource depletion; Central objective: health of the people in developed countries"; while deep ecology was "rejection of man-in-environment image in favor of the relational, total-field image." Although deep ecology has been evolving ever since, there are two fundamental underlying premises: 1) the scientific findings of the interrelationship of all systems of life and 2) the problem of anthropocentrism--human-centeredness. In fact, in 1989 Naess went even further when he said that "environmentalism is a bad word and perpetuates the idea that the human organism or human society can really be separated from the ecosystem."

I met Arne Naess in 1978 when we were both tutors for the New Natural Philosophy program. At that time I began working out an experiential education approach based on deep ecology. In the years since then I have done workshops in various parts of the United States, published a yearly newsletter on the subject, and lectured at various colleges--both in the U.S. and in Canada, culminating in the publication of my book Sacred Land, Sacred Sex in 1988.