What's Your Paradigm?

When we talk about being "out in nature," we're announcing our paradigm. We believe nature is "out there" somewhere, and we need hiking boots and a backpack to get there. When we talk about "appreciating nature," we're also announcing our paradigm. We appreciate things at a distance, as though we are observers, not participants. As though we ourselves are somehow not nature, too. And being "close to nature" or "in harmony with nature"--well, what do we mean by that? What do we unconsciously believe?



Language is powerful, and the words we choose, the phrases we use--all shine a light on how we think. And thought and language in turn give rise to action.

That's the premise of this class--that creative writers, whose gifts are language and ideas, have something important to tell us, and in ways that newspapers, editorials, letters or scientific journals don't. Our first task is to read these writers carefully, to understand the relationship between their language and ideas, and to work toward reading and understanding ourselves and our own ideas better.

Kathleen Jamie's "Pathologies" and Michael Pollan's Second Nature: A Gardener's Education both bring us face to face with that Romantic paradigm we've inherited from Thoreau: the idea that, as Jamie says, nature is all "primroses and dolphins." This paradigm ignores the "nature" of the human body in all its glory and frailty; and suggests that we have to choose: nature or culture, wilderness or the city. It's taken me a long time to shake that paradigm loose from my own brain. I used to wonder, if I really want to be environmentally responsible, don't I need to move to a yurt out in the country, grow my own food, dig a well, knit sweaters from my own goats, and read by candlelight?

In my book about Kansas, My Ruby Slippers (not out yet), I write about my own process of discovering a new paradigm for my relationship to the planet, and to place. At one point, I really, finally get it. To be "in harmony with nature," you don't have to "go back to the land." We're already on the land. Even in the city, we're on the land. So the question we've all been making our way toward is, "How then shall we live?"

Do you share the paradigm that you've either got to get a yurt in the country, or accept the evils of civilization (whatever we mean by that word)? When you think of "nature," is your mental picture filled with dolphins and daisies? Would you, like Michael Pollan, decide to put up a fence to keep the woodchuck out of the arugula? Or would you allow the beast to make a salad whenever it wants because after all, it's his home, too? Are you busy trying to shake loose your own paradigms? Have you discovered yet what they are?

The question of paradigms matters, because it helps us edge toward that even bigger question that's been lurking at the edges of our conversation: How do we save the planet? Are we too late?

I believe that literature can give us the tools to imagine a new perception, to shape new paradigms, and to find a new relationship with our environment. As the Wendell Berry poem on our syllabus says, "Let imagination figure your hope." And let hope propel you to action.

For some inspiration, I include this commencement address by Paul Hawken at the University of Portland: http://www.fallingwhistles.com/blog. Most people reading this blog are not graduating, but this address seems apt, since we're all at the commencement of something big. Read it and see what you think.