I'm happy to announce, on my 28th birthday, the launch of wisdomandearth.org. On the site you will find photo galleries, poetry, and essays that I have produced over the past several years. In terms of writing, the past few years have been, unfortunately, very quiet ones for me. Now that the site is launched, rectifying that oversight is my primary goal, and where the real journey begins.
“Oh me, Oh America,” one of the essays on the site, which I wrote in 2003, relates my experience in the months after September 11th. While more personal than I envision future content(and despite its immaturity and angst, true to time and place,) I think of it as a birthing pang to this site and its purpose. I would like to make clear my intention that future content on the site will be more newsworthy and documentary in nature.
Why “wisdom and earth”? Biodiversity is critical to a healthy planet, and biodiversity includes us. Geography and climate determine what we eat, how we build our homes, and how we creatively express and encounter the mysteries and meanings of life – or at least they did, before the ill-fated human experiment in overpowering these realities with industry and fossil fuels. Certainly there are still places in the world where people live in balance with their environment, maintaining ways of life that have evolved over millennia. Yet with each passing day languages and indigenous societies – with their unique wisdom and vision – face increasing threat and extinction. While environmental degradation and climate change have achieved “critical mass” in the media and political dialogue, no less important is the rapid vanishment of our cultural heritage in the face of globalization and mass-market approaches to economies, media, and even religion. Growing trends like organic foods and walkable cities show that many aspects of human living, so carelessly discarded in the past few generations, must be revived. Rather than hoping for new technology to save us, many answers lie not in the future but in our past and in our living but endangered present. In seeking to understand the relationship between wisdom and earth, I think we will find more than solutions to problems; we will encounter the deeper joys and mysteries of our human experience that a dramatic and sudden attachment to technology has largely obscured.
My work going forward is to report on the dialogue between human wisdom and the earth; where it is threatened, where it is being revived, and how it evolves; how it is an issue of physical survival, and how it is an issue of deep spiritual importance, with the belief that strengthening the bond between “wisdom and earth” is not only necessary to the planet’s survival, but also to our pursuit of happiness.
I absolutely welcome suggestions, leads, and collaboration from all of you. My hope is that this site can one day become a collective pursuit by those who share a commitment to protecting the incredible diversity and beauty of our world.
Thank you for all of your past and future support. Jonathan
