I’m an environmentalist in the broadest sense, “environment” being a surround of sense-tingling elements that produce in us good feelings or anxious ones—though not everyone even senses them.
“Environment” can be our physical world, of course. The dampness or aridity of a place, the perhaps pristine condition of waters or blueness of skies, the natural splendor of plants or freedom of truly wild life. We are moved by such undespoiled scenes and naively wish all of existence were virginal.
Corrupted environs impact us, too. The griminess of urban streets shuddering with traffic under dismal skies in air crammed with unidentifiable bangs next to sidewalks full of the sullen ugliness of too many people in too big a hurry. It leaves you feeling mugged.
Yet environment is about human nature, too.
Novelist Willa Cather experienced the Nebraska plains as a girl in the 19th century and never lost the sensations associated with the experience. In one of her novels, the author had a character bemoan the loss of “wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests.”
The author went on: “Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odor. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labor and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe such air only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sagebrush desert.”
Cather rued the changes in the natural environment—the transition from undisturbed plain to tilled farmland—as well as in the mental outlook of the people living through it. The pioneers necessarily evolved from dreamery to industry, from infinite possibility to earnest productivity. It wasn’t a loss so much as a disappointment mostly felt in their hearts.
I suppose the feeling could be compared to a loss of innocence. Can you remember the season when possibility eroded into probability, dreams yielded to reality, the sun came up and hope dried up? The resulting anguish wasn’t breathtaking, but it lingered. Perhaps it still lingers.
There is a simple way to avoid personal environmental pangs like those: Don’t put yourself at risk. When opportunity for meaningful change in life visits you, ignore it. Don’t flirt with it or even cursorily examine it. Quickly dismiss it and do so rudely so that it never returns. Don’t let expectations put you in a place where the loss of a “peculiar quality in the air” subsequently depresses you. We are free to choose our personal environment.
Look again at the accompanying stormy-sky illustration. It’s pure Rorschach. Does it attract or repel you? (There’s no correct answer.) Boiling clouds can fascinate us or cause us to want to flee. While pioneers must weather stormy days, not everyone is a pioneer.
Good approach to environment!