Happy New Natural Year

At the turning of the year, it’s customary to look back at the year that was and forward to the year that is yet to be. Whether your year starts at the Winter Solstice or the next page on the calendar hanging on the wall, the New Year is a time of celebration, regrets and resolutions for new beginnings.

On this third day of the New Natural Year, I celebrate the biodiversity of the place that Jean and I call home and all the life that shares this bit of the Pacific Plate with us, sliding along the edge of North America on its way north to Alaska. The local climate is as close to Paradise as anyone could expect. The sun shines, most of the time, through west and south facing windows, warming my shoulder, face and lap as I pound away on this defenseless computer keyboard. Crows, gulls and red tailed hawks decorate the sky and fill the air with their exuberant calls. The dusky-footed wood rat trying to gnaw its way into the tool shed in the yard has given up and gone elsewhere in search of winter shelter.

On reflection, I regret that in the past year I haven’t written enough, talked to neighbors and friends enough, testified at public meetings enough, communicated my understanding of the natural world and the place of humans as one species among myriad others sharing this bit of the Earth.

Looking forward to the coming Natural Year, I rededicate myself to write and speak more for those neighbors, friends and fellow beings who have no voice in human affairs.

The cumbersome, complex and confounding world of political/economic governance in Our Fair County, and most of the rest of the human world, is dominated by the goals of population and economic growth, for humans and human institutions, that is. Other-than-human species have no say in this dominant social goal, and, at present, few humans speak up to defend the livelihoods of the four-legged, the winged, the flippered, the crawling and squirming, and the neighbors standing majestically in place, whose continuing health and well being is essential to the living biosphere of this bioregion and this planet we all live on and in.

Those of us who are aware, and those who will soon become aware, must make our understanding of the Natural Word known and understood in the halls of government, in public commissions, in places of worship and contemplation, on street corners, across neighborhood fences, texting, phone calls, emails, discussion groups, Zoom meetings, blogs and websites, by whatever means available to us.

This may seem like a conundrum, an oxymoron, an unconformity to use the technologies that are destroying the Natural World to call for their end in its defense. Perhaps so, though we must use the tools we have in hand to change the world to a new/old lifeway that no longer needs them.

I wish for you all and for all Life a Happy New Natural Year, in peace and harmony with all living beings in the Santa Cruz Bioregion we all call Home.

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