Book Excerpt (Can McKennan)

“Today’s environmental movement is a vast ecosystem that includes farmers and teachers, monkey-wrenching activists and pragmatic politicians, pagans and mainline Protestants, entrepreneurs and communalists, toddlers playing on the beach and elders planning a green burial. These diverse people are united by an awareness that their individual destinies are caught up with the health of natural ecosystems at the local, global, and cosmic levels. Human beings have always evolved in creative symbiosis with apples and wheat and cattle and intestinal bacteria; environmentalists are simply those human beings who are becoming conscious of that evolutionary process. This consciousness is changing the way we interact with the physical beings that surround us: what we eat, how we treat plants and animals, where we live, how we travel from place to place. And ecological consciousness is also changing our human culture: the stories we tell, the ways we teach and learn, how we buy and sell and save, our outer rituals and innermost beliefs.”