The environment movement

The environment movement
The 'environment movement' in its widest sense (simply in terms of people who care about the environment), never really spells out what its vision of the future is, what it is trying to achieve, what a change to a sustainable world would look like. Part of the problem is that many people never really seem to be able to get their thinking above a war mentality - we live in a sort of constant state of siege, where concepts of 'doom' always seem to be upon us. In this situation, can it be surprising that no-one ever stops to say, well hold on for a moment, what kind of world do we want, can we work together to create? We need to be much more rigorous and determined about asking what it would mean to incorporate new ways of interacting with the natural environment into all our thinking, education and then into all our decision making. So, for example, we create opportunities for all school children to go outdoors and learn in outdoor classrooms, and make the commitment to ensure that these spaces are available at a close enough distance to all schools; similarly, spaces are created close enough to hospitals to act as natural healing spaces (benefits of green, plants and the associated wildlife you would get from native planting on health is proven - not just a little grassy park, green spaces with planting of species to attract and provide habitat for native wildlife...); all food production, energy, textile and other non-food crop production is done in a way that takes ecological processes and wildlife into account, that all transport, energy production is decentralised to people see where their energy comes from and see the wildlife benefits of this on their doorstep...and so on, in every sector you can think of. If knowledge and thinking on wildlife and ecological processes were integrated into absolutely every sector of society, the result would be that our surroundings and day-to-day living processes would develop / evolve alongside, and INTO, functioning ecosystems. Such ecosystems would not only be resilient and adapt to environmental change which in various forms / scales happens constantly, but also, the increase in natural habitat, soil etc... would sequester carbon, buffer air, water and against extremes of climate, thereby protecting human society from larger-scale environmental change. The ecosystem approach isn't something that can be created and imposed along previous lines where we decide what the policy output should look like, and then deliver it - rather it would be something that would evolve and emerge naturally as a result of positive collaboration and new innovative projects between all the sectors, as mentioned above.