I’ve always loved being outside. But somehow I learned – from a very young age – to go outside only after everything else was done: homework, work, reading, dishes, whatever. But as I got older, I usually managed to get outside more and more. I started cross country ski racing later in high school and went on to coach part-time even after I had a corporate consulting job. In grad school I found ways and places to run, and I did extensive field work outside.
But living in the corporate world really reinforced the “work first do you later” mentality that was already there. And after having a baby and going through some corporate shifts (my original small firm was bought by a much larger, mid-sized one), I stopped going outside for anything other than absolute necessity. And it was literally killing me.
So I’m here, writing about my passion: nature and society. How do we organize ourselves around or without natural environments? And why do we so readily deny our need to connect with the non-human world? And what are the consequences?
I’m not 100% clear what this space is going to look like over time, but I need to talk about it with the world. I see a hurt, a system that denies our humanity and drives us to misery, and I want to explore it and find ways to fix it. I want to share that with others and engage in a broader conversation.
It’s something I’ve been leading up to in earnest for a couple of months, and it has been in the background of my mind for many years, decades really. But it has all become so much more poignant in the last weeks as we live out the reality of a truly sinister global pandemic for the first time in living memory. I live in one of the absolute hot-beds of COVID-19 infections, near a ski resort in Colorado. As I sit here social distancing, I feel like this conversation is more necessary than ever.
In this space I plan to explore my ideas and experience, to do research, and to keep myself accountable to go outside – even if it’s just a few minutes looking at a tree – every day at least once without a chore attached. I hope this can serve as a spark, providing manageable actions for all of us to get out there with the trees.
Out There With the Trees 