Green Intentions: Dylan Thomas and the Faces of Nature

by Kim, June 29, 2009 at 2:51pm

Two faces of the sun, by Le Corbusier

Last week I wrote about the poetry of the green movement, and today we're going to have a little more poetry. In fact, don't be surprised if you see poetry, thought-provoking quotations, and other posts from the heart in this space in coming weeks. After all, my academic background is checkered with creative writing, religious studies, psychology and more. My volunteer work has drawn me into the world of genetics advocacy, and I'm an avid reader on a variety of subjects. In short, I'm like most of you: interested in a lot of areas, expert in a few, and always trying to get better at the art of living. Since I've heard the wake-up call about global warming, living simply has become a social responsibility as well as a personal choice, but it's my belief that trying to live a more environmentally responsible lifestyle is still as much of an art as a science.

Those of us trying to live greener lifestyles all suffer from "green fatigue" every once in awhile because of the sheer amount of information that we need to process. A product that's on the "environmentally preferable" list one week is on next week's blacklist. Resources like our Conscious Consumer Marketplace and The Good Guide can help sort through the sometimes confusing information about what to buy, but the goal isn't to become talking heads spouting the newest data on green cleaners or plastic contamination, is it? While I respect every person in the movement dedicated to finding these facts, and every person who struggles to restructure their lives to live by them, New Dream has always been about that obscure "something more" that happens after you've bought all the right products (or decided against buying them at all). For me personally, my New Dream has an awful lot to do with beauty, that uncommodifiable entity that is so threatened by pollution, exploitative business practices, and our global thermometer inching ever upwards. A world without the silver gleam and grace of fish or the intricate nexus of life that is a rainforest will be immeasurably impoverished, but one of the best ways to sum up this loss is in terms beauty. No one wants to think of a contemporary dustbowl, or of nature only turning her most fierce and inhospitable face to us in the form of hurricanes. And haven't we all lost some sort of primary human right now that we can't just enjoy a sunny day without having to worry that it's the beginning of the end?  These are the rights I was getting at in the Post-Consumption Bill of Rights: the parts of life that may take a little more effort but which bring us closer to the life we want to be living.

Look for a new series of posts that will attempt to unite the actions that we know we need to take as green-minded folks with the inspiration that will help us take a few more of those steps every day.  Today's bit of inspiration comes from Dylan--no, not that Dylan, though he probably has a lot of words to live by in his music.  Dylan Thomas' poem,  "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower":

he writes. I've always liked this line because it doesn't create an artificial boundary between the energy present in nature and that which we utilize in our human pursuits.

It's hard to really comprehend how much our fate is tied to that of trees.

Ditto for water...

The rest of the poem can be interpreted with our modern eyes as a warning about disrupting natural processes. On that note, today's green intention is looking at our carbon footprints to reduce carbon impact. Check out one of many carbon calculators and see if there's something you haven't been willing to budge on that you can compromise on a little. Let's woo nature's kind face to turn towards us again.

See the whole poem here.