Disempowerment and Connection

You'll read about our disconnection to the natural world all over the place. I don't have to argue the point because most would regard it as a fact.

Yes, it is our current lifestyles that have brought us to this point, but it is something more specific that I have been thinking about of late.

As I walk home from the shops in town I pass a warehouse, not ancient but disused for many years.  Jasmine has over taken the north wall and the southern wall is completely hidden behind a living curtain of ivy. The Butterfly Bush has claimed the grounds of what was once the outside. The walls within are covered in graffiti of various languages, none of it the bright and inspiring kind. The railings outside are bent wide and pallets have been dragged inside to create a nook for the consumption of alcohol. The acoustics of the building however don't lend itself to this activity.

Litter is everywhere. You would think a bin had been upturned.

On the railings outside there is now an unimposing white laminated sheet hanging. The writing small l enough to necessitate you stopping to read it.

It notifies me, member of the public, that planning application has been made for retail and residential properites to be erected on this site. Gone will be the drunks hideout. Gone too he graffiti and the piles of rubbish. All good things.

But gone too will also be the two big ash trees, and this makes me sad. I hope the developers will find a way to leave the ash trees standing, but know that probably this will not even occur to them as important.

And I also know there is nothing I can do. 

Disempowerment.

I read somewhere, some wise person say that we don't care for the land anymore because we no longer live there - we live inside our heads.

Regretfully I cannot remember where this wise insight originated. There is more than a grain of truth there. But I also wonder if part of the problem is that we have no say. How hard it is to love something, somewhere, when you cannot protect it...