[Newfie]

Ibon,

A few years ago I did a sabbatical sailing trip. My first leg, the longest, was 7 days, solo, non stop. I did 3,000 miles solo altogether. I haven't been the same since. Changes you.

Quiet? Yeah. Maybe a bit like dead? Perhaps. But not bad either, very much alive, more so than here. No one else to argue with, no one to blame, helps you take responsibility for yourself.

Except for those damn voices I kept hearing!

[KaiserJeep]

My own confrontation with human mortality was three years ago. For just slightly longer than 25 years I had been meeting up with a camping buddy for an annual journey into the backcountry. Our earliest expeditions were backpacking, but for the last decade we drove our Jeeps, until the trail ended and the works of man were totally gone from view. The only requirements were that we go somewhere new each year, and keep going until civilization was no longer visible. Then we would make camp, drop a few lures in the water, or attempt to puzzle out the runes scratched into an overhead rock surface by Neolithic people.

Then four years ago, he got cancer, and we started making plans for our final journey, the long-postponed voyage to Alaska's North Slope, as far as one could drive North. But he died three years ago, when the chemotherapy quit working.

I made one more trip by myself, a stupid thing for a 60+ year old man to do. Ten days alone in the desert. When grief overwhelmed me, I howled at the moon. When I ran out of food, I thought about it for a while, then came back.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')y father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'I')bon,

A few years ago I did a sabbatical sailing trip. My first leg, the longest, was 7 days, solo, non stop. I did 3,000 miles solo altogether. I haven't been the same since. Changes you.

Quiet? Yeah. Maybe a bit like dead? Perhaps. But not bad either, very much alive, more so than here. No one else to argue with, no one to blame, helps you take responsibility for yourself.

Except for those damn voices I kept hearing!

[basil_hayden]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'L')et's take two of your statements and see where that leads us.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')I am in a way glad if their was a widespread culling of the population as I see needless suffering and deprivation among many people on this planet.

[Newfie]

That's a pretty fine distinction Basil.

[basil_hayden]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'T')hat's a pretty fine distinction Basil.

[onlooker]

Ibon that is a very insightful post. I would add that we seem in this modern world to run from asking ourselves profound questions. When do you remember being at some social gathering and asking an awkward questions, such as what is the purpose of life? Among the people I know none except my current girlfriend seem to preoccupied with profound philosophical questions. So this silence you and Newfie speak of I think is disturbing in so much as it forces us to in absence of distractions to finally confront these questions. When in fact I believe by asking and perhaps attempting answers to them we can address perhaps our deepest insecurities and frailties.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('basil_hayden', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'T')hat's a pretty fine distinction Basil.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'M')ontequest mentioned as a young man he got an insight about "this disturbance within the force". I can't speak for him and I welcome him to elaborate if he likes but for me this was also a very clear perception.

[Newfie]

Monte,

For whatever reason I can't explaine I've know there are too many people since second grade. I thought I was some kind of freak.

But I think that this points to the idea that a few of us are less inhibited to knowing the truth than most. There must be some kind of social block in the brain that just does not let them go there.

I think it would be a worthwhile experiment for some psychologist to design a study to ask this question. Is it simply impossible for some to contemplate the extinction of our species?

Let me answer that question. We invented God and the afterlife to avoid thinking of death. If it is aborent on a personal level it must be even more so on a species level, but or everyday notion of God does not address that problem. Maybe that is the spiritual evolution we will see, not the OP, but an expansion of heaven were we all go when the species becomes extinct. A broader embracing of rapture.

[Newfie]

Mind twist...

Suppose, just suppose, that humanity is humanities own OP. We seem to be doing a wonderful job of sleep walking into species suicide.

Then WE are Natures answer to us, we are the agents of our own demise.

We don't need an OP, we ARE the OP.

Our bodies die after about 80 years due to some internal mechanisms. Is it so impossible to think that our species has some similar clock?

Kinda weird.

[SeaGypsy]

Second grade. Me too, it was a teacher introducing exponential curves & bell curves. Population was her main focus. Was about half what it is now.

[Ibon]

The forests and fields of my childhood in western Pennsylvania was my playground. A few friends and I were unsupervised for days on end with our parents not having a worry. Fishing trips with my father back in his neck of the woods in eastern Pennsylvania every other summer went like this. We seined for minnows in a farmers field and then drove down a dirt road and camped in an old canvas tent. We crossed a rail road track and fished from these rocky bluffs using bobbers and minnows and worms pulling out catfish, bluegills, crappies, perch, bass.

I had a mentor, a cousin who was older and studying to be an entomologist. When we visited our grandparents in eastern Pennsylvania he would wake me up at 2am on misty warm rainy summer nights and we drove 30 minutes up a dirt road in national forest to arrive at a ridge top where a communication tower was set up that had powerful lights at the base as a warning to aircraft. Millions of moths would cover the walls and we would collect insects with killing jars and this cousin taught me how to pin the insects. That was the moment that I fully grasped the degree of bountiful biodiversity on the planet and it was this, together with fishing trips and playing in the woods, that set my direction to study ecology and in many ways lead me to where I am today, up at the top of a 4WD road here at Mount Totumas where I now have entomologists coming and we set up mercury vapor lamps to collect insects.

I spent 6 years after university in wilderness, hitchhiking around the country, backpacking in national parks, forests and BLM land out west. Worked as a wilderness counselor for kids for two years, took expedition length canoe trips on The Churchhill River in northern Saskatchewan and many canoe trips in Quetico and Boundary Waters in southern Ontario and northern Minnesota. Saw a cloud forest for the first time in southern Mexico when I was 21, was very drawn to this tropical yet temperate habitat that was both exotic and familiar (my appalachian roots) at the same time.

These deep nature experiences created a bond that has lasted a lifetime but set me apart from 99% of society. I felt like many of you have expressed that I was not part of my fellow species around me, I would see the flash of a Cooper's Hawk darting through flock of pigeons in an urban area and look around and I was the only one who noticed. Time and time again.

All of us are sharing stories where a deep communion with nature resulted in a spiritual alignment with the natural world that had the power to separate us from the social fabric of consumption culture. We were perhaps in it to make money and survive but we were not of it because of the strong experiences with the natural world.

If we were the rare oddballs back then in the 60's and 70's and 80's before digital media and before childhood became micro managed by our parents with only structured play like soccer games, how rarer today it must be that young people can have similar experiences that set them on a path toward a primal relationship with nature that some of us were so fortunate to have. As we can see this needs to start in childhood. And childhood today is more firmly tied to the fabric and structure of urban and suburban landscapes, to digital landscapes. We have a culture were nature has been pushed even further into abstraction.

Nature in the media when I was a kid was Jacques Cousteau on TV making new discoveries in marine habitats. Today it is the survivor genre and outdoor experiences have become adrenalized zip line experiences. The nervous system, jaded and aligned to digital media, can only get its rocks off when the experiences are "survivor" or extreme mountain biking or zip lining or jumping off cliffs. This reflects the nervous system of our distracted culture. What of the quiet walk in the woods where a stone unturned revealed a salamander?

What Monte said at the end of his post is all one can say. It is sad.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', ' ')We have a culture were nature has been pushed even further into abstraction.

[Newfie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'Y')es, of course, some species have adapted well to our anthropic ecosystems. But I don't think I want to live in a world where the dominant wildlife is house sparrows, starlings, and brown rats. I sometimes wonder if there is any life here on earth that we can just let be

[careinke]

I really enjoyed reading all of your comments about silence in nature.

Unfortunately that is all but impossible today. Especially in the US. Except for one very small spot in the Olympic Rainforest, there is no place in the US you can go and NOT hear human civilization. Even the spot in the Olympics, is only there because FAA moved the jet routes around it. Of course now that people know about it, it is being ruined by people visiting it.

A small caveat here, obviously if you are standing next to a waterfall or on an ocean beach, nature will drown out the human made noise. But that really does not count, if the waterfall was not there, you would here man made noise.

I learned about this several decades ago, and ever since I have been trying to prove it wrong, not just in the US, but all over the world. In over 40 years, I found ONE place, and it only lasted for about ten minutes before some Bedouin drove up to great us in the middle of the Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia.

Certainly lends some credibility to our overpopulation woes.