What is this blog about? The answer to this question is sure to evolve, but here’s a start.
First, I am writing a book called Human Nature and Human Beings in Nature: Culture, Consciousness, & the Fragile Earth. I have five chapters (not quite half of the book, as presently outlined) completed in draft form. Some of that, for sure, will end up in this blog, along with work in progress. My goal is to take some of the serious current scholarship relating to human nature in nature that often seems obscure or inaccessible, and show how and why it matters to the everyday lives we live.
The second half of that equation, everyday life, revolves around familiar institutions, work, family, and so on. It also is reflected, sometimes on a larger scale, in the daily news. So, I’ll also occasionally take up what’s happening in the world. Right now (early May, 2016) wildfire is destroying the city of Fort McMurray in northeastern Alberta, Canada, the hub of oil production from the Alberta tar sands; Donald Trump is sweeping to victory as the Republican presidential nominee in the U.S.; economic inequity continues to widen around the world; and refugees are still pouring out of Syria, just to mention a few. Lots going on!
(By the time you read this, all or some of this will have changed, new problems and issues arisen. What is in the news now?)
I will also slip in reflections on fly fishing, bicycli
ng, hiking, and other things I do, or simply on where I am—which right now happens to be the town of Nanaimo, on the eastern coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Also, you might see occasional notes on particular topics, like the history of science, or the evolution of culture. In the end, I guess, it’s still all about human nature, nature, the Earth.
Basically, I love to write—strange as it may sound. It’s one of the things I do. Writing can be frustrating, exhausting, lonely, discouraging…. But it’s also satisfying. Writing is a discipline. What it disciplines is thought. Like everyone else I have a lot of thoughts running through my head. They are often half-formed, jumbled, sometimes more intuition or feeling than actual concepts. In writing, I take some part of this mess and nurture and develop it. As I work it, it fills in, rounds itself out, takes on texture and mass, gets put in order. It’s a little like serious gardening, making pottery, or painting a picture.
Writing also can be a process of discovery. Sometimes I don’t really know what—or maybe even that—I’m thinking about something; but there is this feeling of something there that needs to be taken up and worked with like a lump of clay, or a half-formed song. I try to put it into words. Sometimes I have to worry at it for two or three days, and it feels like it never will give. The form and flow of what I’m thinking just won’t take shape. It’s frustrating! But then, I wake up one morning and there it is, complete, waiting to be discovered, uncovered, as my fingers fly over the keyboard. That’s the fun part.
But writing is also communication. That’s where this blog comes in. I’m setting it up as a means to communicate in something more like real-time. What I’m working on in the moment as part of an article or a book will take months or even years (I am slow) to see the light of day. In the course of daily life ideas may come and go and never get expressed. But with this blog, I can bring the reading much closer in time to the writing. It’s more like actually writing for someone—you.
So, that’s it, in a nutshell. For now.