At one point Moore was alone in a boat
out on the water, notebook on her lap and pen in hand, and she was trying to understand "the beautiful, complicated ways that love for people is all mixed up with love for places. The ecology, one might say, of caring." She continues:
"I opened my notebook. Let's put this gathered evidence in front of us and let it speak. Love has as its object: daughter, son, young woman who loves son, sudden quiet, a certain combination of smells (hemlock, saltwater, gas fumes), mist swimming with light, purple kayak, fog-bound island, hidden cove, and a man who can drive a boat backward through a whirlpool. The list is, of course, incomplete. Add silver salmon. Add unexpected sun. Add the whirlpool."
She made two lists - what it means to love a person and what it means to love a place - and found them to be the same list: (1) wanting to be near, physically; (2) wanting to know everything about; (3) rejoicing in the fact of; (4) fearing the loss of and grieving the injury to; (5) wanting to protect, "fiercely;" (6) being transformed in the presence of; (7) wanting to be joined with; (8) wanting the best for; (9) "desperately."
There was something important missing from her list, however. "Loving isn't just a state of being," she recognized, "it's a way of acting in the world. Love isn't a sort of bliss, it's a kind of work, sometimes hard, spirit-testing work." This is the wisdom of thirty-two years of marriage and a lifetime of loving the world around you, isn't it? What was missing?
"Number ten, I wrote in my notebook. To love a person or a place is to accept moral responsibility for its well-being."
Ah, this is where many of us fail - we say we love a person or a place, yet we fail to take care of her or him, of it. This means you cannot pretend to be an environmental president if you are pushing slash and burn policies, Mr. Bush. One cannot pretend to be a nature-lover if wilderness is lessened by his presence.
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"I believe that the most loving thing you can say to a person is 'Look,'" Moore believes. The most loving stance, she says in the piece "Refrigerator Fungus," is two people standing side by side, looking out at the world together. "When people learn to look," she says, "they begin to see, really see. When they begin to see, they begin to care. And caring is the portal into the moral world."
The saddest, most self-destructive mistake we make, Moore writes, is "to think that humans can degrade their habitats and not degrade themselves." Even pigs know not to shit where they sleep. The extractive heart of the miner beats markedly different than that of the best husbanding farmers.
Moore quotes something that the Powhatan-Ren'pe writer Jack Forbes said to her:
"You could cut off my hand, and I would still live. You could take out my eyes, and I would still live. Cut off my ears, my nose, cut off my legs, and I could still live. But take away the air, and I die. Take away the sun, and I die. Take away the plants and the animals, and I die. So why would I think my body is more a part of me than the sun and the earth?"
Suddenly we have perspective: this little mudball spinning in space is all we've got and we should be taking care of it, for it is as much a part of us as our hands or eyes or legs or lips, as much a part of us as our own heart.
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Continued in Part Four, below....
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