[...]... and Sufi traditions appear here in connection with the question of beauty Chapter 5 moves to the other side of the relationship with nature the end of the world, ” that is, the psychological impact of environmental degradation and the destruction of the natural world It uses work on the effects of trauma to elucidate the perhaps subtler effects of environmental degradation It draws particularly on the. .. Internal and External The return to the green chaos, the deep forest and refuge of the unconscious —John Fowles, The Tree To enter the silence is to touch the fertile void and the nature of life itself Inner and outer meet at the threshold of that silence To enter it is to enter the “beyond” of both For Laurens van der Post, the journey to the interior of the desert is equally the journey to the interior... answer ended the primordial dialogue did the men gasp, as if coming up for air out of an unfathomed deep themselves, and start to talk again.22 22 Chapter 1 The commanding sounds of the bird and the lion plunge the listeners into an “unfathomed deep” of profound silence There the voices of the nonhuman meet the receptivity of the listeners at a depth that does not have words To those receptive ears the. .. becomes the fertile void the Buddhists speak of: the void that generates the “ten thousand things,” the whole array of created beings The roaring of the ocean waves arises out of the silence of the ocean This is the interplay between emptiness and form Colette Richard, the mountain climber 24 Chapter 1 cited earlier, tells us how the silence of the mountain—hardest of hard matter—was alive: “I was there... believe, was the film When the film, and the hero in it, acknowledged the suffering of the river and the people who lived by it, she became able to acknowledge and cry out her own agony Afterward she was free to find a different kind of silence 16 Chapter 1 The Awe Before There Are Words The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of eternity,... deals with the love of nature in its various forms and the question of how concern might arise It is based on the assumption—in which I concur with Harold Searles—that the nonhuman environment is an important presence for each of us from the beginning of life It hopes to evoke that recognition in the reader, and then to lead the reader into the sometimesbewildering question of the nature of our relationship... fear plays in this unspokenness The boy is afraid of his grandfather, who has shown how he can deal out pain to living creatures, and he is afraid to acknowledge this experience of shared suffering, of which he and his grandfather are the witnesses And the pain in the grandfather, which led him to be so hard? Unspoken, the food of truth denied, the child condemned to silent shame The Voice That Comes... boundary of silence toward what is outside Those feelings are the private domain of those who feel them for one another When the private intimacy of the love relationship spills over the boundaries, there is a sense that it is dissipated, or sullied, contaminated by the less sensitive energies of the group outside Love might then be talked about by nonlovers, and it disappears in such talk The group and the. .. anxieties—about the holocaust of nature, the collapse of the world, the failure of a future These we leave almost wholly unspoken “It’s scary,” someone will say, and then be silent It is as though we are cutting our own vocal cords One reason we keep silent about these profound anxieties is that we are afraid of “losing it,” going mad Think of the silliness of soldiers on leave from the front They simply... extensive writings of Robert Jay Lifton and others on the psychology of events and situations like Hiroshima, nuclearism, and the Nazi Holocaust Chapter 6 reflects on the issue of the future as a way of asking about the implications for action of all that has been said here It is particularly concerned with our capacity to think about time and the future, and about issues of leadership and group and communal . w0 h0" alt="" The Love of Nature and the End of the World This page intentionally left blank The Love of Nature and the End of the World The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern Shierry. States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. The love of nature and the end of the world : the unspoken dimensions of environmental concern. Silences 7 2 The Love of Nature and the Concern for Life 35 3 Tangling at the Roots of Being: Perception as Field and Reciprocity 63 4 What Beauty Can Tell Us: The Face of Nature 95 5 A Severe and Pervasive