There is something truly great about the man made world. But man's world fails when it forgets it is grounded in the largely irrational natural world. All of man's beauty is based on the natural world, and as such is beautiful to us. We must work to respect that world and realize that we understand it relatively poorly.

Despite living in such a modern society, we are largely natural and local. We live in little dots in a big planet. Less then 10% of our state is either residential, commercial, or industrial. Instead most of New York is wooded or farmed. We still farm, we still manage forests and other resources for our benefit. We might live in relatively compact cities and suburbs, but we still live largely in a natural world.

We also live in local societies. We study big issues and hear about them on the news every night. The war in Iraq seems to be more important then what is happening in our backyards. Yet, what happens in our backyards and the relatively small bubbles of the world we live in defines the world we live in. We must always respect that all is ultimately local in our world.

As such we should always be celebrating our local cultures and emphasize our local politics. We rarely know what's going on in our backyards, in our environment. We should spend more time trying to observe our world and question. We should look for more local solutions and try to embrace the environment as much as we can, despite living in a world that is somewhat abstracted from the natural world.

We need to respect our natural environment. We might be able to log the forest, farm the land, and do far more destructive things, but we really do not understand it all that well. As Leopold argued in the Land Ethic, man is simplifier of ecosystems. We simply can't build a farm or a strip mall as good as nature can. But we can try to observe her principles and try to do what is right.

And we must always be concerned about the impact of our actions. What is happening when buy that PVC pipe and install it in the drain? What about 20 years from now? What about flushing the toilet or throwing something in the trash? We know all those activities have an impact and when 300 million others do it, there is an even bigger impact.

Maybe the environmental ideal can be summed up as just: question and question again. Think locally and respect nature. Then act and do the right thing.

“Science will save us all, if it doesn't kill us all first”
-- Pete Seeger, Interview on Democracy NOW!, July 4, 2006