On Independence Day, 2020

Paul Hawken, in his visionary book, Natural Capitalism, wrote:

Decades from now, we may look back at the end of the 20th century and ponder why business and society ignored these trends for so long -- how one species thought it could flourish while nature ebbed. Historians will show, perhaps, how politics, the media, economics, and commerce created an industrial regime that wasted our social and natural environment and called it growth. As author Bill McKibben put it, "The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield." 

Our country's symbol depends on the laws of nature and of physics
to soar. As a country, so do we.

Photo by J. Harrington

It is now a couple of decades since the end of the 20th century. We persist in electing to Congress, and elsewhere, those who believe the laws of Congress, or presidential Executive Orders, can trump the laws of physics and the Laws of Nature acknowledged by those who founded this country. Meanwhile, our climate becomes ever more volatile. Storms and floods and rising oceans create ever more economic and physical damage and human suffering. We have clearly lost the way we should exercise our inalienable rights as those founders envisioned when they declared:

In Congress, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

When was the last time you heard a contemporary politician acknowledge a "Law of Nature" or "Nature's God" or even a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind?" That's what I thought. Today's issue of The Writer's Almanac tells us that the first (1855) edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass "contained a preface, which was left out of subsequent editions." Noting is mentioned about why. The omission makes me wonder if McKibben, or Hawken, ever read the 1855 edition of Leaves. Our poets and statesmen historically have recognized that our Independence derives from and is required by our Interdependence. Unless, of course, you actually believe you can literally "do it all" yourself, by yourself.

This is what you shall do

by Walt Whitman

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

"This is what you shall do..." by Walt Whitman, from the preface of Leaves of Grass. Public domain

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