Environmental Stewardship, Art, and Beauty

I intend to make only a minimum of remarks about the ethics of environmental stewardship, for fear of preaching to the choir, as well as offering opinion on a site otherwise devoted to fact. Yet occasionally, experiences call upon me to write such a post.

The first experience on which I’d like to comment is one that I know I share with many readers: the PBS special on the National Parks. I know we are all deeply moved to learn about the discussions between John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt and how, at the beginning of the last century, our world was transformed forever with the establishment of protection for many of the national treasures.

The second experience is a far more personal. I took my 13 year-old daughter (pictured here) and one of her friends to the Santa Barbara Art Museum last Sunday for a docent-led tour of the travelling exhibit of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. I happened to join another tour an hour or so later in the day for a discussion of a piece of contemporary art: a huge piece of pale grey and pink with almost no content; it was like looking out on a dense fog. The docent asked the crowd, perhaps 25 of us, what we felt the artist had intended to communicate. I didn’t answer, as I’m by no means an art expert, and I certainly didn’t want to pontificate in front of this group of strangers who couldn’t hit their “back” button and shut me up.

But in fact, the artist’s message was very straightforward me: ambiguity. We struggle to assign meaning to the people, the things, and the events in our lives. We live in a cold and uncaring world, one that is quite indifferent to your and my happiness. Our presence in this universe is the only thing that confers meaning upon it.

And with this fact comes responsibility. Exactly what meaning do we confer? What decisions and actions do we make, and what are their consequences? What difference will we make in our own lives, in the lives of those around us, and in the lives of generations yet to come? It’s up to each of us to create lives of true meaning – and preserving the natural purity and beauty of our planet is a great place to start.