Here's what I understand the sum of the class to be so far: Humans must embrace both our biotic and religious capacity in order to understand environment and ourselves. In addition to this, religious symbols are dependent on the environment, farthing this connection... a parallel relationship between the environment and religion is the ability for religion to communicate messages about the environment. I immediately think about the rhetoric around the desert as a dry wasteland in Biblical text. For a long time the desert was very hard to traverse and many strayed from it. In addition, we talked some about small movements that connect the community with the environment. Something like guerrilla gardening that encourages people to take on gardening for themselves.
I was entranced by the question that was brought up in class... "What is the place of human beings in the natural world?" Immediately I think about the philosophical terms of cosmos and chaos... how the wilderness may be seen as a chaos and the structured garden as a cosmos. But, which was the human made for? Perhaps both. I believe as we explore the "web of ecology" we will open up to the ideas that connect the human with the wilderness and teach us how to value ecology as a whole.
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