Nov 24th, 2009 by David Key
THIS WEBSITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION!
The is a creative project to explore the ecological Self – the Self experienced when we think and act as part of nature.
The ecoSelf project was born in New Zealand in 1997 and has formed the basis for a long journey of Self discovery for the author.
The material on this site is a mixture of published and unpublished papers and articles as well as random blog entries and links to stuff I find interesting. It is all personal to me, it’s an exploration of my own truth. I am not trying to sell or promote anything, I am just exploring my ecological Self through the creative process.
David Key
November, 2009
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Nov 19th, 2009 by David Key
The array of social and environmental threats currently facing us is frightening . That these threats are all connected to each other – and to each of us personally – is overwhelming. How can we cope? Continue Reading »
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Nov 24th, 2006 by David Key
First published by Proboscus as part of there Topographies and Tales project, 2006.
‘On Banks Island, in the Canadian Arctic, environmental shifts are happening so fast that the Inuvialut inhabitants do not have the words to describe what they now see around them.’1
Words become inadequate at the boundary of new experience. So often they are the first and most obvious companion for a journey to the edge of Being, but sometimes they fail us. To run out of words is to stand at the edge of the unknown, at the cusp of The Mystery. There is something both frightening and exhilarating about this: The excitement of an impending adventure, the fear of formlessness.
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Apr 1st, 2004 by David Key
First published in The Great Outdoors Magazine, Nov. 2003
One of the first things I do when I run an eco-education course is introduce the “Environmental Spectrum”. One end of the spectrum is ‘grey’, the other ‘deep green’. Points in between get progressively less grey, and increasingly greener. The object of the spectrum is to help people understand differing perspectives and viewpoints that exist towards environmental matters – even within the ‘environmental’ movement.
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Tags: deep ecology, ecopsychology, nature, wilderness
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Mar 1st, 2004 by David Key
It is time for you to learn how to drive a car. The driving instructor takes you into a room full of tables and chairs, the walls covered in shelves lined with books, at one end of the room is a black-board. The instructor takes a book off one of the shelves and hands it to you. The title is “How to Drive a Car”. The instructor then leaves.
After you have read the book, you go outside, get into your new car and drive off. Within five minutes you have crashed.
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Tags: deep ecology, ecopsychology, education, nature, wilderness
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Feb 1st, 2004 by David Key
I am poised leaning backwards out over a 60-foot drop into a roaring abyss. My harness tightens around me, the rope taught between my abseil device and the deeply rooted tree around which it has been wrapped. I take a few more steps backwards, fighting through dense undergrowth, and I am free.
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Tags: deep ecology, ecopsychology, nature, wilderness
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Jan 24th, 2004 by David Key
First published in The Great Outdoors Magazine, Jan. 2004.
I am floating on the surface of a warm tropical sea. The burning sun beating down on the skin of my back and shoulders, my face submerged in the tepid rolling waves, mask and snorkel on.
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Tags: deep ecology, environment, nature, systems thinking
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Jan 1st, 2004 by David Key
National Parks are a paradox. Men (usual men) take marker pens and scribe boundaries onto maps. On one side of the boundary the landscape is sacred, to be preserved for ‘future generations’. On the other side, it’s business as usual.
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Tags: wilderness
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Dec 1st, 2003 by David Key
In 1995, I visited a Maori village (Marae) on the Whanganui River (fong-a-nu-e) in New Zealand. George, the chief or Matai of the community, showed me around and took me to see an ancient tribal canoe. This canoe had been buried so that the bow stuck vertically out of the ground by about three metres. The bow of the canoe was highly decorated in traditional Maori black and white designs. George asked me to place my finger on the designs and trace out the shapes I saw. I did this, carefully running my finger over the black fern leaf patterns. When I finished, he looked at me and laughed: “Now it’s my turn”, he said, as he placed his finger on the white parts of the design and traced out the same fern leaf shapes.
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Tags: Diversity, nature, New Zealand
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Nov 1st, 2003 by David Key
The main problem, with the ‘environmental’ problem, is that it’s so energy-sappingly depressing. All those mind-numbing statistics about species extinction, escalating Parts Per Million of atmospheric carbon, another landscape racked by deforestation. A read through the “Jo’berg memo” for example, published to coincide with the Rio plus 10 Earth Summit in Johannesburg last year, is a downward-spiralling journey of despair. Lester Brown’s annually published ‘State of the World’ report, the essential brief-case bible of the environmental lobbyist, attempts to be positive but the undercurrent of desperation catches you in the end.
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Tags: environment, sustainability
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