Ecologist with prodigious feelings makes cookies

 I just finished my first watch of The Eternal Song .  One of the Elders interviewed for this video, Pat McCabe (Diné) links European witch hunts to the worldwide system of othering through the colonial era. Recounting that the children were made to watch torture. Another Elder states that's when Europeans were drawn away from the forest, the Land, when Europeans lost their wise ones.  The colonial violence of severing relationship with place, the identity of being part of nature and one's environment... a form of cultural genocide... is, perhaps, not always as obvious as I think it is. I never thought about the ways we/they Europeans did it to our/them-selves. I witness the message, among many others, that interconnectedness is true and sacred. We humans are part of the rich tapestry of life; that great web unites us all.  So we are also holy and precious, each one of us, but especially when we come together in collaboration and celebration. cf. alterity "The people...

 I've been re-reading Grenz' Medicine Wheel for the Planet  over the summer and embracing her way of writing herself into her work, of connecting her head and her heart. This reflection is an inkshed about how I might connect my head and my heart. I've been told I show up with authenticity, I speak truth to power.  I don't know how to unmask in academia and applied biology. Will people still take me seriously if I acknowledge the bliss I feel lying in the moss or watching the wind flirt the aspen leaves for hours? Does ecology need to be objective? My science-based advice must be unfettered, unbiased, and 'objective'. But the rest of it? I'm no phenomenologist that can bracket out her biases. I wear them firmly on my sleeve and live them out loud. I sometimes attempt a feminist hermeneutic of transformation. Theory, applied. My plant neighbours are sentient. That caribou's life is worth as much as yours because you're part of the same ecosystem, the ...