Perspectives Shape our Landscape

In an earlier post (Small Revolutionaries: Environmental and Political), I commented on a column written by Joe Mozdzen in the bimonthly Making Waves publication from the Surfrider Foundation*.


Well, Joe once again does an excellent job in communicating how significant each of us is to the overall well-being of our planet and quality of life of our fellow inhabitants.

Joe refers to lessons learned while reading a large book of microscopic photography, France Bourely's "Hidden Beauty: Microworlds Revealed" (2002).

Here are some extracts from Joe's editorial titled ""Perspectives Outside the Comfort Zone"":

It is a good thing to regularly renew the limits of our perceptions and our senses.

Bourely reminds us of our many self-imposed obstacles to vision. The prejudices inherent in having fixed perspectives, fixed beliefs, and rock-solid insistance that we are right. These things that seem so solid now can change drastically with a shift in scale and perception.

Oh how, as a youth, I knew it all! The naivete of youth, the confidence to take on the world, yet lacking the wisdom to know how to appropriately proceed. Some outgrow this belief as they encounter life experiences where it becomes obvious there is much to learn, and ultimately understand we live in a school where there are many lessons to learn.

Ours is not always the winning perspective, nor does our perspective often include that which is not visible to the naked eye.

Our passion for protecting what we love must not be weakened by limiting our perspective to dogma, nostalgia or narrow perspective. If we make other perspectives -- the tinier view, or the bigger view -- irrelevent, we have lost.

We, all of humanity, lose whenever our perspective is limited by bias of any sort, whether religious, political, socio-economic, or intellectual.

There is no us and them, there is only us. Everything else is scale and viewpoint.

The mindset of "You're either with us or with the enemy" or "You're either with us or against us" is divisive. A problem or condition must be evaluated objectively from ALL sides. Anything less serves only those who wish to divide and rule.

* Surfrider Foundation is a non-profit environmental organization dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of the world's waves, oceans and beaches for all people, through conservation, activism, research and education.

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