Now cities evolve on economic and transportation principles and the surrounding countryside just awaits suburbanization. In the First World anyway, the village that Hillary Clinton wrote about is a myth. The great Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who came to North America in the late fifties, said that Americans had named their great mountains but had yet to name their small hills and perhaps it was time to do so. He encouraged people to discover home ground. To start to tackle some of the big problems of this earth, maybe we need to walk on it more and run around less.
Environment is the watchword of the day, but environmentalism is a political movement.
Before it becomes a way of life, we'll first have to return to earth and get to know the neighborhood. Before we can work with it, we have to be living on the earth, not just skimming along the surface of the globe. Barry Campbell Boyce is a writer and teacher of writing. He is president of Victory Communication.