Page 2 - ECOlogic Book

Introduction

These essays come from an edge-place, a place I had the opportunity to explore
during the eight years I co-edited ECOlogic, the newsletter of the Upland Hills

Ecological Awareness Center (EAC) in Michigan.

Shortly after Thomas Berry’s death in 2009, long after I’d shifted my energies
from the Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center (EAC) to the North
Oakland Headwaters Land Conservancy and land-use issues in the township
where I live, a friend asked if we might meet so I could give her a little
background on the EAC. She had just accepted the position of the EAC’s
Treasurer and believed having some background on the place and its people
would be helpful to her in this new responsibility. I invited her and her
husband to lunch.

The day before they came I spent the day pawing through old issues of the
EAC’s newsletter, ECOlogic, which I’d co-edited with Kathy Roberts from
1990 to 1998. I’d had the luxury of writing ECOlogic’s cover essays. It was
a forum for sharing the sensibilities I was still integrating from prior
experiences. As I rifled through those archived ECOlogics, I realized three
things:

First, how soaked I was when I started editing ECOlogic, with the spirituality
of the Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality (ICCS) where I did my
graduate work, and the work of Thomas Berry. ECOlogic gave me a place to
drip. The EAC fitted the ICCS spirituality like a key in a lock.

My second realization was the extent to which I’d gone underground in more
recent years, adopting a conventional disguise that I believed would give me
credibility as a local activist, a stealth approach. Perhaps a fear of
fanaticism, especially in myself, also played a role in this reversion to
conventionality. The fires of passion that had lit up those old essays, the
coals I’d banked in order to tread that narrow road between today’s society
and the world of the visionary, still smoldered, and though they drove every
activity I engaged in, had been, in recent years, largely invisible.

Now, in 2009, rereading those essays from the 1990’s, the third thing I
realized was that the world has been catching up with that vision. Now, in
2009, it feels as if there might be a readiness in the general population to
accept these writings. The author need no longer fear getting singed.

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