Learning from Nature -- Alison Hawthorne Deming

What can we learn from our encounters from nature, particularly from the great animals like elephants? This is Alison Hawthorne Deming writing about being stuck in the mud on a safari in Africa: 

Being stuck is how any earth cel­ebrant might feel these days, con­fronted by the habitat-hogging reign of human culture over the planet.  But one of nature's little tricks is that our better intentions can be fueled by the simple contemplation of natural beauty.  Whether our empathy for other spe­cies is sufficient to motivate the level of care that the damaged world requires remains an open question.  But to feed one's wonder and love for the varieties of earth's self-expression is one of our better desires. You can read the entire essay from which this excerpt was extracted at the NRDC's 

OnEarth Magazine


As a bonus, listen to a podcast from OnEarth magazine in which Deming reads the essay 
and talks in more detail about what we can learn from nature. 

Poet Alison Hawthorne Deming on What Nature Teaches -- If We Listen | OnEarth Magazine

Also see an earlier post about the emotional life of elephants here.