THOUGHTS ON A DAVID ORR ESSAY
My old friend Jarvis in North Carolina sent me an essay by David W. Orr, a noted environmental lecturer and writer. Orr's essay made these points:
- On the average, people in our culture are losing the ability to think critically
- A cause of that decline is that we are allowing our language to "balkanize" as we use specialized terms in our own narrow lives while the language we hold in common withers away. Orr points to a study indicating that during the last 50 years the working vocabulary of an average 14-year-old has declined from some 25,000 words to about 10,000. (Spretnak, C. 1997. The resurgence of the Real. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.)
- Our common language is languishing because our human experience is being so sanitized and compartmentalized that we are cut off from the enriching experiences of nature. Orr writes that "... our experience of the world is being impoverished to the extent that it is rendered artificial and prepackaged..."
Orr sums things up:
Because we cannot think clearly what we cannot say clearly, the first casualty of linguistic incoherence is our ability to think well about many things."
The essay appears in Conservation Biology, Vol 13, No. 4, August 1999.
In my own system of using words and thinking, the above insights flow irresistibly into a river of philosophic conviction in which the following is an undeniable truth:
To save Life on Earth we must struggle to get our minds clear, think deeply and honestly on many subjects, make an enormous effort to articulate to others what we're understanding, and then actually live the lives we perceive as the most dignified and honorable.