I really like the video clip I've linked to below. It features the world renown theologian and environmentalist Matthew Fox. Fox is a former Roman Catholic Dominican Priest who found himself at odds with dear old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI).

Fox has now become more of a Universal Catholic and certainly a Creation Spiritualist. He's a very influential leader within new eco-spritual groups - a rebel with a cause for sure.

In the clip, Fox talks about the fact that industrialized world culture has experienced a very fatal break from nature in its attempts to dominate the planet.

Fox is quite right, though we must be careful not to think this is necessarily so new today. Our disjointedness with nature was certainly exacerbated exponentially with the industrial revolution, but this goes back thousands and thousands of years into the mists of our earliest history and even pre-history.

Since then, our sense of any connectedness with the sacredness of nature seems to come and go, and also vary from wilderness locale to city location, or from culture to culture, or from person to person.

Certainly though, it is always in our best interest to seek a restoration in terms of our sense of oneness with the beauty and joy and well being of our miraculous planet - to seek a connection to nature wherever and whoever we are.

It goes back to some of the thinking in Fox's earlier work, Original Blessing. There he talks about the blessing of Creation and the break from it that happened at the dawn of human civilization. We broke away from a blessing, and have always yearned to restore it.

Never before has the need to restore the Original Blessing been so great.

Now this doesn't mean we should all leave behind the cities and head for the mountains. Our cities are important. In many ways our whole world is becoming more and more of a city - in Marshal MacLuhan's famous words, a Global Village.

We can make the cities greener though - or just let the "green" in.
Check out this amazing article on the natural greening of the Leslie Spit - left unattended by we preposterous humans: http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/414004

Indeed, we can help enable or allow a transformation of the Global Village into a community which is also a beautiful Global Garden.

Here's that interesting clip, Let's Go Back to Nature - with Matthew Fox.

[youtube]Ye_iWDbAih8[/youtube]