Welcome to my ecology files. It’s deliberately not capitalized because I am not talking about a movement. I want to talk about the way things and ideas on our planet interconnect.

Environmentalism is a political movement. It’s about controlling other people to achieve utopia. It’s about closing yourself off from the possibilities.

I don’t want to be limited by the word “environmentalism” anymore. I don’t think ecology is about saving the Earth. I think it’s about understanding how things fit and the tradeoffs we make. It’s about looking at where we were, where we are, and where we could go.

Yes, we should talk about the human impact on the environment, but that means all sorts of things. We should discuss water and electrical subsidies in the Western U.S. We should discuss waste management. We should discuss underground manufacturing. We should discuss aquaponics. We should mention how wind farms slaughter birds. We should discuss how birds use oil derricks and power line supports for nesting. We should discuss bat housing built into bridges. We should discuss feral cats at Disneyland. We should discuss about privately owned bison. We should discuss wildlife mismanagement in our national parks. We should discuss wildfires. We should discuss earth houses.

And yes, we should discuss nuclear power.

The more we unshackle our talk from saving the planet, the more possibilities open up.

It’s not about politics. It’s about interconnections.