Are you an Eco-Puritan?

A new Puritanism is taking hold of us all, which is promulgated by the polluters of the planet. Its main tenets are:
1 An environmental apocalypse is nigh!
2 If we love the planet we need to do something now!!
3 If we stop driving cars and use public transport, stop taking holidays abroad and recycle out bottles and boxes we can stop feeling so bad about it.
4 We should try not to get distracted by evidence suggesting that doing these things is effectively a drop in the ocean of what those countries with obscenely gigantic carbon footprints might be capable of, but just don’t get round to doing!

Suggest to an Eco-Puritan that there might be a small problem with tenet number 4 and you might as well be denying the holocaust at a Bar Mitzvah, or depicting Allah as a cartoon character to an ayatollah.

I take my bottles cans and newspapers to my recycling point like any good Brightonian. But I’m not a believer! However, in the spirit of ‘being the change you would like to see in the world’ I have taken to regularly attempting to raise my awareness of myself, in my body, in the world

This is how it works: Every day as I drive to work, I take a few deep breaths. Then, as I’m looking out of the windscreen, I become aware of those things on the glass that partially obscure my view- things like specks of dirt, raindrops, reflections of the illuminated speedo up on the screen. And I think about how what I see is affected by these obscurants. I then look beyond the screen to the open road where I see shadows underneath oncoming cars and beneath trees. Most cars today have a metallic finish so the images of the cars are made up of reflected light and mirrored, distorted, reflected images. There are light sources too: headlights, taillights, road lights, traffic lights. I become aware that all of what I see is simply light reflected off matter. Usually at this stage I start to feel more acutely aware of the moment I am existing in and I’ll be grateful that I’ve brought myself out of dwelling in the past or preoccupying myself with the future.

I’m grateful because the present moment, ‘now’, is all we really have ever had and is all we really ever will have. Choosing to aware-ly exist within it is probably one of the few things we can truly have an influence over.

I then look at something I might conventionally disregard as boring- like the tarmac on the road. But instead I see it afresh in the present as fascinating. I’m now getting to know lots of bits of road which, in the past I would never have registered! Then I look for imperfections on the road. For me, finding an imperfection in something is a sure-fire way of rapidly disregarding it. So I find an imperfection and see it as something to be aware of now. Spots of chewing gum, drips of paint, pebbles, grit. And finally I find something that is creatively perfection. Something which, because of its complexity, I would previously have overlooked- grass, wild flowers, trees, hedgerows. I’ve made friends with lots of trees along the route into work this way!


As a society we are increasingly divorced from our present and from the nature in the world that surrounds us. Please become aware of yourself in your present and love it!

As queer folk we have a special gift to be able to do this more easily than our straight brethren. Spread the word. The more of us who are aware of our present selves, as part of nature, the less disconnected will we be from our beautiful mother- Earth. Ditch the Eco-Puritanism and connect with nature in the present moment as often as you can. 

Oh- and mind you don’t crash the car!


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