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Can a field of wheat reconnect humans with nature? |
from Time, April–May 2000
Why Protecting the Environment
Means Saving Ourselves
ALL THE DAYS
OF THE EARTH
by Roger Rosenblatt
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 French farmers staged a dramatic protest against the European Union a few years ago by hauling sections of wheatfields that had been uprooted, and cattle and sheep, to the center of the Champs Élysées. The police rushed to surround this sudden  imposition of the countryside on the city, which disrupted business and traffic, and they braced themselves for fistfights between the citizens and the farmers. When the Parisians caught sight of the wheat and the animals, however, instead of reacting angrily, they ran toward them and began to stroll in the fields—lawyers, lovers, farmers, cops—dreamily together. For a few hours on that day, before they remembered who and where they were, all were happily back in the country.
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Two conclusions may be drawn from this story, and both are correct. The fields of asphalt that ordinarily occupy the center of Paris may be called Elysian, but the name is simply a gloss, or an apology, applied to something that is nothing like Eden. Cities tend to create such places (find the tulips in New York City’s Madison Square Garden) as a sort of nostalgic glance at the rural world they supplanted. If the farmers had not carted their bucolic protest to Paris on that day, the citizens there, like people in cities everywhere else, would have continued to conduct their life disconnected from anything in nature, much less paradise.
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Yet the appearance of the instant countryside clearly and immediately reconnected them with a submerged world of sympathy long forgotten or ignored. This depth of feeling runs counter to the civilized, industrialized impulses of what Wordsworth called “getting and spending,” and the tension between the two impulses characterizes most lives. On the first Earth Day of the new century (April 22), this is where we are—running hard to catch up with our heady commercial present and our future in cyberspace and at the same time capable of being called back, at the drop of a wheatfield, to a life that connects us with all life.
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From "All the Days of the Earth" by Roger Rosenblatt from Time, April-May 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Time Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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