Contemplative Hiking

In the last several years, there has been a slow, ugly death happening around Winter Park, Fraser, Grand Lake and the western side of Rocky Mountain National Park. The last time I came here (4-5 years ago) I remember hiking in the summer through lush, green forests and cross country skiing through stands of tall, living pines. This weekend, what I saw shocked and saddened me.

Hiking up this trail makes me think of walking up the side of a soft-serve ice cream cone, with the reward in this case being an incredible and breathtaking 360 degree view of the landscape once you reach the top.

You feel pretty good about your job, but someone just told you that there will be no use for your profession after Peak Oil. You have been living within your means but now you worry that you own no land and won’t be able to grow your own food when food shortages strike. You’ve been buying “green” and organic products for years but just read a headline that Whole Foods is destroying the planet.

Argh! You’re this close to giving up on everything you’ve come to believe and just going back to a life of blissful ignorance about the state of the Earth. What’s the point? You tell yourself. You are only one person and you can’t save the planet. And besides, all this is stressing you out.

Sound familiar? If so, you’re experiencing eco-anxiety. That’s what ecopsychologists call that underlying feeling of fear and anger over the injustices and destruction of the planet and its inhabitants. I suspect this is fairly common, but the problem is that there are no statistics to back that up, because quite simply, no one likes to talk about it.

The Chicago Lakes trail, which starts at Echo Lake near Mt. Evans can be pretty thrilling this time of year. There’s a stretch of trail that’s maybe a couple of feet wide above a very steep and sometimes sheer dropoff, and right now it’s covered in snowpack and ice.

This hike is a way to boost your energy and mood by focusing on the things in your life that make you feel thankful and appreciative.

Does the idea of doing a midnight hike alone frighten you—or intrigue you? Darkness used to creep me out. I had a house in the mountains of Fairplay, Colorado for a few years, where on a moonless night it was almost completely black outside except for the glitter of the Milky Way. Walking through the [...]

Is it true? Is Detroit going to be on the forefront of a new, more-eco friendly industry in the new millennium? Is it going to go from building cars to growing carrots (and other crops)?

What an exciting thought!

You feel a vague sense of despair, or you’re feeling blue for no reason you can think of. Can this be a sign of your disconnectedness from nature?

I just finished Stephen King’s 1,000-plus fat brick of a novel entitled “Under the Dome.” I haven’t read a Stephen King book since putting down “Insomnia” half-way through sometime back in the 90s. As a kid and college student, I devoured his novels, but grew out of them and grew bored with the way King [...]

I tend to slip into a paradigm coma every now and then. I go back to sleep. I forget everything I’ve learned about peak oil, impending economic collapse, climate change, species extinction and go back to living according to the prevailing western paradigm: keep striving for more, keep improving your assets, success equals money and affluence.