I pause on the sharp observation made by my colleague Christos Michaelides in his piece in the newspaper’s edition the day before yesterday, on the disappointing fact that, after Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Cyprus, no political force or party formation representing political ecology now has any parliamentary representation.
The same issue is also addressed in an article by the deputy president of the Movement of Ecologists – Citizens’ Cooperation, Dr Katerina Hadjistylli, who wrote, among other things, that “the departure of political ecology from the parliamentary field creates a substantive gap in representation on critical public policy issues, such as sustainable development, the protection of the natural and cultural environment, and spatial and urban planning balance”.
Both writers linked the absence of political ecology from the Cypriot — and Greek — parliaments with the weakening of political scrutiny over the need to protect the natural environment in the face of unchecked residential and industrial development, and of the climate change that is, of course, being observed in Cyprus, as it is in Greece.
Indeed, Christos Michaelides directs readers to Walden, the book by the American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), whom he describes as, for many, “a pioneer of the modern ecological movements”, adding that it is “a book that answers all our excesses and delusions”.
I take Christos’s… cue, to say that Walden is, for me, a defining landmark in my long reading odyssey, and to add to what he mentioned that Thoreau wrote the book between 1845 and 1847, while living alone in the woods, “a mile from any neighbour”, in a wooden cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. It is the simple and enthralling account of the solitary philosopher’s daily life in the forest, of his love for nature, and of a life stripped back to what is plain and essential.
“I see young men, my townsmen,” he writes in Walden, “whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools. I think of them as unfortunate, because these things are easily acquired but hard to get rid of. Men live under the false impression that some fate, which they call necessity, compels them to pile up treasures that moth and rust will consume, and that thieves and burglars will steal. It is a foolish life, such a life, and one day they discover it. Often, though, that day is their last.”
Thoreau was, of course, writing about the people of the 19th century. But also of the 10th and… quite possibly… of the 20th… and the 21st as well…
