What is Telos?

A Personal View of the Telos Project

1. Telos: The utility, purpose, motivation, intention or logical reason behind an event or a thing's existence.

The motive underlying my desire for a sustainable world is at root erotic. That is to say, eros is the energy behind my move toward justice for all life. It is the bond of love, not in the abstract, but in the flesh – love for the earth and its multiplicity of forms, each in the particular -- it is that cherishing, that animates my desire to share and my willingness to labor. Beside that erotic energy is my intuition of accountability, the sense of responsibility arising from the intuition that we are not really separate from each other or from other forms of life and that what happens to others cannot be separated from what happens to us. This intuitive awareness of our inter-being in its responsive form is the guidance of conscience.

Eros and Inter-being. These two fiery energies want my constant awareness, they want my complete commitment. Like a team of horses, their continual tugging, their stamping and snorting and steaming, their strong hearts and pounding hooves, pull me into the present time and again. When I am gassing-up my little station wagon I hear them stamp their feet, impatient for the day when I will drive an energy efficient car, furious at the thought of Ken Sarawiwa at the gallows. Their warm breath on my neck reminds me that like the animals on earth their breathing, like my own, is compromised by fuel emissions.

In the first days of the sustainability movement, there was a division between ecologists and humanists centered around the assumption that sustainability was linked with human development. As time goes on it becomes more clear that we cannot talk about sustainable human life separate from its context. Homo sapiens arose in a world of animals, plants and geomorphic energies apart from which we will not survive.

Without the cultivation of a force to counter the seductions of productivity, a force as powerful as eros, the imbalances that divide us and discount the value of those with less and of the earth itself will hold such sway as to drive us into the end of biology. Earth systems verge now on collapse. Potable fresh water has become unavailable to millions. Deterioration of air quality is leading to acute respiratory illnesses, the loss of plant species, and rising global temperature. The oceans, that produce 80% of our oxygen are dying under multiple assaults.

It was Aldo Leopold, that founder of conservation in America, who reminded us that our affection for the earth is what ensures its protection, and affection depends a great deal on the understanding that grows with time. We protect what is familiar. Because I have grown up with the landscape of my home, I feel a deep attachment to it; I want it to thrive around me, along with me, as I want my neighbors to thrive. Is it such a leap to want a thriving for what is beyond my sight but alive in my imagination?

I see the bears in their dens and on the ice floes. I see the whales in the deep sea. I see the women and children in the fields of Cambodia and on the high steppes of Asia. I see the reindeer moving north and the cranes flying south. I see the lichen clinging to the oaks, brightening in winter rain; I see the steelhead salmon migrating up stream, heading home to the place they were born. I see you and me and all our brothers and sisters feeling our way in the blindness of our difficulty – mired in consumerism or poverty, ignorance or the suffering of knowledge of inequity – all of us, heading toward our own homecoming, guided by the telos of our underlying understanding of a shared fate.