Hello! My name’s Noah Guthrie, and I’d like to welcome you to the Green Phoenix website! This is a collective site where everyone is invited to contribute their voice. While it is a platform for environmental writers, it is also a community for anyone who wants to cultivate an intellectual, emotional, and practical engagement with the natural world. Even if you aren’t a writer, environmentalism can also express itself in other ways, which is why I’ve created the “Feather Forums.” For now, there are four categories of forum—general discussion, sustainable recipes, green living, and environmental news—but in the future, we may expand to things like photography, gardening, environmental activism, or whatever else you may suggest. Either way, anyone is free to post on these discussion boards, and I’d be happy to see what you have to share!
Forums aside, I’d like to use this post to introduce myself and the goal of this site. I’m a twenty-year-old Nashvillian and author, and I’m studying creative writing at Berry College—which is nice, because I get to call my scribblings “work,” now. While I enjoy writing, I’m also passionate about the natural world, and about cultivating mutual thriving between nature and ourselves. Whether we know it or not, we are a part of nature, benefiting from and contributing to its cycles, and things turn out better for us and for our environment when we work together.
The Green Phoenix is a way of combining my passions for writing and environmentalism, and more importantly, it’s a way of trying to inspire cultural rebirth. In the wake of issues such as climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and COVID-19 (which, as a zoonotic disease, is an environmental issue), our community needs to cultivate a renewed environmental consciousness. This not only means confronting problems with our environment, but also reclaiming certain moral values and developing our relationship with nature—nurturing, pondering, and celebrating it—and writing is a wonderful way to do this. Language sculpts our worldview, and with many voices, we can reshape our perspective of ourselves and the natural world, which will, in turn, lead to practical action.
In any case, that need for "many voices" is why this is not simply my website, but a collective one. For those of you who like to write, feel free to contact me if you have any environmental pieces that you’d like to share, whether you write essays, poems, short stories, or works of any other genre. (The term “environmental pieces” is purposely broad.) For those of you who like to read, cook, share, or discuss, please contribute to the comments and to the Feather Forums.
In the meantime, I’ll post regularly on the blog and the discussion boards, and I’ll look forward to hearing from you. If you’d like to say hi, feel free to leave a comment below! Either way, I wish you all the best, and I’m very excited to build this community together with you.
Comentários