“This morning I dived with a loggerhead. The turtle was missing a chunk of its shell. On its right hand side a shark, I assume, had taken a bite out of its shell and left its flipper intact but withered. We had been diving at Tunnel. I had taken three dives and was concentrating on relaxing under water, minimizing effort without concern for depth, and finding the point at which my buoyancy would become neutral and I would hover in the water column while excerting no effort. I had not yet found that depth. My buddy Max swam through the tunnel. As he swam, I spotted the turtle in response to Alex’s cry. Max surfaced, we turned and followed the turtle. He was perhaps five feet long. Perhaps 250 pounds. Perhaps 80 years old. We trailed it. Max asked if we could dive down. We could. I was concerned that as we dove, the turtle would startle and flee. Accelerating in to the obscurity where the visibility in the blue diminishes. But the loggerhead is not a fast swimmer, and it did not scarper. All 11 of us trailed the turtle. Maxey, Max, Peter, Alex, Ben and I dove and dove as we followed the turtle into deeper water. As it continued to swim, a dive required the active effort of forward, as well as downward  travel. On the surface, we remained active between dives to stay with the turtle. There was no opportunity to cultivate that purity of patience and relaxation that I had set out with. The turtle kept us with him. We dove, and swam beside  him. His fins coming in to sharper focus – the small claw on the flippers. The girth of the neck. The action of the front fins, the size and brightness of the eye. The length of the dives. We must have swum with the turtle for perhaps 30 minutes. Long enough that the turtle had to surface twice for air. He slowly made his way towards the surface, followed by the attendant ramora. As the turtle came towards the surface, the light that seems to fragment into columns, radiating from a point on the surface, brought the turtle in to cleaner focus. Others of our group could dive and have a moment under water. A rapid exhale, a large bubble a moment at the surface and the turtle dives again. At 40 ft, swimming beside the turtle, close enough to touch.”

It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. Rather, it is largely the results of work by people with BA’s, BS’s, LLB’s, MBA’s, and PhD’s. Elie Wiesel once made the same point, noting that the designers and perpetrators of Auschwitz, Dahcau, and Buchenwald – the Holocoust -were the heirs of Kant and Goethe, widely thought to be the best educated people on earth. But their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s (1990) words,

‘It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than concsience.’

I believe that the same could be said of our education. Toward the natural world it too emphasizes theories, not values; abstraction rather than consciousness; neat answers instead of questions, and technical efficiency over conscience. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could nor read, or like the Amish do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kinds of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance but rather a statement of decency and human survival – the issues now looming so large before us in the twenty-first century. It is not education, but education of a certain kind that will save us.”  – David M. Orr; Earth in Mind. p 7 – 8.