Quite early in my flying training my instructor took me out over a large reservoir nearby and we climbed to about 9000 feet.
He talked about students being afraid of stalling, so today we were going to practice and learn about stalling.
I cut the power to idle and held the attitude as the speed decayed to the point where the airflow separated from the wings and lift was no longer produced.
We were now not flying at all, we were falling.
My instructor said to me, “Well here we are, we’re stalled, it’s ok isn’t it? It’s perfectly comfortable, we’re still breathing, we’re still alive and nothing very terrible seems to be happening does it? But if we don’t do anything about it we will hit the ground at 5000 feet per minute and that will really spoil our day”.
The recovery involves something that seems counter-intuitive, you push the nose forward towards the ground that is now rushing towards you, as pilots say, you “change the attitude”.
I learned a big lesson that day which I took into my everyday life, it put things into perspective.
From then on, if I was presented with a problem I would ask the question “If I don’t do anything about this will I or anybody else die”? If the answer was no then the problem wasn’t that great after all.
The problem today is environmental collapse.
There is little doubt that the intricate web of life on Earth is unravelling and it is due to human activity, we’ve broken too many of the threads and it’s starting to fall apart rapidly.
The web of life has stalled, we saw the signs of it approaching but we failed to pay enough attention to it and for now, it’s kind of ok isn’t it?
We can kid ourselves that everything is fine.
It’s comfortable enough, we’re still breathing, we’re still alive and nothing very terrible seems to be happening - yet.
But like stalling, we must look at it, we must pay attention or we will certainly crash and burn and take many other species with us - and that would really spoil our day.
One of the lessons about aircraft stalling is to understand the aerodynamics, to recognise the symptoms of an approaching stall and to correct it, if the aircraft stalls you’ve done something wrong and you must recover calmly but without delay.
The same principle applies to the environment, we have a clear understanding of the ‘aerodynamics’ of environmental damage, we know the reasons for the stall.
We are going to have to accept the situation, not ignore it, and do what is necessary to recover right now, calmly and without delay.
If we stop mishandling the ecosystem it will recover quickly and naturally, we just need to stop causing damage to it.
The tricky part is that this will require a total change in the way most humans do things, it will take a complete revolution in thinking, we will need to make the natural world the most valuable and important thing in the World.
In other words, the recovery drill requires a change of attitude.
It involves coming in to proper relationship with the Earth and all things in it, it means remembering and honouring the absolute essentials of life that apply to all things.
So let’s apply the lesson I learned in my flying lesson that day, “if we don’t do anything about this, will we or anything else die”?
The answer is a resounding yes.
Here at Perfect Rucksack we are doing what we can to help develop and apply the recovery drill, we are building a curriculum to help you and your family to learn and to teach the essential skills for life that our children and the children of the future will need to help them create a new culture in balance and harmony with the natural world.
Jonny