Seeing Wetiko

“Every year that we head closer to catastrophe […] the old narrative loses its hold on the collective consciousness. Waves of young people are looking for a new worldview—one that makes sense of the current unraveling, one that offers them a future they can believe in.” - Jeremy Lent

We call nature ‘the wilderness’ and animals within it ‘wild animals’ while we are ‘civil’ humans. This type of language alone shows our un-symbiotic relationship with nature. We see us, humans, ourselves, as being separate or even superior to nature (the ‘wild’ vs the tame, conscious, civil), a mental model that is at the root of so many powerful a... See more

Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder.”

While being obvious to many indigenous cultures, it may take quite of a mind-shift for us others to see ourselves as one (or even just interdependent) with nature and our overall environment, and to see any damage or destruction of that environment as a form of cannibalism (or self-destruction). But framing the unsustainable destruction of the envi... See more

“All of nature is in us, all of us is in nature.”

Wetiko reframes the un-symbiotic and destructive relationship between humans and nature into a so-called ‘mind-virus’