Humans & Nature

Root & branch: Humans in a dance with their environment.

For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus upon. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanin

David Abram • The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

We need the biosphere to be healthy so that we can be healthy. Giving the biosphere legal rights makes some sense if we are serious about making the future a better one.

Matt Orsagh from Degrowth is the Answer • What if We Gave Nature Legal Rights?

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.

"The world is your body, you breathe it, drink it, eat it, it lives inside you, and you only live and think because this community is doing well. So: nature? You are nature, nature is you. Natural is what happens. The word is useless as a divide, there is no Human apart from Nature, you have no thoughts or feelings without your body, and the Earth ... See more

Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies • Interview: Kim Stanley Robinson - Farsight

When we are deprived of green, of plants, of trees, most of us (though evidently not all of us) succumb to a demoralization of spirit which we usually blame on some psychological or neurochemical malady, until one day we find ourselves in a garden or park or countryside and feel the oppression vanish as if by magic.

— Robert Harrison: Gardens: An Es

Think about rituals each season to celebrate the arrival of spring or the harvest, think about rituals of gratitude and abundance each day to remember where our food came from or who was involved in cultivating the earth.

Ecological belonging is living in an ongoing interconnected relationship with ourselves, each other and our broader natural world... See more

Ecological Belonging

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally

noemamag.com • The Tyranny of Time | NOEMA

Let us try a thought experiment which might make this clearer. In order to calculate the rate of economic growth, it is necessary to treat all of the activities in which money is handed over as essentially interchangeable. According to the World Bank, agriculture currently makes up around 4% of global GDP. Seen in these terms, the growing of food i

Dougald Hine • Helpless Growth

“Yet when we understand winter in the natural world, we realize that what we see out there is not death so much as dormancy. Some life has died, of course. But much of it has gone underground, into hibernation, awaiting a season of renewal and rebirth. So winter invites us to name whatever feels dead in us, to wonder whether it might in fact be dor