Humans & Nature
Root & branch: Humans in a dance with their environment.
Humans & Nature
Humanity is at a crossroads, will we be hoarders or healers? There is every reason to argue that history proves either. System Change is needed to find our way to another way of living that is not fed by exploitation of each other and the ecology. The change needed is not in any of the institutions, for surely they are interdependent, the change is... See more
Nora Bateson • Digging into Warm Data, The Warm Data Lab, and Certified Training.
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
... See moreDougald Hine • Helpless Growth
Dr. Stibbe’s book, The Stories We Live By, and free online course are full of real-life examples: of economics textbooks that describe people as “consumers” who are driven by an insatiable need to buy; the government documents that position cows and horses as “units” as though they are as lifeless as a kitchen cupboard; and the United Nations’
... See moreDeep Ecology • Why We Need New Words for Nature
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.
The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth. By his constant rituals, trances, ecstasies,
... See moreDavid Abram • The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
"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
"The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology."
— Renowned sociobiologist Dr. E. O. Wilson
Center for Humane Technology • CHT Welcome 2 of 3: The 6 Tenets of Humane Technology
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
... See moreThe 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
... See more