Humans & Nature
Root & branch: Humans in a dance with their environment.
Humans & Nature
"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
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... See more
Ecological belonging is living in an ongoing interconnected relationship with ourselves, each other and our broader natural... See more
Ecological Belonging
“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
... See moreThe 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
“Life runs on sunlight. Life rewards cooperation. Life builds from the bottom up. Life banks on diversity. Life recycles everything. Life builds resilience through diversity, decentralization, and redundancy. Life optimizes rather than maximizes. Life selects for the good of the whole system. In short, life creates the conditions conducive to... See more
Thomas Klaffke • Natural Intelligence
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
... See moreDavid Abram • The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
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 moreWhat can we do now? Well, there's a
whole lot of things really. We can begin the work of limiting the damage we do to nature and that's, of course, the obvious one and is underway in many very good organisations and human beings in the world today. But I think we also need to reestablish some sense of who we are and what we're doing here. And I
... See more