Humans & Nature
Root & branch: Humans in a dance with their environment.
Humans & Nature
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
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
... See moreJoe Zadeh • The Tyranny Of Time
"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
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
We tend to think of the environment as a subsystem of the economy, but it is entirely the other way around. We are part of nature, not separate from it.
Green Biz • We need to value natural capital | Greenbiz
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
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
What 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
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