Humans & Nature
Root & branch: Humans in a dance with their environment.
Humans & Nature
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
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 more“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
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
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?
"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
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
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.
