Humans & Nature

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

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

The story of separation can be vividly seen in the human-nature divide. Treating the environment as a resource that should be used for the benefit of humankind has ultimately led to its abuse and destruction. Today, the world economy has become the ‘end,’ and nature and humans have become the ‘means,’ the resources for the economy. Believing

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

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’

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

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.

“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