Re-membering our connection with the rest of nature

Why it's important

These relationships, when we are able to create them through these practices that we explored together these last few days, they leave an imprint. Because I spoke a lot about imprints yesterday. They leave an imprint that creates a bond. And this bond, over time, leads to kinship. It’s not that first imprint: it might be returning, building that... See more

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee • Remembering Earth Time – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Rebuilding our philosophical connection to nature has the largest potential to drive a societal transformation toward sustainability but it is also likely the most difficult connection to change. This is because it demands not only a shift in deeply entrenched and nuanced cultural narratives but also a fundamental transformation in individual... See more

Jonathan Aronson • Restoring Respect for Nature: How Mindset Shifts Can Solve the Biodiversity Crisis

Gregory Bateson saw the “false reification of the self” — the idea of a separate self rather than one emerging out of and sustained by relationships — as a root-cause of our “planetary ecological crises”. He argued:

We have imagined that we are a unit of survival and we have to see to our own survival, and we imagine that the unit of survival is the

How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material? We embody. We learn. We release the idea of failure, because it’s all data. But first we imagine.

adrienne maree brown • Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

We can’t expect people to take care of things they don’t care about

Restoring Respect for Nature: How Mindset Shifts Can Solve the Biodiversity Crisis

Making good relationships with the human and more-than-human world is the primary currency of wellbeing

we could seek out ways to coordinate our days with the biological rhythms where we live. Observing isn’t enough, because kinship time is time made together; we must let wild clocks adjust our sense of connection, particularly where their rhythms are becoming disordered. In practical terms, we might discover this sense of time in ritual.

David Farrier • Wild Clocks – David Farrier

there are two basic kinds of work we may to do serve it, and each of the two has an inner and an outer expression. The first is to dismantle the structures, habits, beliefs, and powers of the old story (I call it the Story of Separation). The second is to grow the structures of the new story, the Story of Interbeing.

Charles Eisenstein • 2023: The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible

If the future generations don’t care or aren’t interested in the rest of nature, if they aren’t taught about ecology and that we only eat and breathe because of plants, why would they bother with conservation or connection? If they haven’t felt the soothing calm of a walk in the woods or heard the song of a nightingale, what will they miss, through