Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rewilding the Self

worldsensorium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 71 posts

Re: Rewilding the Self

#11

Post by arn3n »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #6

We are nature. The separation between humanity and nature is a false one, that works against conservation efforts. I like the idea of rewilding because it forces us to see ourselves as part of a large natural system - which is what we are - and helps grow appreciation for that system. But until there is a way for recognition of that system to become more profitable than "othering" nature - polluting the environment,…

This is a take on environmental communication I’ve heard more and more of recently. Out of curiosity, do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship?

Re: Rewilding the Self

#12

Post by tomrod »

65 wrote: post #9
MrMcCall wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary problem, my brother, is our valuing the world's resources in terms of money.

The problem lies in the idea that humans can own land. Hah. We're so dumb. We cannot "own" land.

Sure we can. We made fences, guns, and governments to do exactly that. But it turns out these coordination and defensive devices sort of blow up in our hands. And come a huge hurricane, storm, flood, or fire, nature just laughs are our land surveys and continues unabated.

Re: Rewilding the Self

#13

Post by magic_smoke_ee »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #6

We are nature. The separation between humanity and nature is a false one, that works against conservation efforts. I like the idea of rewilding because it forces us to see ourselves as part of a large natural system - which is what we are - and helps grow appreciation for that system. But until there is a way for recognition of that system to become more profitable than "othering" nature - polluting the environment,…

There's a word for it: anthropocentrism. Also a common fallacy/myth: the noble savage.

Re: Rewilding the Self

#14

Post by 1123581321 »

benrutter wrote: post #7

This is so sadly true. I remember reading an article by philosopher and environmentalist Arne Naes where he remarked how surprisingly rare a joy in nature was, even if circles of environmental activists. Our species is doing some aggregious things to the planet at the moment, like the article implies, I think in part, that's possible because of a kind of blindness we now have to the world around us.

Aggregious is a nice portmanteau or eggcorn.

(More detail: egregious is from Latin ex grex, to stand out from the flock. Aggregate is from Latin ad grex, to bring into the flock. Aggressive is ad grad, towards a new grade or level or behavior. So aggregious has this idea of all of humanity leaving our flock en masse as we hurt ourselves and the planet, unified in elevated action but misbehaving and alienated.)

Re: Rewilding the Self

#15

Post by antonvs »

65 wrote: post #9
MrMcCall wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary problem, my brother, is our valuing the world's resources in terms of money.

The problem lies in the idea that humans can own land. Hah. We're so dumb. We cannot "own" land.

Of course we can. You're perhaps thinking of ownership as being something more than a social construction, but that's all it is.

"Own" just means that we agree with other people that we have certain rights over some property - land, or whatever. That ownership is enforced to varying degrees by society. That's it.

Re: Rewilding the Self

#17

Post by walterbell »

arn3n wrote: post #11
PaulRobinson wrote: post #6

We are nature. The separation between humanity and nature is a false one, that works against conservation efforts. I like the idea of rewilding because it forces us to see ourselves as part of a large natural system - which is what we are - and helps grow appreciation for that system. But until there is a way for recognition of that system to become more profitable than "othering" nature - polluting the environment,…

This is a take on environmental communication I’ve heard more and more of recently. Out of curiosity, do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship?

> do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship?

WHO draft treaties demote humans (including rights) to the same level as other animals and mandates global surveillance of interspecies zoonotic boundaries.

The TV series "Zoo", based on writing by James Patterson, includes 3 seasons of thought experiments.

Re: Rewilding the Self

#18

Post by monktastic1 »

I am reminded of a passage from Charles Eisenstein's "Climate, A New Story":

Explorers and naturalists of previous centuries give staggering testimony to the incredible natural wealth of North America and other places before colonization. Here are some images from another book, Steve Nicholls’s Paradise Found:

> Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”

I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now. MacKinnon illustrates this phenomenon, known in psychology as “change blindness,” with an anecdote about fish photographs from the Florida Keys. Old photographs from the 1940s show delighted fishermen displaying their prize catches—marlins as long as a man is tall. When present-day fishermen see those pictures, they flat-out refuse to believe they are authentic.

Re: Rewilding the Self

#19

Post by monktastic1 »

arn3n wrote: post #11
PaulRobinson wrote: post #6

We are nature. The separation between humanity and nature is a false one, that works against conservation efforts. I like the idea of rewilding because it forces us to see ourselves as part of a large natural system - which is what we are - and helps grow appreciation for that system. But until there is a way for recognition of that system to become more profitable than "othering" nature - polluting the environment,…

This is a take on environmental communication I’ve heard more and more of recently. Out of curiosity, do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship?

You might appreciate Charles Eisenstein (or he might be too "hippie" for you). I posted one quote of his as a top-level comment, but here's another:

Clear-cutting aside, the decline of one after another species of trees all over the world is something of a mystery to scientists: in each case, there seems to be a different proximate culprit — a beetle, a fungus, etc. But why have they become susceptible? Acid rain leaching free aluminum from soil silicates? Ground-level ozone damaging leaves? Drought stress caused by deforestation elsewhere? Heat stress due to climate change? Understory damage due to deer overpopulation due to predator extermination? Exogenous insect species? Insect population surges due to the decline of certain bird species?

Or is it all of the above? Perhaps underneath all of these vectors of forest decline and climate instability is a more general principle that is inescapable. Everything I have mentioned stems from a kind of derangement in our own society. All come from the perception of separation from nature and from each other, upon which all our systems of money, technology, industry, and so forth are built. Each of these projects itself onto our own psyches as well. The ideology of control says that if we can only identify the “cause,” we can control climate change. Fine, but what if the cause is everything? Economy, politics, emissions, agriculture, medicine … all the way to religion, psychology, our basic stories through which we apprehend the world? We face then the futility of control and the necessity for transformation.

...

Thus I say that our revolution must go all the way to the bottom, all the way down to our basic understanding of self and world. We will not survive as a species through more of the same: better breeds of corn, better pesticides, the extension of control to the genetic and molecular level. We need to enter a fundamentally different story. That is why an activist will inevitably find herself working on the level of story. She will find that in addition to addressing immediate needs, even the most practical, hands-on actions are telling a story. They come from and contribute to a new Story of the World.

Re: Rewilding the Self

#20

Post by mxkopy »

arn3n wrote: post #11
PaulRobinson wrote: post #6

We are nature. The separation between humanity and nature is a false one, that works against conservation efforts. I like the idea of rewilding because it forces us to see ourselves as part of a large natural system - which is what we are - and helps grow appreciation for that system. But until there is a way for recognition of that system to become more profitable than "othering" nature - polluting the environment,…

This is a take on environmental communication I’ve heard more and more of recently. Out of curiosity, do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship?

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Post reply on HN