[HN Gopher] Rewilding the Self
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Rewilding the Self
Author : dnetesn
Score : 116 points
Date : 2025-01-12 11:18 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (worldsensorium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worldsensorium.com)
| Over2Chars wrote:
| "walking barefoot in the grass, planting native species in our
| backyards, or simply pausing to observe the life teeming around
| us" - from the fine article
|
| Ok, I'll get right on it.
| amelius wrote:
| You can put this [1] under your desk.
|
| [1] https://www.freshpatch.com
|
| (I saw this on Shark Tank)
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Beware! That website makes sounds :-|
| amelius wrote:
| Oops, sorry! I have my sound turned off.
| krackers wrote:
| I'm glad someone brought Picchi 2 to life
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqjUlmkYr2g
| xigency wrote:
| I don't get the downvotes.
|
| It's hard to read any fraction of this article without wanting
| to take a walk away from the computer.
| 1shooner wrote:
| From the guidelines:
|
| > Don't be snarky.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| 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, destroying parts of that system - or regulation
| prevents that othering, it can be depressingly isolating.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| The primary problem, my brother, is our valuing the world's
| resources in terms of money.
| 65 wrote:
| The problem lies in the idea that humans can own land. Hah.
| We're so dumb. We cannot "own" land.
| tomrod wrote:
| 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.
| antonvs wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| Yep. The same fallacy would get you "we can't own a candy
| bar because its component atoms originated in distant
| stars billions of years ago and will outlive our solar
| system". Sorry, no, that's my Kit Kat.
| cwmoore wrote:
| You can have your Kit Kat and eat it too? You must be
| thinking of Twix.
| arn3n wrote:
| 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?
| walterbell wrote:
| _> 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.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| 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._
| mxkopy wrote:
| Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
| eat_veggies wrote:
| William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting
| Back to the Wrong Nature"
|
| https://faculty.washington.edu/timbillo/Readings%20and%20doc.
| ..
| ggregoryarms wrote:
| Try "Way of Being" by James Bridle.
| holdit wrote:
| David Abram's 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous a good
| starting point.
|
| This was also a central theme in a lot of the late John
| Moriarty's work (although approached more obliquely and
| holistically than Abram imo). That mantle has been picked up
| by Martin Shaw. Both discuss how we, as a species, have
| domesticated ourselves out of our natural and profound
| connection to the very ground of our being. See also
| philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist's The Master
| and his Emmisary.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm reminded of a sign I once saw at a protest:
|
| > We are nature defending itself
|
| It might interest you for use as a search query, there seems
| to be more to it than just a sign.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Aurora Morales, in one of the essays in Medicine Stories,
| mentions how we need to stop referring to our biosphere as
| "environment".
|
| It is not something "out there" that surrounds us. It is the
| air we take in with every breath etc. we are one with it.
|
| Poisoning or destroying it is the very act of poisoning and
| destroying ourselves.
|
| She points out that perceiving the biosphere, the land, other
| living beings, and humans as _resources_ - and especially
| resources tied to an economic system of infinite growth,
| causes us to destroy it all for the creation of illusory
| value.
|
| We are dealing with normalized mental illness on planetary
| scale which causes humanity to actively destroy our
| biosphere.
| sriacha wrote:
| Kimmerer: The Serviceberry and Braiding Sweetgrass
| magic_smoke_ee wrote:
| There's a word for it: anthropocentrism. Also a common
| fallacy/myth: the noble savage.
| partomniscient wrote:
| _" But it wouldn't have been ecological. The geotects of
| Imperial Tectonics would not have known an ecosystem if
| they'd been living in the middle of one. But they did know
| that ecosystems were especially tiresome when they got
| fubared, so they protected the environment with the same
| implacable, plodding, green-visioned mentality that they
| applied to designing overpasses and culverts."_
|
| -- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age.
|
| Kind of interesting timing given the mysterious sea fence
| that appeared recently [1].
|
| Does that mean there's still some sort of hope...?
|
| [1] https://en.tempo.co/read/1963072/after-much-protest-
| pantura-...
| wat10000 wrote:
| I see the appeal of this framing, but it seems wrong. We came
| from nature but we're qualitatively different. No other species
| could spread across the world in the virtual blink of an eye.
| No other species could dig up and burn gigatons of coal or
| eradicate thousands of species just for convenience, food, or
| sheer indifference.
|
| I don't see it helping conservation efforts either. If we're
| part of nature, if we're fundamentally not so different, then
| that implies we don't need to worry too much about what we do.
| Dumping toxic waste is like a deer crapping on the ground. It
| doesn't worry about where the stuff goes or what will clean it
| up, so why should we?
|
| The answer is that we're not part of nature, we don't have
| robust ecosystems taking care of all those details. We should
| care because we still need nature for many things, and beyond
| that we still want it. And so we must act to preserve it,
| because we certainly are capable of acting to destroy it.
| bokoharambe wrote:
| Humans both are a part of nature and are distinct from it at
| the same time. It is wrong to dissolve humanity into its
| natural constituents just as it is wrong to turn humanity
| into something totally Other or supernatural standing above
| nature. Both can be true.
|
| Reject the law of noncontradiction.
| card_zero wrote:
| But at the same time, accept it.
| bokoharambe wrote:
| That's the spirit!
| cle wrote:
| The answer is that it's not binary, despite everyone's
| insistence on framing it as such. We are a part of nature,
| but we do have some degree of power and responsibility over
| it that other species don't. It's not absolute, it's murky
| and messy, defined by the relative magnitude of power and our
| estimates of it. I think this framing addresses both our
| relationship within our ecosystems, above our ecosystems, and
| in the distant future, beneath some larger cosmic ecosystem
| that may exist that we don't know about yet.
| picafrost wrote:
| Other lifeforms have dramatically altered the planet in the
| (geologic) past. The Great Oxidation Event, when plants
| colonized land, etc. These events were far more catastrophic
| to the status quo of their time. Timelines, means, and modes
| differ, sure. If anything makes us qualitatively different
| it's that we have a choice.
|
| Or do we? Does a plant have a choice jumping from sea to
| land? Do we have a choice in greedily using the resources of
| the planet to "progress"? From the perspective of a pessimist
| it's beginning to seem, at least to me, that we do not.
|
| I frame it to myself this way:
|
| - We are one animal among many
|
| - We are uniquely capable of large-scale destruction
|
| - Technology must be carefully additive tools
|
| - Designing tools is designing behavior
|
| - Civilization is complication, nature is complexity
|
| - Nature, undominated, is our home
| research_pie wrote:
| If we are nature and there is no separation then whatever we do
| is nature.
|
| Including polluting and destroying part of the system.
| benrutter wrote:
| 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.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| 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.)
| monktastic1 wrote:
| 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._
| sriacha wrote:
| Along these veins I recommend the book "The Once and Future
| World" by Mackinnon.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| My problem with the term "ecological balance" is that it doesn't
| exist. It's a mythical term that seems invented by Disney. Nature
| is brutal. Populations will get wiped out, species will
| disappear.
|
| That's exactly why having a lot of species is important. But it's
| hardly balanced.
| kmmlng wrote:
| It does seem that there are periods and places where things are
| in equilibrium, or stable. At some point, something typically
| comes along and disturbs that balance. This can be seen in the
| fossil record, where you have lots of species going extinct
| during fairly short periods of time, while there are other
| times when not much happens.
|
| What people are concerned about is that we, as humans, are the
| thing that is disturbing the balance at the moment.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Equilibrium truly doesn't exist in nature.
| https://willsarvis.medium.com/the-myth-of-balance-in-
| nature-...
| ANewFormation wrote:
| Things are not stable between the mass extinctions - the mass
| extinction events are just extreme events of high relevance.
|
| The thing is that Earth is constantly shifting in
| unpredictable ways. There was an interesting paper recently
| published working to reconstruct the temperature record of
| the last 500 million years. [1]
|
| The paper concluded that global mean temperatures varied
| (over time) in a range from 11c to 36c. We're currently
| around 15. And temperature is but one of countless variables,
| most all of which are constantly changing.
|
| This makes longterm equilibriums basically impossible because
| each time things change, it disrupts the existing balance and
| there will be new winners and new losers.
|
| [1] - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
| daveguy wrote:
| I think the point is that those promoting ecological
| balance are concerned that humanity itself may be an
| extreme event of high relevance.
| jt2190 wrote:
| Since nature is brutal and natural balance does not exist,
| should we humans try to enforce an "unnatural balance" in order
| to preserve ourselves, or is that folly?
| sriacha wrote:
| I worry this view is both pedantic and harmful.
|
| Of course over geologic scales extinctions are quite normal,
| and nothing is static.
|
| That doesn't mean ecosystems aren't normally resilient to
| perturbations on a smaller timescales:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_stability
|
| >Populations will get wiped out, species will disappear.
|
| There is plenty of evidence that extinction rates are extremely
| high right now, and that humans are culpable.
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12816
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I feel a little guilty that this is not appealing to me
| SteveVeilStream wrote:
| With the world's population now exceeding 8 billion, we need to
| be thoughtful about the best way to rewild ourselves. We can live
| in dense cities with concrete high-rises but animals can't. Many
| animals at the top of the food chain need significant ranges for
| themselves. So the challenge is finding a way that we can
| minimize our footprint while also providing more opportunities
| for legitimate connection with nature. Put another way, a bimodal
| life - with time split between a concrete high-rises and natural
| areas is probably more ideal for the overall system than a push
| for everyone to live in slightly more rural areas.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| The world is _far_ bigger than most realize. Split completely
| equally there 's enough room for more than 200,000 square feet
| per person. [1] Thats about 4 football fields of area for every
| single man, woman, and child alive today.
|
| Factor in that some people enjoy living in urban areas, most
| won't leave in any case, and so on - and we're realistically
| talking about tens to hundreds of football fields per person.
| It's a big world out there.
|
| [1] -
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=land+area+of+earth+%2F...
| 93po wrote:
| only about 71% of all land is habitable, and there would be a
| lot of other restrictions in terms of access to resources,
| and we need land dedicated to stuff like manufacturing and
| shared common spaces, so that per-person number quickly gets
| much smaller
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