Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Reintegrating humans into their ecosystems (so they are directly dependent on them and understand that dependence and thus actively steward them) is what will be required to help humans shift from their predominantly invasive form to a naturalized and even beneficial one. Like the common plantain.
Solidarity with animals and solidarity with humans are entangled imperatives and strategies in the search for a Great Transition.
We cannot avoid having to walk through the ruins of our present civilization. But we can walk together to a living future, where our well-being and the well-being of the Earth are not in conflict, but part of a shared journey. This we can do.
Even if the world that the Half Earth achieves were environmentally sustainable, it could not possibly be livable, or just.
I am confident that this civilisation is coming to an end. It will be replaced by a civilisation, in all likelihood, that is much better at grounding itself in the Earth and much more attuned to that natural world.
You’re a big Mobius strip that ultimately is not separate from the environment at all, but woven into it—covered and integrated with other species from start to finish.
Earth abuse is also at the root of the Covid-19 pandemic and the grim likelihood that new pathogens will continue to emerge from other animal species to infect humans.
The language allows no form of respect for the more-than-human beings with whom we share the Earth. In English, a being is either a human or an “it.”
If I may crudely summarize Andreas’ thinking in a sentence or two: relationality, aliveness, subjectivity, and wholeness are central to the functioning of healthy living systems.
There is a growing movement, largely allied with anarchist, radical environmentalist, and decolonial practice, repurposing the term rewilding to be a political and cultural project that is more than merely conservation biology, one that thinks about nature with the people in.
Mitchell Thomashow’s most recent book, To Know the World: A New Vision for Environmental Learning, arrives when we need it most.
Our new aim should not be to extract more value from the larger economy that enfolds us, but to find our place within it, as we engage in a meaningful exchange.
