Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
French philosopher Jean Vanier once wrote “Love is not to do things for people. It is not to tell people what to do. It is to reveal.” That is the goal of both the video as well as this work. To show the lake’s beauty, gifts, our thoughtless use of it, and to reveal an alternate way and possible new relationship with our water.
The rivers Paul Parsons reclaims are not wild rivers, they are illusions of wild rivers. Just because a river flows does not mean it is not dead. We can and we should reclaim as much of the earth as we can even if it means dreaming ourselves back to a time very few people can remember, before history was written and stories were on paper.
What, if anything, is sacred? ‘Nothing should be sacred!’ comes the impatient answer from the enthusiasts for gene-splicing and geoengineering, the singularitarians eager to upload their consciousness into a disembodied digital eternity. To call anything sacred is to set it off-limits to improvement by the application of human ingenuity – to stand in the way of progress.
We inhabitants of industrial civilization still live inside a human-centered story. The story articulates itself in the ways we speak, what we think, how we listen, what we hear. It expresses itself in the physical forms of our life-worlds, in our legal, political, and economic institutions. It gives structure to the way we conceive of and inhabit both space and time. It shapes our encounters with other-than-human living creatures, as well as with the larger planetary presence. This is the story of the human as a separate self.
I regret the lazy oversimplifications of our time. As our world becomes ever fuller withaccessible information, ever more porous, ever more pressing with demands for our attention, so our subtler semiotic capacities appear to stall before the task. Our attempts at interpretation and meaning-making are overwhelmed: more information means less meaning.
It’s been pointed out countless times that humankind’s current ecological crisis stems from our conviction that we’re apart from nature. Scott Brown’s book Active Peace takes a closer look at what lies beneath this mistaken belief, which he contends has deeply wounded all of us psychologically.
Once we experience ourselves as inseparable part of the web of life we realize that true well-being for us can only happen in harmony with the whole and all of its parts. When other humans or living beings suffer, we cannot stay untouched. This is what Arne Naess meant when calling for an “ecological self”.
This summer, get outside, roll up your sleeves, and take a stand for public lands. Here are 5 ways to do this. Use them or lose them!
Farming has always been an intimate exercise in finding and maintaining a path to where we own the acts that sustain our lives — a path where killing (rather than thrilling) humbles and strengthens a respect for the fragility and value of life.
Whatever this troubling word nature may mean, it is an unruly force.
With the climate emergency now breaking upon the world, some may wonder whether human society is going to be capable of an effective response.
Occupying the same space (that ‘cannot be mapped in terms of a single set of three-dimensional coordinates’), this complex heterogeneous form (universal nature, the environment, and what I am calling ecologized nature—or nature recalcitrant to universality) allows for alliances and provokes antagonisms.
