Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
My garden is a plenum – a spatially continuous living community which includes me, its caretaker – and I intuitively experience it as such while simultaneously perceiving a visual panorama, an audible space filled with the music of cicadas, crickets and birds as well as an expanse of floral perfume.
Every sip of water, every breath of air, every morsel of food, and every time my heart beats. Gaia is within and around me. Who better to learn from than that?
Our prize, the goal of our actions and our lives is to achieve the ecological civilization in which, as far as possible, humans interact with each other and nonhuman natural things for maximum mutual benefit.
Given the ubiquitous nature of this animistic intuition among the diverse indigenous peoples of this planet – given its commonality among so many exceedingly diverse and divergent cultures – it would seem that this is our birthright as humans.
In the world of biocivilisations, humanity must seek to understand and adopt the best practices of other biocivilisations to the depth and degree that we can convincingly address the academy of life and its principal authority: Gaia.
I think we are born with an innate sense of relationship; it has to be “educated” out of us to accept and participate in the current industrial food system.
As Indigenous writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer show in Braiding Sweetgrass, indigenous people have much to teach us about holistic thinking, the use of social controls to curtail greed, and how to live with the rest of nature.
Solidarity with animals and solidarity with humans are entangled imperatives and strategies in the search for a Great Transition.
It matters which world we think is ending, and it matters what we tell each other is worth doing in such a time.
This story is on borrowed time. And it’s just a part of a story, a piece of human and living patchwork. Maybe you can borrow it, and make it part of your story too?
How do we change climate together, in ways that makes this Planet liveable for all creatures, in ways that (as Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it) all flourishing can be mutual?
The border between the human and the non-human is far less clear than we once believed. How might this impact the way we relate to the Earth?
