Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“Nature” is often cast as a word that separates humans from non-humans. But it can also mean something much larger: the universe, the course of things, the great event we live within. It’s a word worth defending.
Imagine what a financial system would do if it behaved like a headwaters system. There would be continual arrival of flows from elsewhere. Resources would pool into local places. Actions would converge in the same direction. And all of it would support the continual emergence and maintenance of life.
After years of turning her backyard into a haven for wildlife, the author, Cylvia Hayes, watched the songbirds suddenly disappear. What began as a personal loss became a reflection on eco-grief, ecological decline, and how to find meaning, connection, and hope in a world undergoing profound environmental change.
Studies show a steep decline in nature-related language, from books to music. Now, projects like children’s books, citizen science platforms and everyday practices like gardening and birdwatching are helping rebuild our ecological vocabulary.
The question of consciousness continues to devil us. If consciousness is distributed throughout the universe, then its appearance in humans is just one manifestation. Does it matter one way or the other how we think about this question? I think it does profoundly.
In this Trumpian era of alternative facts and truth isn’t the truth, it somehow seems fitting to expand further the fiction of personhood to include animals and Nature in the effort to save the environment. After all, it is their environment too.
Within recent months I’ve been bumping into an increased number of animal rights cases. Last week a horse name Justice was given 15 minutes of fame in the Washington Post (WaPo). The article triggered an “ah/hah” moment; today’s article is the result.
Now Andreas Malm, who won the prestigious Deutscher Memorial Prize for his 2015 book Fossil Capital, has written a powerful essay “to scrutinize some of the theories circulating at the nature/society junction in the light of climate change.” In clear and convincing prose, he shows that the “end of nature” thesis stems from deep confusion about the complex relationship between human society and the rest of nature.
Mari Margil says there are many communities across the U.S. that are pressing the issue of rights of nature through law making, community mobilization, and within the court system. The communities are building a movement and advancing a new paradigm for protecting the environment. “It’s a movement that in the past 10 years has accelerated rapidly,” she said.
It defies our normal modes of thinking that natural entities such as trees, rivers, mountains, lakes, and glaciers should be given legal standing in courts and public life. And yet we take as a matter of course the legal rights of other inanimate entities.
This is a seemingly humble outlook, not as bold and self-assured as the modern project to control nature and perfect humanity. But it can be liberating, allowing us to see the world, both human and natural (as if there were actually a difference) in all its multiplicity and diversity.
This week on Sea Change Radio, we feature Lauren Markham who has chronicled the new generation of hipster farmers, or “farmsters, and Sharman Apt Russell on citizen science.
