7 ms·
Rewilding the Self
- Over2Chars 2y ago"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.
- xigency 2y agoI 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 1shooner 2y agoFrom the guidelines: > Don't be snarky.
- Over2Chars 2y agoI'm glad our anti-snark overlords are being attentive. Oh sh*t was that snarky too?
- amelius 2y agoYou can put this [1] under your desk. [1] https://www.freshpatch.com https://www.freshpatch.com (I saw this on Shark Tank)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PaulRobinson 2y agoWe 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 2y agoThe primary problem, my brother, is our valuing the world's resources in terms of money.
- 65 2y agoThe problem lies in the idea that humans can own land. Hah. We're so dumb. We cannot "own" land.
- tomrod 2y agoSure 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 2y agoOf 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 2y agoYep. 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.
- benrutter 2y agoThis 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 2y agoAggregious 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.)
- benrutter 2y agoI absolutely love this, and wish I could say it was intentional and anything other than a mispelling.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- monktastic1 2y agoI 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 2y agoAlong these veins I recommend the book "The Once and Future World" by Mackinnon.
- spiderfarmer 2y agoMy 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 2y agoIt 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 2y agoEquilibrium truly doesn’t exist in nature. https://willsarvis.medium.com/the-myth-of-balance-in-nature-7c7add99305b https://willsarvis.medium.com/the-myth-of-balance-in-nature-...
- ANewFormation 2y agoThings 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 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
- daveguy 2y ago
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoI feel a little guilty that this is not appealing to me
- SteveVeilStream 2y agoWith 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 2y agoThe 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+number+of+people+on+earth https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=land+area+of+earth+%2F...
- 93po 2y agoonly 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
- fulafel 2y agoAccording to https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture of the habitable land, still half is used for agriculture.
- fulafel 2y agoHow much of appealing countryside is there that is attractive living area for humans?
- wilg 2y agoIt seems like a lot of people spend time outdoors, gardening, hiking, doing outdoor recreation, etc. Is it really true that we're losing something here?
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- zonkerdonker 2y agoA bit beside the point of TFA, but reading about "rewilding ourselves" reminded me of some research on human parasites [0]. Tldr is that the parasite dampens the immune system, and our bodies have evolved to deal with that dampening, so in places (like the US) where parasitic infection is relatively rare, diseases involving hyperactive immune systems (allergies, T2 diabetes, asthma, etc) are much more common. So to really rewild, maybe we should all go out and eat some raw snails out of the nearest stagnant body of water. (50% /s?) [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5010150/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5010150/
- conartist6 2y agoI did a double take at "walk barefoot on the grass" as the top suggestion, as the kind of grass you can walk barefoot on is the least wild thing around (at least where I live)