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We 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 forc

We 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 ago
The primary problem, my brother, is our valuing the world's resources in terms of money.
- 65 2y ago
  The problem lies in the idea that humans can own land. Hah. We're so dumb. We cannot "own" land.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    Sure 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 ago
    Of 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 ago
      Yep. 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.
      - cwmoore 2y ago
        You can have your Kit Kat and eat it too? You must be thinking of Twix.
arn3n 2y ago
This is a take on environmental communication I’ve heard more and more of recently. Out of curiosity, do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship?
- sriacha 2y ago
  Kimmerer: The Serviceberry and Braiding Sweetgrass
- walterbell 2y ago
  > do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship? WHO draft treaties demote humans (including rights) to the same level as other animals and mandates global surveillance of interspecies zoonotic boundaries. The TV series "Zoo", based on writing by James Patterson, includes 3 seasons of thought experiments.
- monktastic1 2y ago
  You might appreciate Charles Eisenstein (or he might be too "hippie" for you). I posted one quote of his as a top-level comment, but here's another: Clear-cutting aside, the decline of one after another species of trees all over the world is something of a mystery to scientists: in each case, there seems to be a different proximate culprit — a beetle, a fungus, etc. But why have they become susceptible? Acid rain leaching free aluminum from soil silicates? Ground-level ozone damaging leaves? Drought stress caused by deforestation elsewhere? Heat stress due to climate change? Understory damage due to deer overpopulation due to predator extermination? Exogenous insect species? Insect population surges due to the decline of certain bird species? Or is it all of the above? Perhaps underneath all of these vectors of forest decline and climate instability is a more general principle that is inescapable. Everything I have mentioned stems from a kind of derangement in our own society. All come from the perception of separation from nature and from each other, upon which all our systems of money, technology, industry, and so forth are built. Each of these projects itself onto our own psyches as well. The ideology of control says that if we can only identify the “cause,” we can control climate change. Fine, but what if the cause is everything? Economy, politics, emissions, agriculture, medicine … all the way to religion, psychology, our basic stories through which we apprehend the world? We face then the futility of control and the necessity for transformation. ... Thus I say that our revolution must go all the way to the bottom, all the way down to our basic understanding of self and world. We will not survive as a species through more of the same: better breeds of corn, better pesticides, the extension of control to the genetic and molecular level. We need to enter a fundamentally different story. That is why an activist will inevitably find herself working on the level of story. She will find that in addition to addressing immediate needs, even the most practical, hands-on actions are telling a story. They come from and contribute to a new Story of the World.
magic_smoke_ee 2y ago
There's a word for it: anthropocentrism. Also a common fallacy/myth: the noble savage.
- partomniscient 2y ago
  "But it wouldn't have been ecological. The geotects of Imperial Tectonics would not have known an ecosystem if they'd been living in the middle of one. But they did know that ecosystems were especially tiresome when they got fubared, so they protected the environment with the same implacable, plodding, green-visioned mentality that they applied to designing overpasses and culverts." -- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age. Kind of interesting timing given the mysterious sea fence that appeared recently [1]. Does that mean there's still some sort of hope...? [1] https://en.tempo.co/read/1963072/after-much-protest-pantura-peoples-network-claims-to-build-the-illegal-sea-fence-in-tangerang https://en.tempo.co/read/1963072/after-much-protest-pantura-...
wat10000 2y ago
I see the appeal of this framing, but it seems wrong. We came from nature but we’re qualitatively different. No other species could spread across the world in the virtual blink of an eye. No other species could dig up and burn gigatons of coal or eradicate thousands of species just for convenience, food, or sheer indifference. I don’t see it helping conservation efforts either. If we’re part of nature, if we’re fundamentally not so different, then that implies we don’t need to worry too much about what we do. Dumping toxic waste is like a deer crapping on the ground. It doesn’t worry about where the stuff goes or what will clean it up, so why should we? The answer is that we’re not part of nature, we don’t have robust ecosystems taking care of all those details. We should care because we still need nature for many things, and beyond that we still want it. And so we must act to preserve it, because we certainly are capable of acting to destroy it.
- bokoharambe 2y ago
  Humans both are a part of nature and are distinct from it at the same time. It is wrong to dissolve humanity into its natural constituents just as it is wrong to turn humanity into something totally Other or supernatural standing above nature. Both can be true. Reject the law of noncontradiction.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    But at the same time, accept it.
    - bokoharambe 2y ago
      That's the spirit!
- cle 2y ago
  The answer is that it's not binary, despite everyone's insistence on framing it as such. We are a part of nature, but we do have some degree of power and responsibility over it that other species don't. It's not absolute, it's murky and messy, defined by the relative magnitude of power and our estimates of it. I think this framing addresses both our relationship within our ecosystems, above our ecosystems, and in the distant future, beneath some larger cosmic ecosystem that may exist that we don't know about yet.
research_pie 2y ago
If we are nature and there is no separation then whatever we do is nature. Including polluting and destroying part of the system.
- netsharc 2y ago
  This[1] says humans make up 34% of mammal biomass, 64% is livestock, and 4% wild animals. Another stat[2] says we kill more than 63 billion chickens each year. I like my steak and fried chicken, but damn if it's not horrific. (Imagine if an alien race farmed and killed 60 billion humans, each year...) 1) https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass 2) https://birdvenue.com/homegrown-flock/chickens/how-many-chickens-killed-a-day/ https://birdvenue.com/homegrown-flock/chickens/how-many-chic...
  - salomonk_mur 2y ago
    I wonder how many wild animals would be killed and eaten yearly in a world without humans. Are those deaths horrific too? Would the earth itself be a horrific hellhole given it would be sustaining billions of deaths, each year? I have never understood this argument against animal farming. I'm all for humane treatment of livestock, but we can't fool ourselves into believing that the corresponding biomass in a completely "wild" earth would be having a better time, or a better death, than our cows and chickens.

MrMcCall 2y ago

The primary problem, my brother, is our valuing the world's resources in terms of money.

65 2y ago
The problem lies in the idea that humans can own land. Hah. We're so dumb. We cannot "own" land.
- tomrod 2y ago
  Sure 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 ago
  Of 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 ago
    Yep. 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.
    - cwmoore 2y ago
      You can have your Kit Kat and eat it too? You must be thinking of Twix.

arn3n 2y ago

This is a take on environmental communication I’ve heard more and more of recently. Out of curiosity, do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship?

sriacha 2y ago
Kimmerer: The Serviceberry and Braiding Sweetgrass
walterbell 2y ago
> do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship? WHO draft treaties demote humans (including rights) to the same level as other animals and mandates global surveillance of interspecies zoonotic boundaries. The TV series "Zoo", based on writing by James Patterson, includes 3 seasons of thought experiments.
monktastic1 2y ago
You might appreciate Charles Eisenstein (or he might be too "hippie" for you). I posted one quote of his as a top-level comment, but here's another: Clear-cutting aside, the decline of one after another species of trees all over the world is something of a mystery to scientists: in each case, there seems to be a different proximate culprit — a beetle, a fungus, etc. But why have they become susceptible? Acid rain leaching free aluminum from soil silicates? Ground-level ozone damaging leaves? Drought stress caused by deforestation elsewhere? Heat stress due to climate change? Understory damage due to deer overpopulation due to predator extermination? Exogenous insect species? Insect population surges due to the decline of certain bird species? Or is it all of the above? Perhaps underneath all of these vectors of forest decline and climate instability is a more general principle that is inescapable. Everything I have mentioned stems from a kind of derangement in our own society. All come from the perception of separation from nature and from each other, upon which all our systems of money, technology, industry, and so forth are built. Each of these projects itself onto our own psyches as well. The ideology of control says that if we can only identify the “cause,” we can control climate change. Fine, but what if the cause is everything? Economy, politics, emissions, agriculture, medicine … all the way to religion, psychology, our basic stories through which we apprehend the world? We face then the futility of control and the necessity for transformation. ... Thus I say that our revolution must go all the way to the bottom, all the way down to our basic understanding of self and world. We will not survive as a species through more of the same: better breeds of corn, better pesticides, the extension of control to the genetic and molecular level. We need to enter a fundamentally different story. That is why an activist will inevitably find herself working on the level of story. She will find that in addition to addressing immediate needs, even the most practical, hands-on actions are telling a story. They come from and contribute to a new Story of the World.

magic_smoke_ee 2y ago

There's a word for it: anthropocentrism. Also a common fallacy/myth: the noble savage.

partomniscient 2y ago
"But it wouldn't have been ecological. The geotects of Imperial Tectonics would not have known an ecosystem if they'd been living in the middle of one. But they did know that ecosystems were especially tiresome when they got fubared, so they protected the environment with the same implacable, plodding, green-visioned mentality that they applied to designing overpasses and culverts." -- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age. Kind of interesting timing given the mysterious sea fence that appeared recently [1]. Does that mean there's still some sort of hope...? [1] https://en.tempo.co/read/1963072/after-much-protest-pantura-peoples-network-claims-to-build-the-illegal-sea-fence-in-tangerang https://en.tempo.co/read/1963072/after-much-protest-pantura-...

wat10000 2y ago

I see the appeal of this framing, but it seems wrong. We came from nature but we’re qualitatively different. No other species could spread across the world in the virtual blink of an eye. No other species could dig up and burn gigatons of coal or eradicate thousands of species just for convenience, food, or sheer indifference. I don’t see it helping conservation efforts either. If we’re part of nature, if we’re fundamentally not so different, then that implies we don’t need to worry too much about what we do. Dumping toxic waste is like a deer crapping on the ground. It doesn’t worry about where the stuff goes or what will clean it up, so why should we? The answer is that we’re not part of nature, we don’t have robust ecosystems taking care of all those details. We should care because we still need nature for many things, and beyond that we still want it. And so we must act to preserve it, because we certainly are capable of acting to destroy it.

bokoharambe 2y ago
Humans both are a part of nature and are distinct from it at the same time. It is wrong to dissolve humanity into its natural constituents just as it is wrong to turn humanity into something totally Other or supernatural standing above nature. Both can be true. Reject the law of noncontradiction.
- card_zero 2y ago
  But at the same time, accept it.
  - bokoharambe 2y ago
    That's the spirit!
cle 2y ago
The answer is that it's not binary, despite everyone's insistence on framing it as such. We are a part of nature, but we do have some degree of power and responsibility over it that other species don't. It's not absolute, it's murky and messy, defined by the relative magnitude of power and our estimates of it. I think this framing addresses both our relationship within our ecosystems, above our ecosystems, and in the distant future, beneath some larger cosmic ecosystem that may exist that we don't know about yet.

research_pie 2y ago

If we are nature and there is no separation then whatever we do is nature. Including polluting and destroying part of the system.

netsharc 2y ago
This[1] says humans make up 34% of mammal biomass, 64% is livestock, and 4% wild animals. Another stat[2] says we kill more than 63 billion chickens each year. I like my steak and fried chicken, but damn if it's not horrific. (Imagine if an alien race farmed and killed 60 billion humans, each year...) 1) https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass 2) https://birdvenue.com/homegrown-flock/chickens/how-many-chickens-killed-a-day/ https://birdvenue.com/homegrown-flock/chickens/how-many-chic...
- salomonk_mur 2y ago
  I wonder how many wild animals would be killed and eaten yearly in a world without humans. Are those deaths horrific too? Would the earth itself be a horrific hellhole given it would be sustaining billions of deaths, each year? I have never understood this argument against animal farming. I'm all for humane treatment of livestock, but we can't fool ourselves into believing that the corresponding biomass in a completely "wild" earth would be having a better time, or a better death, than our cows and chickens.