It has long been obvious to those who attend human relationships with the environment carefully that, somehow, what happens in our ecologies is -immediately- expressed in our bodies, minds, and collectives. Not merely in a cause-effect relationship. No. In a shared identity relationship. This means instantaneous transfer of harm and benefit.
Yet science has not discovered this, so we are not aware of it — at least not formally, and certainly not as modern cultures.
We, in thinking ourselves distinct from the Earth, are like organelles who insist upon converting their host cell to resources. The outcome may vary but the basic outcome is that both die.
All of the astonishing capacities and abilities that we enjoy, and the specific sophistication of our minds, are the direct result of our immersion in nature, and this immersion is relational, not merely physical. That is to say, damage to biodiversity at every scale will have immediate impacts in us. Particularly in our minds.
We cannot disconnect from nature in the ways our abstract ideas portray. Our species is a bit like a peculiar organ that functions as her nervous system; so sensitive to every change that we become the expressions of those changes… cognitively, behaviorally, and physically.
It seems absurd that we should have to demonstrate something so incredibly obvious that it comes second only to the fact that there is a breathable atmosphere here. Perhaps part of the reason for this problem is that as we erase the anciently conserved relational ecologies of our world, we are becoming more prone to continue this process.
This is because damage to nature damages our potential to be intelligent. It affects us at the roots of our cognition, a fact science has yet to adequately demonstrate, but which is immediately obvious to any reasonably attentive observer. The resulting mindsets and cultures express this damage as the urgent desire for faster and more desperate assaults on the future of our living world.
Our relationships with the environment are not optional. They are intrinsic, vastly more intimate than science can yet portray to us adequately, and urgently requiring our rescue from oblivion at the hands object-and-data-oriented cultures.
0 Comments