Discuss: Mind in the Forest

This is a beautiful piece and encompasses my thoughts on the disconnect between humans and nature due to the idea of our “dominion” over it. Dispelling this ideology could be the key to changing human practices that destroy the beautiful world we call home.

Stewart Brand reports,

“We are as gods and have to get good at it.”

I hope Stewart will forgive me for saying that he has elucidated at least one of the problems humanity faces now. It appears the formidable global challenges that loom before the human community in our time are likely the result of distinctly human activities borne of extreme foolishness, pathological arrogance, unbridled greed and malignant narcissism. To be a species with such remarkable self-consciousness, intelligence and other splendid gifts and to do no better than we are doing now is a source of deep sadness and occasional outbreaks of passionate intensity (likely signifying nothing).

The first fifty years of my life were lived as if in a dream world in which humans believe and act like gods, a profane world devised by the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us. I had no awareness a single generation would elect sponsors of powerful, greed-mongering economic powerbrokers who would formulate policies and implement business plans that irreversibly degrade Earth’s environs, recklessly dissipate its limited resources, relentlessly diminish its biodiversity, destabilize its climate and threaten the very future of children everywhere. My failures include not realizing that my selfish generation were hyperconsuming and excessively hoarding resources, ravaging the Earth, and effectively behaving in a way that could soon lead to the destruction of our planetary home as a fit place for habitation by the children. Even though it is discomforting and difficult to responsibly perform our duties to science and humanity, at least we can speak out loudly, clearly and often about these unfortunate circumstances and in the process educate one another as best we can. Like you, I do not have answers to forbidding questions related to the patently unsustainable ‘trajectory’ of human civilization in its present, colossally expansive form that has been organized by and for the benefit of the Masters of the Universe.  Much more problematic, however, is the ruinous determination of many too many experts who have colluded with the Masters of the Universe to obstruct open discussion of the best available scientific evidence of “what could somehow be real”. If what could be real about the human condition and the Earth we inhabit is not confronted with intellectual honesty and moral courage, how is it possible for the family of humanity to adapt to the practical requirements of “reality” in reasonable, sensible, sustainable and timely ways?

An ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort is likely to be the end result of experts choosing to embrace false common knowledge and to remain willfully blind, hysterically deaf and electively mute rather than skillfully examining and objectively reporting on extant science of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of our evidently finite and noticeably frangible planetary home. This refusal to respond ably by acknowledging evidence and accepting responsibility for the human-driven global challenges that have emerged robustly and converged rapidly just now could be one of the greatest mistakes in human history. After all, what mistake in history could be greater than the ones made in our time by those self-indulgent Masters of the Universe and their many minions who are knowingly leading humanity down a primorse path, perhaps to precipitate the inadvertent demise of life as we know it and to put at risk a good enough future for the children?

We have entered not only a new year but a new decade as well. Hopefully the deafening silence, disinformation, dishonesty, denial and ideological idiocy that marked the last decade have ended.

A very nice piece that resonates with me.  I have little doubt that one of the evolutionary bottlenecks that our species passed through was in a region of forests and streams.  There is little that evokes a simple reverence better than a small brook running through a mature forest.

This is a lovely meditation, wise and heartfelt. I look forward to sharing it with my students as we discuss the relationship between humans and nature (as Michael Pollan has pointed out, we’re the only species that can countenance having such a “relationship” with something as intrinsic as nature).

I disagree with the sky god criticism, however. I think it is clear that short-sighted human cleverness as expressed in our technology is the core problem. All human civilizations have tended toward land abuse, but their technologies limited or supported this tendency. The underlying question is, how do we change human thinking and behavior to end the repeating tragedy of the commons that has brought us to the brink of global disaster?

Allan Savory makes an impressive argument in Holistic Resource Management for a more thoughtful and conscious group approach to using, managing, and conserving resources. The idea is to counter individual greed and divisive politics through policy and the regular revisiting of values. Sort of a mission statement forged when everyone is calm, uncommitted in money or ego, and at the table.

As far as I know, the biblically driven Amish are the most effective model of this. Their aim is to preserve community, in the widest sense, and in large part through case-by-case limits on individual greed and the use of technology.

Thank you for this piece.  Your last few paragraphs remind me of Albert Low’s Zen and the Sutras. Do you know it?  Chapter 6:  “We talk about being aware OF the world, aware OF other people, aware OF the flower, aware OF the past, [aware OF the tree]?  Most people would say that we ar aware of the world, but the sutra says that we are aware of ‘all the memory of the beginningless past..preserved in a way beyond consciousness and ready for further evolution.”  Another way of saying this is that what we are aware of is awareness AS memory crystallied AS objects.  In other words, we are aware of awareness AS the world, AS other people, AS the flower, [AS an old growth tree].  Thus, when I say I am aware of the flower, this should, technically, be speleld out as I-am-aware-of-awareness-as-the-flower.”  Thanks agai

Global warming was the topic of urgent attention as the time I sent ORION the comment dated October 25, 2009.  People around the world are, by and large, aware of the threat. Regretably, such events as the faulted structure of the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico and its faulty operation as well as the violently erratic weather calll for more assertive awareness of both the beauty and the generosity of the earth, the atmosphere, the water and the life systems evolved over millennia.  If what I have written is ultimately too thin or too unconvincing, I must seek out another elder Douglas fir and offer a stronger embrace, not just a hug. Such a stalwart tree hears and responds to feelings and facts better than the cyberbranches too many of us cling to too often, in my opinion.