Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Science of Qualities is really an extension of conventional science in the sense that it depends upon consensus, agreement and a methodology whereby people come to recognize the agreement or the consensus they have about the qualities of experience of other beings.
Thus one of the things that I want to explore in posts to come is how we got into ways of thought that treat modern industrial lifestyles as normal and desirable—how people in the industrial world, that is, got caught up in a self-defeating attempt to escape from nature, when human beings are at once inescapably dependent on nature and inescapably part of nature—and how that frankly bizarre habit might be swapped out for something saner.
“Designing Regenerative Cultures” by Daniel Wahl is an essential guidebook for our time that everyone should read, young and old. Through this book we come to realise deeply that there is a way out of the madness of our current societal systems in which so many people and non-human species have become trapped.
How, exactly, do the many, burgeoning posthumanist interpretations of our time fail to grasp the cosmos as a creative reality? Let us begin with the Anthropocene.
I like giving the example that we humans can behave like cancerous cells. Working out of a disconnection from nature, as if we are separate from other natural aspects is similar to when cells stop communicating with the whole system.
The journey towards an Earth jurisprudence economy, rather than being seen as an insurmountable challenge, can serve as a uniting force in our defense of the global commons.
Life actively contributed to the creation and maintenance of conditions on Earth that are favourable for higher organisms. In the words of Janine Benyus, the founder of the Biomimcry Institute: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.” Over the course of the last forty years James Lovelock’s hypothesis has matured into a new field of scientific investigation that is referred to as Gaia theory or Earth Systems Science.
In a time of fall and fragmentation , if you are wise, you do not look for the powerful Ones with their faraway promises and angry rhetoric. What you find yourself searching for is something real, something coherent, something you can count on — your relationship with fabric of things, a certain meaning that comes from the natural world, held instinctively in the forms of creatures and plants.
It is, has been, and always will be, harder to care than to be apathetic. Life can be difficult when, as an environmentalist, you truly care about the current and future well-beings of the diversity around you.
This is the discovery I make: we are all living liminal lives. Denying this is part of the madness. The only real thing is the liminality of life, the moments when we can inhabit fluidity, accept the threshold. We are just passing through, why should we expect anything other than being between places and times and states of being.
Let’s face it, most of us don’t love the environment most of the time. More often than not, the environment is too cold, too hot, too buggy, too dry or too wet, and we try to keep it safely on the far side of a window or a TV screen. Bicycle travel has a way of breaking us out of that narrow band of comfort.
Spirituality came easy for me, being “normal” was hard. As a child I was allowed to wander alone in the woods, old farm buildings, pasture, and along the creek. We lived in the small house on my grandparent’s farm, while my grandmother and uncle lived in the big house. I would tell my mother I was going over to Grandma’s house and head off exploring.
