While industrial society has the collective momentum of nearly seven billion humans, wild aliveness has the collective momentum of everything else in the universe. Tap into that.
Miles Olson (Unlearn, Rewild)
This blog is dedicated to the promotion and preservation of Earth's ecological integrity. This includes the ecological integrity of all the forms of life who together compose the biosphere as a whole, humans included.
We members of global industrial modernity have long been indoctrinated to view of ourselves as separate and above the order of life, a wild order our guiding stories compel us to see as chaotic, savage, and little more than a pool of resources for our exclusive exploitation. But Earth's wild order is anything but. In fact, it is self-organized to a degree we cannot even comprehend, let alone manage. Every molecule has its place. And one thing is clear, for this wild order to successfully thrive, all the lives who compose it must conform to some very specific and inviolate limitations, the most basic of which are the energetic limits of the Trophic Cascade (see the side-bar page, "Seven Lives of the Sun").
Industrial modernity has normalized a mode of living in which success is measured in terms of circumventing trophic, as well as many other, limits. Those terms—growth, progress, development, advancement, innovation, profits etc.—blind us to the destruction, chaos, and savagery on which most of our present activities depend.
This blog is intended as an interface for direct conversation about these ideas and more, which will be elaborated in my forthcoming book Wild Integrity: An Essay Tree. In the book, you will embark —as I did almost forty years ago—on an unconventional journey from the lofty limbs where we dwell at present to the deepest taproots of our ecologically discordant mode of existence. The book’s heartwood grows ring by ring, essay by essay, around the question: what does it mean to be human? In this age of unprecedented anthropocentric hubris manifested in countless ways, from the technological tampering with no less than the genetic script of life itself, to the attempted fabrication of AI and a Digitopian reality utterly divorced from the given reality of rivers, trees, and mountains, the need to revisit this question has never been more urgent.
As an example of the needed revisitation, I offer the post, “Welcome the Aftermath,” which is one of the essays that will appear in the book.
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