more on ecology

[starfrosting]

There is also this implicit arrogance, this idea that because our culture and connected over-cultures act in alienation from and instrumentation of (other) forms of life that this is somehow The Human Way of Being In The World, our particular evolutionary function. There's this idea that maybe there's no implicit violence or dulled ignorance at work because it is, after all, the way of this Earth for species to emerge teeming and eventually disappear. There's this complete ahistoricity that refuses to analyze 'our' ways of life as a specific approach to the land, to production, to other humans and other animals-- one dominant form among many other approaches, many other ways of being in the world which present, in fact, whole other possible worlds.

There is violence in our estrangement from the world. Why do I write world, what do I mean? There is violence in our estrangment from the land, the sky, the waters. There is violence in our estrangement from the sacred (I'm thinking here of darkhaligh's recent writing on how the dominance of monotheism has severed us from intimate knowledge of magic, of the divine, of multiplicitous powers). Violence stems from the confluence of these two things, the splitting of intimacy and kinship and power from the world itself, draining the earth into some kind of background.

Comments

[grows.livejournal.com]

agreed. that outlook also ignores the fact that humans lived in harmony with the earth for 99% of our time on the planet, & that there are humans currently, right now, living in harmony with it still. not acknowledging the existence of any other way to be human is definitely the pinnacle of an arrogant lifestyle.