I believe that we humans are all a bit confused these days.
And as a result of that, we don’t really know what’s good for us and what isn’t anymore.
This confusion is a key factor at the root of the big challenges we are facing, from the climate and biodiversity crisis to the mental health crisis, the meaning crisis, loneliness, and extreme wealth inequality.
The antidote to that confusion and the subsequent not knowing what’s good and bad for us, I think, is all about going back to our natural roots.
It’s about rewilding humanity. Or, more precisely, it’s about rehabilitating humanity.
Because it’s not only non-human ecosystems that have lost their diversity and wildness; it’s humans, too! And perhaps, by rewilding and rehabilitating ourselves, we’re much better prepared to rewild and rehabilitate the Earth.
“What if, in trying to heal ourselves, we also begin to heal the planet?
Because, in a wonderful turn of events, it would seem that what is good for us, is good for the planet too.”
But even without an environmental, inequality, or mental health crisis, there still is a very serious craving in societies across the globe to re-discover a sort of natural element within us, to essentially reconnect us with nature, to restore some sort of natural balance within us.
So far, this need may not have been as expressed as to facilitate a bigger Zeitgeist shift, but I think this is about to change.
A Machine-Like Existence
Unlike many animals and plants we share this planet with, humans aren’t going extinct – at least not at this moment. But I believe something within us is slowly but steadily going lost. What that “thing” is is hard to define, but I think an increasing amount of people are becoming aware of its depletion.
And maybe this “thing” is hard to define because it feels like something inherently human, something indescribable. Maybe it’s hard to define because we don’t have the right words for it. Or maybe it’s hard to define because we’ve lost the ability to do so.
What I know is that “it” is being increasingly replaced by a machine-like existence. With that, I mean a way of experiencing and attending to the world, a mode of living, so to say, that feels very mechanistic, linear, commodified, alienated, bland, and, I wanna say, plastic 🥤.
What happens on a macro level also happens on a micro level:
Since industrialization, the biosphere of our planet has been taken over by a sort of parasitic technosphere.
“In 1900 the mass of human civilization equalled about three per cent of global biomass. Today the weight of the technosphere’s manufactured abundance exceeds that of all living things on the planet.”
We Built the Technosphere. Now We Must Resist It by Andrew Nikiforuk
What’s more, we’re losing the planet’s biodiversity and wildness at unprecedented rates. Wild mammals, for example, have declined by 85% since the rise of humans. Most mammals alive today are livestock (domesticated and commodified), and only 4% are still considered wild.
But I want to go even further and make the case that we’re experiencing the same kind of biodiversity and wildness loss on a micro level as well, within us:
Humans’ inner biosphere, biodiversity, and wildness are being lost, too, and they have been increasingly replaced by an inner technosphere and an inner domestication (or commodification).
I could now talk about all of the problems that result from this loss of inner biodiversity and inner wildness, but I think this sentence really encapsulates all that I am trying to say:
You can’t have healthy people on a sick planet.
Once you recognize and actually realize that humans are nature, that this whole planet is a lot of different, diverse things but also, at the same time, one big inextricably connected thing, it becomes very clear that all the current major crises that we are facing are also crises within ourselves.
When people are sick, the planet is sick, too – and vice versa.
Humanity Needs A Rehab
"What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?"
Bayo Akomolafe
In this excellent long read, John Foster explores why the majority population doesn’t really like destructive consumerism but can’t desist from it and comes to a crucial conclusion: “They have become addicted to it”. This is so crucial because addiction, as he explains, is…
“[…] essentially the attempt to fill an unfillable hole in the soul – a radical and unignorable need, for the meeting of which only patently inadequate substitutes are available, so that the hole only deepens with each attempt to fill it, while making repeated such attempts becomes a compulsion”.
John Foster describes this “hole,” this missing “thing,” as an…
“[…] unfathomably ‘other’, not external to us as the material world is external, nor in the different way that gods used to be, nor internal in any psychological sense, but intimately relevant to everything we do. […] [Something] for which contemporary civilisation and majority ‘culture’, in this respect a thoroughly and helplessly two-dimensional business, has lost any speakable language. […]
The profound natural need of human beings for life-purpose organised into significance within a robust framework of value finds itself confronted, in a two-dimensional world-view, with a general impossibility of satisfaction.”
He then ultimately concludes that…
“[…] the politics required must now be understood as therapeutic.”
So what we need, really, is a rehab.
A therapy that fills that hole, that void within us, and thereby helps us see the world as three-dimensional again.
The Benefits Of Being An Animal 👹
I am obviously not a biologist, but I recently had an epiphany while having stomach issues and, at the same time, watching Chris Van Tulleken talk about ultra-processed food and our microbiome: I realized, that this microbiome of mine is actually a kind of symbiotic organism that lives within me. Like a little Tamagotchi (who remembers them?! 😁) that I care for by eating the right food. A Tamagotchi that I cannot live without, nor would it exist without me.
“You may be classified as a single species, but you are “host” to as many as 1,000. And while your cells hold 20-25,000 genes, your microbiome contains 500 times more. So what are “you” really?
In his book I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, author Ed Yong writes: ‘Even when we are alone, we are never alone. […] Some animals are colonized by microbes while they are still unfertilized eggs; others pick up their first partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right— a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species collective. An entire world.’” Being Human
There is something very moving, very awe-inducing about realizing the symbiotic relationships one is in. It creates a very meaningful bond, and it extinguishes this feeling of loneliness that so many of us experience these days.
What’s more, once you realize that we are nature, it becomes a no-brainer that close interaction with nature, especially wild nature, is super important and beneficial.
Following the science that increasingly recognizes and illustrates those interconnections and benefits – and thereby matches what indigenous cultures have been saying for thousands of years – is extremely exciting. And this already touches on a crucial point that I will dive deeper into in next week’s Friday post. I guess we’ve anyway now come to a point where you’re all wondering:
“Okay, so what exactly needs to be done now?!; How do we replace that confusion, and the subsequent not knowing what’s good and bad for us, with clarity?; How do we rehabilitate humanity?”
Well, despite this being probably the biggest question of our time, I will attempt to answer it – or at least put you on a clearer path to explore the question yourself – in next week’s Friday post.
As a little teaser: We’ll talk about traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), animism, self-expression, and ‘common sense’.
So stay tuned for next Friday! 😉
That’s it for this week! Thank you so much for reading!
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