Looking forward to this read: "In essence, [The Once and Future World] is a love story, maybe the oldest one: between humankind, conscious and curious, and the stuff that grows around us, invoking and sustaining our desires, informing our ideas of who we are. McKinnon puts it thus: “The lone person on a wild landscape is a baseline of human liberty, a condition in which we are restrained only by physical limits and the bounds of our own consciousness. [...] [T]he most appealing thing about rewilding is that it says, simply, “Just imagine.” It is an invitation. Its proponents are emphatic about it being a positive environmentalism – a way of asking not just what we don’t want, but what we do. It’s a selfish and beautiful dream, focused not on what we are willing to lose from nature (apparently, almost anything) but what we are ready to accept for the wild things in all of us. Are we content with the world we have built, or is there something in us that still burns to imagine the epic ways in which the earth might yet surprise and delight us? What kinds of fun we might have by quitting work a few hours early to go look at some wild elephants? Doth the kraken still wait, writhing in the deep? It can start much smaller that that, though. “Pay attention,” MacKinnon writes, “and we will value nature more.” Perhaps, for those of us who live in cities, it can mean taking a few extra moments away from the computer to stare at bees. To recognize, sure, that their global population is still collapsing, posing a potential threat to our food supply. But more so, to wonder at what ideas they might inspire in us, how many different and dazzling creatures’ existence might be contingent on their frolicking through the pistils. To watch closely, and conjure the taste of honey on the tongue." theglobeandmail/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/paradise-lost-our-memory-of-nature-is-in-tatters/article14444134/?page=all
Posted on: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 20:58:51 +0000