Rewilding the Self | Hacker News Reader

Rewilding the Self

worldsensorium.com

147 pointsdnetesn65 comments

We are nature. The separation between humanity and nature is a false one, that works against conservation efforts.

I like the idea of rewilding because it forces us to see ourselves as part of a large natural system - which is what we are - and helps grow appreciation for that system.

But until there is a way for recognition of that system to become more profitable than "othering" nature - polluting the environment, destroying parts of that system - or regulation prevents that othering, it can be depressingly isolating.

I see the appeal of this framing, but it seems wrong. We came from nature but we’re qualitatively different. No other species could spread across the world in the virtual blink of an eye. No other species could dig up and burn gigatons of coal or eradicate thousands of species just for convenience, food, or sheer indifference.

I don’t see it helping conservation efforts either. If we’re part of nature, if we’re fundamentally not so different, then that implies we don’t need to worry too much about what we do. Dumping toxic waste is like a deer crapping on the ground. It doesn’t worry about where the stuff goes or what will clean it up, so why should we?

The answer is that we’re not part of nature, we don’t have robust ecosystems taking care of all those details. We should care because we still need nature for many things, and beyond that we still want it. And so we must act to preserve it, because we certainly are capable of acting to destroy it.

The answer is that it's not binary, despite everyone's insistence on framing it as such. We are a part of nature, but we do have some degree of power and responsibility over it that other species don't. It's not absolute, it's murky and messy, defined by the relative magnitude of power and our estimates of it. I think this framing addresses both our relationship within our ecosystems, above our ecosystems, and in the distant future, beneath some larger cosmic ecosystem that may exist that we don't know about yet.

Other lifeforms have dramatically altered the planet in the (geologic) past. The Great Oxidation Event, when plants colonized land, etc. These events were far more catastrophic to the status quo of their time. Timelines, means, and modes differ, sure. If anything makes us qualitatively different it's that we have a choice.

Or do we? Does a plant have a choice jumping from sea to land? Do we have a choice in greedily using the resources of the planet to "progress"? From the perspective of a pessimist it's beginning to seem, at least to me, that we do not.

I frame it to myself this way:

- We are one animal among many

- We are uniquely capable of large-scale destruction

- Technology must be carefully additive tools

- Designing tools is designing behavior

- Civilization is complication, nature is complexity

- Nature, undominated, is our home

For all we know there have been great civilizations in eons past. How would we know? 100 million years from now there might not be a trace of our own civilization left.

Humans both are a part of nature and are distinct from it at the same time. It is wrong to dissolve humanity into its natural constituents just as it is wrong to turn humanity into something totally Other or supernatural standing above nature. Both can be true.

Reject the law of noncontradiction.

But at the same time, accept it.

That's the spirit!

The primary problem, my brother, is our valuing the world's resources in terms of money.

The problem lies in the idea that humans can own land. Hah. We're so dumb. We cannot "own" land.

Of course we can. You're perhaps thinking of ownership as being something more than a social construction, but that's all it is.

"Own" just means that we agree with other people that we have certain rights over some property - land, or whatever. That ownership is enforced to varying degrees by society. That's it.

Yep. The same fallacy would get you “we can’t own a candy bar because its component atoms originated in distant stars billions of years ago and will outlive our solar system”. Sorry, no, that’s my Kit Kat.

You can have your Kit Kat and eat it too? You must be thinking of Twix.

Sure we can. We made fences, guns, and governments to do exactly that. But it turns out these coordination and defensive devices sort of blow up in our hands. And come a huge hurricane, storm, flood, or fire, nature just laughs are our land surveys and continues unabated.

This is a take on environmental communication I’ve heard more and more of recently. Out of curiosity, do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship?

David Abram's 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous a good starting point.

This was also a central theme in a lot of the late John Moriarty's work (although approached more obliquely and holistically than Abram imo). That mantle has been picked up by Martin Shaw. Both discuss how we, as a species, have domesticated ourselves out of our natural and profound connection to the very ground of our being. See also philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emmisary.

Aurora Morales, in one of the essays in Medicine Stories, mentions how we need to stop referring to our biosphere as “environment”.

It is not something “out there” that surrounds us. It is the air we take in with every breath etc. we are one with it.

Poisoning or destroying it is the very act of poisoning and destroying ourselves.

She points out that perceiving the biosphere, the land, other living beings, and humans as resources - and especially resources tied to an economic system of infinite growth, causes us to destroy it all for the creation of illusory value.

We are dealing with normalized mental illness on planetary scale which causes humanity to actively destroy our biosphere.

William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature"

https://faculty.washington.edu/timbillo/Readings%20and%20doc...

> do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship?

WHO draft treaties demote humans (including rights) to the same level as other animals and mandates global surveillance of interspecies zoonotic boundaries.

The TV series "Zoo", based on writing by James Patterson, includes 3 seasons of thought experiments.

Try "Way of Being" by James Bridle.

The anthropologist Philippe Descola with his main work Beyond Nature and Culture has been trying to classify the nature/culture relations by studying comparatively several societies.

I'm reminded of a sign I once saw at a protest:

> We are nature defending itself

It might interest you for use as a search query, there seems to be more to it than just a sign.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Kimmerer: The Serviceberry and Braiding Sweetgrass

You might appreciate Charles Eisenstein (or he might be too "hippie" for you). I posted one quote of his as a top-level comment, but here's another:

Clear-cutting aside, the decline of one after another species of trees all over the world is something of a mystery to scientists: in each case, there seems to be a different proximate culprit — a beetle, a fungus, etc. But why have they become susceptible? Acid rain leaching free aluminum from soil silicates? Ground-level ozone damaging leaves? Drought stress caused by deforestation elsewhere? Heat stress due to climate change? Understory damage due to deer overpopulation due to predator extermination? Exogenous insect species? Insect population surges due to the decline of certain bird species?

Or is it all of the above? Perhaps underneath all of these vectors of forest decline and climate instability is a more general principle that is inescapable. Everything I have mentioned stems from a kind of derangement in our own society. All come from the perception of separation from nature and from each other, upon which all our systems of money, technology, industry, and so forth are built. Each of these projects itself onto our own psyches as well. The ideology of control says that if we can only identify the “cause,” we can control climate change. Fine, but what if the cause is everything? Economy, politics, emissions, agriculture, medicine … all the way to religion, psychology, our basic stories through which we apprehend the world? We face then the futility of control and the necessity for transformation.

...

Thus I say that our revolution must go all the way to the bottom, all the way down to our basic understanding of self and world. We will not survive as a species through more of the same: better breeds of corn, better pesticides, the extension of control to the genetic and molecular level. We need to enter a fundamentally different story. That is why an activist will inevitably find herself working on the level of story. She will find that in addition to addressing immediate needs, even the most practical, hands-on actions are telling a story. They come from and contribute to a new Story of the World.

There's a word for it: anthropocentrism. Also a common fallacy/myth: the noble savage.

"But it wouldn't have been ecological. The geotects of Imperial Tectonics would not have known an ecosystem if they'd been living in the middle of one. But they did know that ecosystems were especially tiresome when they got fubared, so they protected the environment with the same implacable, plodding, green-visioned mentality that they applied to designing overpasses and culverts."

-- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age.

Kind of interesting timing given the mysterious sea fence that appeared recently [1].

Does that mean there's still some sort of hope...?

[1] https://en.tempo.co/read/1963072/after-much-protest-pantura-...

If we are nature and there is no separation then whatever we do is nature.

Including polluting and destroying part of the system.

This[1] says humans make up 34% of mammal biomass, 64% is livestock, and 4% wild animals. Another stat[2] says we kill more than 63 billion chickens each year. I like my steak and fried chicken, but damn if it's not horrific. (Imagine if an alien race farmed and killed 60 billion humans, each year...)

1) https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass 2) https://birdvenue.com/homegrown-flock/chickens/how-many-chic...

I wonder how many wild animals would be killed and eaten yearly in a world without humans. Are those deaths horrific too?

Would the earth itself be a horrific hellhole given it would be sustaining billions of deaths, each year?

I have never understood this argument against animal farming. I'm all for humane treatment of livestock, but we can't fool ourselves into believing that the corresponding biomass in a completely "wild" earth would be having a better time, or a better death, than our cows and chickens.

My problem with the term “ecological balance” is that it doesn’t exist. It’s a mythical term that seems invented by Disney. Nature is brutal. Populations will get wiped out, species will disappear.

That’s exactly why having a lot of species is important. But it’s hardly balanced.

It does seem that there are periods and places where things are in equilibrium, or stable. At some point, something typically comes along and disturbs that balance. This can be seen in the fossil record, where you have lots of species going extinct during fairly short periods of time, while there are other times when not much happens.

What people are concerned about is that we, as humans, are the thing that is disturbing the balance at the moment.

Things are not stable between the mass extinctions - the mass extinction events are just extreme events of high relevance.

The thing is that Earth is constantly shifting in unpredictable ways. There was an interesting paper recently published working to reconstruct the temperature record of the last 500 million years. [1]

The paper concluded that global mean temperatures varied (over time) in a range from 11c to 36c. We're currently around 15. And temperature is but one of countless variables, most all of which are constantly changing.

This makes longterm equilibriums basically impossible because each time things change, it disrupts the existing balance and there will be new winners and new losers.

[1] - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705

I think the point is that those promoting ecological balance are concerned that humanity itself may be an extreme event of high relevance.

The TV series “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” talks about how scientists tried to simulate balance in nature with control theory and found that there isn’t much balance at all. The premise that there is balance, despite being very popular, was shown to be false.

I recommend a watch, it is very well-directed too. But here is Wikipedia saying the theory has been discredited if you don’t want to spend the time on the documentary series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature

Equilibrium truly doesn’t exist in nature. https://willsarvis.medium.com/the-myth-of-balance-in-nature-...

I worry this view is both pedantic and harmful.

Of course over geologic scales extinctions are quite normal, and nothing is static.

That doesn't mean ecosystems aren't normally resilient to perturbations on a smaller timescales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_stability

>Populations will get wiped out, species will disappear.

There is plenty of evidence that extinction rates are extremely high right now, and that humans are culpable. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12816

Why? It doesn't retract from the fact that biodiversity is important.

Biodiversity is important because nature is brutal.

And it's clear to anyone who is willing to listen that humans are culpable. But that doesn't mean nature will return to an equilibrium when humans disappear.

Is it really brutal? Can you single out "nature" and its characteristics?

Brutal sounds like a value judgement, one that I suspect explains nothing about the fact.

Can we accept that it just is, and we're part of that, for all our vices and virtues?

Embrace nature and go live in the jungle without clothes, tools, fire, water, food, medicine. Calling it brutal after such an experience wouldn’t be dismissed as a value judgement.

> I worry this view is both pedantic and harmful.

Yes it seems like excuse for enlightened apathy.

Since nature is brutal and natural balance does not exist, should we humans try to enforce an “unnatural balance” in order to preserve ourselves, or is that folly?

With the world's population now exceeding 8 billion, we need to be thoughtful about the best way to rewild ourselves. We can live in dense cities with concrete high-rises but animals can't. Many animals at the top of the food chain need significant ranges for themselves. So the challenge is finding a way that we can minimize our footprint while also providing more opportunities for legitimate connection with nature. Put another way, a bimodal life - with time split between a concrete high-rises and natural areas is probably more ideal for the overall system than a push for everyone to live in slightly more rural areas.

The world is far bigger than most realize. Split completely equally there's enough room for more than 200,000 square feet per person. [1] Thats about 4 football fields of area for every single man, woman, and child alive today.

Factor in that some people enjoy living in urban areas, most won't leave in any case, and so on - and we're realistically talking about tens to hundreds of football fields per person. It's a big world out there.

[1] - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=land+area+of+earth+%2F...

Although that is true, the counterpoint is that I think some people underestimate the potential impact on animals and how much room away from humans they really need. Some interesting recent research here: https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2025/01/human-recreation-pu...

only about 71% of all land is habitable, and there would be a lot of other restrictions in terms of access to resources, and we need land dedicated to stuff like manufacturing and shared common spaces, so that per-person number quickly gets much smaller

According to https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture of the habitable land, still half is used for agriculture.

How much of appealing countryside is there that is attractive living area for humans?

This is so sadly true. I remember reading an article by philosopher and environmentalist Arne Naes where he remarked how surprisingly rare a joy in nature was, even if circles of environmental activists.

Our species is doing some aggregious things to the planet at the moment, like the article implies, I think in part, that's possible because of a kind of blindness we now have to the world around us.

Aggregious is a nice portmanteau or eggcorn.

(More detail: egregious is from Latin ex grex, to stand out from the flock. Aggregate is from Latin ad grex, to bring into the flock. Aggressive is ad grad, towards a new grade or level or behavior. So aggregious has this idea of all of humanity leaving our flock en masse as we hurt ourselves and the planet, unified in elevated action but misbehaving and alienated.)

I absolutely love this, and wish I could say it was intentional and anything other than a mispelling.

I did a double take at "walk barefoot on the grass" as the top suggestion, as the kind of grass you can walk barefoot on is the least wild thing around (at least where I live)

It seems like a lot of people spend time outdoors, gardening, hiking, doing outdoor recreation, etc. Is it really true that we're losing something here?

I feel a little guilty that this is not appealing to me

I am reminded of a passage from Charles Eisenstein's "Climate, A New Story":

Explorers and naturalists of previous centuries give staggering testimony to the incredible natural wealth of North America and other places before colonization. Here are some images from another book, Steve Nicholls’s Paradise Found:

> Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”

I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now. MacKinnon illustrates this phenomenon, known in psychology as “change blindness,” with an anecdote about fish photographs from the Florida Keys. Old photographs from the 1940s show delighted fishermen displaying their prize catches—marlins as long as a man is tall. When present-day fishermen see those pictures, they flat-out refuse to believe they are authentic.

Along these veins I recommend the book "The Once and Future World" by Mackinnon.

"walking barefoot in the grass, planting native species in our backyards, or simply pausing to observe the life teeming around us" - from the fine article

Ok, I'll get right on it.

You can put this [1] under your desk.

[1] https://www.freshpatch.com

(I saw this on Shark Tank)

I'm glad someone brought Picchi 2 to life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqjUlmkYr2g

Beware! That website makes sounds :-|

Oops, sorry! I have my sound turned off.

I don't get the downvotes.

It's hard to read any fraction of this article without wanting to take a walk away from the computer.

From the guidelines:

> Don't be snarky.

I'm glad our anti-snark overlords are being attentive. Oh sh*t was that snarky too?

A bit beside the point of TFA, but reading about "rewilding ourselves" reminded me of some research on human parasites [0].

Tldr is that the parasite dampens the immune system, and our bodies have evolved to deal with that dampening, so in places (like the US) where parasitic infection is relatively rare, diseases involving hyperactive immune systems (allergies, T2 diabetes, asthma, etc) are much more common.

So to really rewild, maybe we should all go out and eat some raw snails out of the nearest stagnant body of water. (50% /s?)

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5010150/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com