All my life, it seems, I've been aware of the caution against what you are calling the Gaia Assumption. Now I find myself more allergic to the caution than to what it's reacting against. I cannot make sense of a world-view in which "homeostasis" or ecosystemic health simply are asserted not to be important or (at the extreme) not to exist. If homeostasis did not exist, nothing living could persist -- and of course, in the end we don't, so if it's Eden you're looking for, of course you won't find it. But...homeostasis is just the term for the negative-feedback loops which enable life to thrive. No, it's not eternal. Yes, though, we can learn from how "natural" systems do it, in "our" absence (not human absence, though, but industrial absence) -- and though I don't have nostalgia for the race relations of the early 1960s I can certainly have nostalgia for the louder or richer birdsong I might have heard then, if I'd been paying attention. There are things which are worthwhile and which are being lost, and this is a separable question from the sentiment in which we drape the music and pop culture of our youth. I might have waited until I've actually read McKenzie Wark, if my up to date iPad ever decides to perform properly and download her book. But the reaction against what might be called the David Attenborough aesthetic has not only come from leftists. It has also been a staple of the "realistic" mainstream biologists back starting in the Eighties. And they did enough damage, in my opinion, that I don't mind a bit of pastorale.
Yes we'll maybe that is one of the major issues we as humans grapple with...how does a body come alive...I have delivered what looked to be a dead lamb and after a few seconds a quiver ran through it and it began to breathe, similarly when people and animals die the force that animated the matter has left the body. People call it all kinds of names but if you have witnessed either of these transitions then you will know what I am talking about...I call it divine because my experience of these transitions has been so profound. But in a more everyday way...how does breathing occur, or a wound form a scab....do we will these things to happen. In many ways we are completely unconscious of the magic of these things...birth is a great example of the medicalisation of something our bodies are naturally designed to provide pain relief for if the conditions are safe and supportive but if women are frightened by what they have been told, these natural systems are thwarted and it becomes a trauma for both mother and baby with attachment and developmental problems. We have been trained to not trust these amazing organisms that we walk around in and that creates anxiety and depression because at some level we feel the wrongness of that.
It seems capitalism capitalizes on a human longing for something new and different...we are familiar with it in the form of physical items but your writing and the clip makes me realise it is alive in our demand for new music, new ideas, new structures. The opposing force is that of nostalgia spoken of with such disdain. I can't help comparing a film of Aboriginal people pre colonization with the state of inner contentment to the humans alive today and think that what we are longing for will never be met in these external ways. movements against "something " rather than a curiosity about why that "something " arose...avoid an involvement in what already is...avoid the very organic process that true lasting change . The desire for no rules i imagine came out of overcontrol or a sense of exclusion but if we don't understand why some rules were there in that time such as traffic rules or taxes, we as a species simply bounce back and forward between reactions, wars, running down the opposing point of view.
A warm revolution
All my life, it seems, I've been aware of the caution against what you are calling the Gaia Assumption. Now I find myself more allergic to the caution than to what it's reacting against. I cannot make sense of a world-view in which "homeostasis" or ecosystemic health simply are asserted not to be important or (at the extreme) not to exist. If homeostasis did not exist, nothing living could persist -- and of course, in the end we don't, so if it's Eden you're looking for, of course you won't find it. But...homeostasis is just the term for the negative-feedback loops which enable life to thrive. No, it's not eternal. Yes, though, we can learn from how "natural" systems do it, in "our" absence (not human absence, though, but industrial absence) -- and though I don't have nostalgia for the race relations of the early 1960s I can certainly have nostalgia for the louder or richer birdsong I might have heard then, if I'd been paying attention. There are things which are worthwhile and which are being lost, and this is a separable question from the sentiment in which we drape the music and pop culture of our youth. I might have waited until I've actually read McKenzie Wark, if my up to date iPad ever decides to perform properly and download her book. But the reaction against what might be called the David Attenborough aesthetic has not only come from leftists. It has also been a staple of the "realistic" mainstream biologists back starting in the Eighties. And they did enough damage, in my opinion, that I don't mind a bit of pastorale.
Yes we'll maybe that is one of the major issues we as humans grapple with...how does a body come alive...I have delivered what looked to be a dead lamb and after a few seconds a quiver ran through it and it began to breathe, similarly when people and animals die the force that animated the matter has left the body. People call it all kinds of names but if you have witnessed either of these transitions then you will know what I am talking about...I call it divine because my experience of these transitions has been so profound. But in a more everyday way...how does breathing occur, or a wound form a scab....do we will these things to happen. In many ways we are completely unconscious of the magic of these things...birth is a great example of the medicalisation of something our bodies are naturally designed to provide pain relief for if the conditions are safe and supportive but if women are frightened by what they have been told, these natural systems are thwarted and it becomes a trauma for both mother and baby with attachment and developmental problems. We have been trained to not trust these amazing organisms that we walk around in and that creates anxiety and depression because at some level we feel the wrongness of that.
It seems capitalism capitalizes on a human longing for something new and different...we are familiar with it in the form of physical items but your writing and the clip makes me realise it is alive in our demand for new music, new ideas, new structures. The opposing force is that of nostalgia spoken of with such disdain. I can't help comparing a film of Aboriginal people pre colonization with the state of inner contentment to the humans alive today and think that what we are longing for will never be met in these external ways. movements against "something " rather than a curiosity about why that "something " arose...avoid an involvement in what already is...avoid the very organic process that true lasting change . The desire for no rules i imagine came out of overcontrol or a sense of exclusion but if we don't understand why some rules were there in that time such as traffic rules or taxes, we as a species simply bounce back and forward between reactions, wars, running down the opposing point of view.