Remember that we are among the most privileged beings to ever live on this planet.

[lupagreenwolf]

We as a species have the ability to choose what we eat, where we live, with whom we mate, and how we raise our young, to unprecedented levels. From the moment we learned how to use fire, through our ability to build ever stronger shelters, and into the increasingly abstract thought processes we communicate to each other, we have altered the world more than any other animal. And we have done this at a price, a price paid not only by our fellow human beings, but every other living being that shares this place with us.

This is not a prompt to lose yourself in guilt and despair, but simply to take note of the immense comforts that you enjoy and to realize how unique they are. Also, a gentle reminder that these comforts did not come out of nowhere, but are drawn from the interwoven webwork of animals, plants, and the Earth itself. We take and we take—what do we give back? There are so many ways we can give back, starting with not taking more than we need.

And even the smallest gifts are important.

Comments

[brushwolf]

This connects up with my really weird hippy ideas about eating meat (hint; I'm not actually vegetarian).

I dunno, I think it's important to acknowledge trade offs. I think age makes this easier for me to see. I grew up in frightful isolation without the immense help of the internet, but then I also never dealt with cyberbullying. I didn't learn how to use a personal computer until I was 18 but then I never had to. I have fond memories of a playground which modern sensabilites would definitely have protected me from, and while typeset mass produced and distributed books are an incredible luxury, it's one that's been a fact of life since the 1800s (and unfortunately might be going away now). Tradeoffs. Of course one of our traits as a species is that we're not very moderate people. Maybe it's a holdover of how our ancestors were designed to do things like sacred Zog it's a huge fig tree! Eat all the figs now before something happens.

That in turn gets into a batch of thinking about Abraham Maslow's hierachy of human needs, connected to the Dene cultural concept of hozho and the Scandinavian cultural concept of lagom. I think maybe that's a separate post.