we don't need to change how we do conservation, we need to change why we do it

Tag: Evolutionary Ecology

Old Buddha, Part-1: the Tree of Life

The second section of Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice begins. PART II —Darwin and the Tree of Life … as a result of competition two similar species scarcely ever occupy similar niches —Georgii Frantsevich Gause [1] I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, …

Continue reading

Two Buddhas, Part-6: What is it “Like” to know?

A short selection from Essay Eight in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE]  Primordial Awareness [the Way] is perfect and all-pervading. How could it be dependent upon practice and realization? The movement of Reality does not need us to give …

Continue reading

The Leadership Crisis

The average citizen doesn’t follow science close enough to appreciate the threat of climate change, let alone study science close enough to sort truth from misinformation in today’s social media free-for-all. It is the responsibility of government to pay attention to experts, to set policy according to their advice, and to tell constituents the truth. …

Continue reading

Hiatus

Good morning fellow conservationists, climate activists and rewilders! Well, I think I’ve shot my last bolt for now from the extremophilechoice.com website. There’s nothing new I can feed into our shared new(s)-hungry cyberspace, so I invite you to look over any previous post that interests you, and to engage with me in its comment section …

Continue reading

The Journey (to Find a Pathway to Global Climate and Conservation Responsibility) Step 8 of 8 – Science Infected by Love of Nature: the Unstoppable Contagion

Jan. 2010 THE LAST NICHEGaia: the hypothesis that the living and nonliving components of earth function as a single system in such a way that the living component regulates and maintains conditions . . . so as to be suitable for life; also: this system regarded as a single organism.           …

Continue reading

The Journey (to Find a Pathway to Global Climate and Conservation Responsibility) Step 7 of 8 – How do you Hug a Cladistic Tree?

. . . When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse. Through those self-grafting knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one. Networked together underground by countless thousands of miles of living fungal threads, the trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and …

Continue reading

The Journey (to Find a Pathway to Global Climate and Conservation Responsibility) Step 6 of 8 – Intimacy is Immortality

Unlike monkeys, humans also use mirror neurons to directly imitate actions and understand their meanings. … Gallese and Rizzolatti found that when people listened to sentences describing actions, the same mirror neurons fired as would have had the subjects performed the actions themselves or witnessed them being performed. — David Dobbs [1] The first thing …

Continue reading

The Journey (to Find a Pathway to Global Climate and Conservation Responsibility) Step 5 of 8 – Humans and Nature, and The Watcher

Thur. Aug. 9/07    When You’re Not Lost To tell your own story As if it’s real Is to be lost. This is allowed When you and your audience Both know when you’re lost As well as you know when you’re not.   Only stories can have such endings.   Not knowing. I have argued this …

Continue reading

The Journey (to Find a Pathway to Global Climate and Conservation Responsibility) Step 4 of 8 – Intimacy with Ideas is ‘Awesome’

Thurs. July 26/07 Ageless and TirelessThe heat drains.The cold braces.Our bodies know what to do. In what distant placesAnd what special climes,Over what vast timesHave they learned this?The knowing bodyThat rises each morningAnd sleeps every nightIs agelessAnd tireless. Let’s take a closer look at this verse that comes at the end of ‘The Journey Step 3’. In …

Continue reading

The Journey (to Find a Pathway to Global Climate and Conservation Responsibility) Step 3 of 8 – Love Deepens

This is the third in what will be a series of twice-weekly posts in which I’ll question the possibility, explore the difficulty, and argue for the mobilisation potential, of understanding the systems of Nature on a personal level. Please use the links at the top of the page to read the earlier ‘steps’. Thus, when you practice just sitting …

Continue reading