Don't blame human nature

"Human nature"—that is a blanket answer after "Capitalism" we often hear from disillusioned environmentalists and self-serving sociopaths to explain all the shits that are happening in this world right now.

I'm guilty of this too. My blog posts say to that effect. This misanthropic view not only attracts me to the ideas along the vein of authoritarianism and benovolent dictators in order to cut all the bullshit impediments to addressing the root causes of our current predicaments for so long, but also shuts off all possibilities, responsibilities and discourse on alternative connection and relationship between humans, other life, and nature.

This book corrected my misanthropic view. Human can be, and was, an intentional force of good for all life and nature. The book highlighted a few examples: In Amazon, human carefully cultivated the soils for over 8,000 years,

The Amazon ecosystem would not be what it is today if not for human stewardship

In California, indigenous people practiced land management techniques that promote soil health, create habitat for game, and minimise the risk of large fires.

Salish nations intentionally created favourable conditions for buffalo and other grazers by periodically burning forests and grasslands

They enhanced fish habitat by planting kelp forests in the sea to help herring to lay their eggs. Both those eggs and the herring provide food for other life, including bear, salmon and birds. Consequently, the ecosystem became more abundant and also provided more nutrition for the Salish people.

The book also cites the work of David Graeber, probably from The Dawn of Everything book, in which they conclude that ancient societies had

fluid ecological arrangements-combining garden cultivation, flood-retreat framing on the margins of lakes or springs, small-scale landscape management(e.g. by burning, pruning and terracing) and the corralling or keeping of animals in semi-wild states, combined with a spectrum of hunting, fishing and collecting activities-were once typical of human societies in many parts of the world. Often these activities were sustained for thousands of years, and not infrequently supported large populations.

And we were free and wiser than we modern humans are:

the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one's existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death. It is just this sort of ecological flexibility that tends to be excluded from conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as a point of no return.

The book also introduced me to the work of Lyla June, particularly this talk

Before I'm accused of romanticizing the past, I want to acknowledge, as Lyla June said, "we weren't just born this cool." Ancient societies did cause the loss of African, Eurasian and American megafauna over thousands of years, or deforestation during the stone age. This can be attributed to "human nature". But to then prematurely conclude that humans are the root cause(and hence should be curtailed and controlled) is to dismiss our capacity to be wise and good as illustrated above.

Human nature is not the root cause. The root cause is cultural and systemic. It's perpetuated by a man-made system that accentuate destructive ideologies of infinite economic growth, human supremacy over nature, imperialism, globalisation, modernity, bureaucracy, way-in-over-our-head(i.e. left-hemisphere) rationality, delusional techno-optimism, and debt-based monetary system.

To soften the ongoing collapse of this global techno industrial consumer societies, we must start by willing to be honest and face-to-face with an open heart to our ideologies we hold dear for our identity, self-interest, and worldview—against the structural force of the current system we are living in and benefiting from. Only then we can be truly free and begin to imagine and experiment alternative ways of being that are aligned with who we really are and how we are really connected to other life and nature, all as a whole, as our ancestors did for thousands of years.

Or we can continue to be apathic, nihilist, solipsist, and individualistic to defend our worldview from a privileged and comfort position while the world burns. In that case, I don't know why we are even talking about anything at all. ☘