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diff --git a/reading-log.md b/reading-log.md index cc82f57..0135b66 100644 --- a/reading-log.md +++ b/reading-log.md @@ -6,6 +6,60 @@ author: Joe Carstairs ## 2026-04-14 +### @{losing-eden} + +Lucy Jones made me feel hopeful. She made me want to get outside, touch nature +from the inside, take action, love, laugh, work. She made me feel that nature is +wonderful, and within reach, and we can do something, and we must do something +now, so let's go! Hooray, what joy! + +Key themes: + +- We need nature for our mental health +- We have and are isolating ourselves from nature, which is suicidal +- We are in a crisis, and it will get worse until we change course +- We must stop destroying and start cherishing nature urgently +- We under-value nature, as if it is optional, not critical +- We must change our relationship with nature urgently + +In Chp 1, she had a moving account of how in early adolescence, she turned her +emotional life off with depression and substance abuse, she became numb. To +recover, she needed nature. Recovery groups in churches with gardens. She felt +an urgent desire for nature. She walked in Walthamstow Marshes. Variety, +physicality, communion of species, light, wholeness vs alienation, isolation, +darkness, narrowness. + +Chp 2. Evolutionary explanation for this? Biophilia hypothesis. + +Chp 3. Children need outdoor play. UK forest schools lead the way. Joy for +children and for teachers. + +Chp 6. Hard to persuade people to go for a walk in the woods, not what anyone +around them does, deviant, even though it's good for them. + +Chp 7. Hard, irritating, to imagine the damage done by our consumption, the lies +of advertising. We don't see the damage we do. Grief perhaps needed, can +paralyse but can spur into action. I frequently worry about my daughter's +future, relate to BirthStrikers. I lead my daughter in thanking the food, not +just farmers, 'pig' not 'pork'. + +Chp 8. Druid: as Jung exposed the psychological importance of sex, we're having +a similar revelation now about the psychological importance of nature. + +Chp 10. Detroit, a biophilic city. Wild Law / Earth Jurisprudence. When the +Oneida had to move out of New York City, wolves were in the way, at the council +meetings, they asked, 'who speaks for the wolf?' + +Chp 11. 'At the moment, the relationship between us and the natural world feels +like that of a truculent teenage daughter and her mother.' We need to fall in +love with nature again, stop destroying it, 'emergency,' 'Hero myth' of control +has gone too far. Time is not on our side. We must walk in the woods, say thanks +for our food, design biophilic cities, messy gardens, issue wildlife ID cards, +et alia. 'Becoming indigenous to place.' I used to feel fear at 'climate chaos +that would cause apocalyptic global instability,' guilt at having second child. +Now I feel hopeful. Action is happening. Changing relationship: not conquerors +but co-tenants. + ## 2026-04-13 ### @{greenhouse-effect} |