Date: 08-12-2025
Tags: nature materialism
Source: WalkingThoughts
“The harm to nature is concomitant with the stunning of the psyches of humans. They are not and cannot be seen as separate from one another. When one group talks about how wrong the wild is, and the other group argues that the wild has been wronged, something is drastically wrong. In the instinctive psyche, the Wild Woman looks out on the forest and sees a home for herself and all humans. Yet others may look at the same forest and imagine it barren of trees and their pockets bursting with money.” - Women Who Run with the Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I read this last night and when I was out on a morning walk through the woods near my apartment today it came back to me. It occurred to me that there is a parallel here that Estes didn’t mention—that is the way that we have come to commodify ourselves in every way. We are being encouraged these days to extract and share whatever value we may find within ourselves so that we can turn a profit off of our very essence. This of course encourages a short-sighted and narrow view of what is valuable within a human being. That is, we see only what Capitalism deems as valuable.
Charles Eisenstein talks about how the monetization of aspects of human life that were once intrinsic to community living (and thus free) continues to expand into deeper and more intimate aspects of life. Has it encroached on our very souls?
Links to: Digital Deafness The Illusory Matrix