Date: 08-12-2025
Tags: nature materialism
Source: WalkingThoughts
Observations in the forest, 2026.
"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 & when I was out on a morning walk through the woods today it came back to me. It occurred to me that there’s a parallel here that Estes didn’t mention—it’s the way that we have come to commodify ourselves in every way.
We’re constantly being encouraged to extract & share whatever value we may find within ourselves so that we can turn a profit off of our essence. This encourages a short-sighted & narrow view of what’s valuable within a human being.
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 (& thus free) continues to expand into deeper and more intimate aspects of life. Has it encroached on our inner worlds as we seek to find ways to extract “value” from ourselves so we can serve it up on the market?
If we’ve become so comfortable with stripping our forests (earth’s natural resources), who’s to say we won’t do the same to our minds, our souls?
And then what? What’s left that’s sacred?
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." - Ralph Waldo Emerson