Unwilding: The Roots of Alienation
From the book, Rewilding Our Hearts by Marc Bekoff.
If we did not unwild, there would be no reason to rewild, and we need to reverse this distancing and destructive devolution. If by “rewilding our hearts” I’m naming our open and compassionate connection to nature, then unwilding refers to the opposite: It’s the process by which we become alienated from nature and nonhuman animals; it’s how we deny our impacts and refuse to take responsibility for them; and it’s how we become discouraged and overwhelmed, and thus fail to act despite the problems we see.
Many, perhaps most, human animals are isolated and fragmented from nonhuman animals and other nature, and so we become alienated from them. The busy-ness of our days, the concrete and steel of our cities, the buildings in which we spend the majority of our work and school lives — all this unwilds us and erodes our natural connection with nature. German psychologist Erich Fromm called this innate connection, this love of life and living systems, “biophilia.” Renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson later defined his “biophilia hypothesis” as “the connections ...
http://kajama.com/unwilding-roots-alienation/
If we did not unwild, there would be no reason to rewild, and we need to reverse this distancing and destructive devolution. If by “rewilding our hearts” I’m naming our open and compassionate connection to nature, then unwilding refers to the opposite: It’s the process by which we become alienated from nature and nonhuman animals; it’s how we deny our impacts and refuse to take responsibility for them; and it’s how we become discouraged and overwhelmed, and thus fail to act despite the problems we see.
Many, perhaps most, human animals are isolated and fragmented from nonhuman animals and other nature, and so we become alienated from them. The busy-ness of our days, the concrete and steel of our cities, the buildings in which we spend the majority of our work and school lives — all this unwilds us and erodes our natural connection with nature. German psychologist Erich Fromm called this innate connection, this love of life and living systems, “biophilia.” Renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson later defined his “biophilia hypothesis” as “the connections ...
http://kajama.com/unwilding-roots-alienation/