Sublime

humus

If we are to address the wholesale despoliation of the planet, and our growing helplessness in the face of vast computational power, then we must find ways to reconcile our technological prowess and sense of human uniqueness with an earthy sensibility and an attentiveness to the interconnectedness of all things.

The Great Barrier Reef might be thought of as the ultimate “entangled bank.” Tens of millions of years of evolution have gone into its creation, with the result that even a fist-sized piece of it is unfathomably dense with life, crammed with creatures “dependent on each other in so complex a manner” that biologists will probably never fully master

The universe is a banyan, its roots above and branches below.

Jennifer Lemche has studied this process that she calls the “greening of Daoism,” in which Laozi has morphed into the God of Ecological Protection (Shengtai baohu shen (生态保护神)).

We are the Earth, created of and animated by its sacred elements: earth, air, fire and water. As social animals, it is love that makes us fully human, and we know who we are through spirit and ceremony.

This suggests a general operating principle similar to the Leopoldian land ethic, often summarized as “what’s good is what’s good for the land.” In our current situation, the phrase can be usefully reworded as “what’s good is what’s good for the biosphere.” In light of that principle, many efficiencies are quickly seen to be profoundly destructive,

The world of books is not a collection of random units of self-interest, but a living ecology.