Good Life Revival: Permaculture, Rewilding, Homesteading - 6. Nature Deficit Disorder and Ecological Literacy with Sam Sycamore

6. Nature Deficit Disorder and Ecological Literacy with Sam Sycamore

02/11/17 • 23 min

Good Life Revival: Permaculture, Rewilding, Homesteading

As a culture, we've lost our fundamental connection to the natural world. This has led to a surge in dysfunctional behavior, like attention issues, depression, anxiety, and obesity, and in general I believe that this disconnect explains a lot of the suffering that we observe in the modern era. We all feel the detrimental effects of nature deficit disorder, but most of us just aren't aware that this is the source of our troubles, because we've been so deeply conditioned to accept the status quo of the human-dominated, human-constructed environment. With that in mind, I put together this episode of the podcast to arm you, dear listener, with the basic vocabulary to describe the symptoms, causes, and treatment of nature deficit disorder. The solution, I think, lies in cultivating ecological literacy at the individual level, which can only come about through immersion in the natural world -- daily observation and interaction. This topic offers a great entry point into a critique of how civilization relates to nature, and how our environment influences our behavior and our underlying worldview. It is our responsibility as self-aware individuals to assess our personal relationship with nature, and take decisive action where necessary to improve our overall health and wellbeing. I hope that this episode encourages you to keep pushing forward on the path that leads back to the natural world.

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5. Good Intentions vs. The Culture of No-Place with Sam Sycamore

What is a culture, and how do cultures relate to their environments?

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7. Liberation Permaculture: Make Yourself Illegible & Irrelevant with Sam Sycamore

What does it mean to be illegible and irrelevant to the dominant culture of destruction and exploitation?

It means reclaiming a greater sense of autonomy, a self-directed lifestyle, freedom from the rat race and the pursuit of financial capital. It means rejecting the distractions and false narratives that are manufactured to divide and conquer the non-elite classes of the world. It means rebuilding our divided communities and taking direct interpersonal action to achieve harmony through the common goals and values that we all share. We can design intentional systems and lifestyles for ourselves which generate yields that the system doesn’t understand. We can generate non-monetary forms of capital that can’t be taxed by a system that only knows how to rationalize financial value. If they can’t measure it, they can’t tax it. I think that making ourselves illegible is a very practical, pragmatic way of responding to the bizarre and dysfunctional zoo of civilization. If we don’t wish to participate in our own annihilation, then we need to put our money where our mouths are — which is to say, we need to generate and exchange value in ways that don’t involve money. That’s liberation permaculture: the fertile intersection of ecology, anthropology, rewilding and anarchist theory. (Please don’t let the A-word scare you off!) Sustainable land design and resilient communal networks will never be organized from above. It’s up to us to make the spaces we occupy into the world we wish to see — and we can start today. Enjoy the show? Do me a huge favor and spread the word by sharing via social media — I’d really love to connect with more likeminded people like you who are interested in having these kinds of conversations. And please get in touch with me if you have any feedback, or if there’s anything I can do to help you out in your journey.