Plants and trees give us our very life. Without them, we wouldn’t have our breath, tissue, food, cognitive abilities of “higher mind,” emotional stability, and spiritual guidance.
Because of our close symbiotic relationship, we share a common ground with the plants that surround us. Our life-giving connection with the green beings is inherent in our humanness and our birthright is to be intimately related.
Communicating effectively is one of the foundations in a relationship that builds to a co-creative partnership. We all know how to communicate with plants… this innate knowledge lives within us, but has been forgotten due to the chaotic nature of our day to day lives.
Do animals show empathy? Are there any signs of morality in animal societies? Can a monkey distinguish right from wrong? And what are the standards of what is right and what is not? Does morality evolve in time both for human societies and animal societies?
It is hard to imagine that empathy—a characteristic so basic to the human species that it emerges early in life, and is accompanied by strong physiological reactions—came into existence only when our lineage split off from that of the apes. It must be far older than that. Examples of empathy in other animals would suggest a long evolutionary history to this capacity in humans. Over the last several decades, we’ve seen increasing evidence of empathy in other species. Emotions suffuse much of the language employed by students of animal behavior — from “social bonding” to “alarm calls” — yet are often avoided as explicit topic in scientific discourse. Given the increasing interest of human psychology in the emotions, and the neuroscience on animal emotions such as fear and attachment, the taboo that has hampered animal research in this area is outdated. The main point is to separate emotions from feelings, which are subjective experiences that accompany the emotions. Whereas science has no access to animal feelings, animal emotions are as observable and measurable as human emotions. They are mental and bodily states that potentiate behavior appropriate to both social and nonsocial situations. The expression of emotions in face and body language is well known, the study of which began with Darwin. Frans de Waal will discuss early ideas about animal emotions and draw upon research on empathy and the perception of emotions in primates to make the point that the study of animal emotions is a necessary complement to the study of behavior. Emotions are best viewed as the organizers of adaptive responses to environmental stimuli. If you like this kind of stuff you should read: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
The Wandering, Winding Way of the Wound or the Politics of Cure, the Shadows of Harm Reduction, and Transgressive Networks of Care at World End was a webinar hosted by Bayo Akomolafe at SAND in 2022.
Nature is sending us extravagant distress signals. Earth is a hot mess. From Covid to climate catastrophe to fascism, the perils of disinformation are a matter of life and death. We’d better get really good really fast at reading Nature’s mind. The stakes are too high to keep drinking the collective Kool-Aid.
Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) “Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime” helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, “Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.”
“Probing Process & Reality” is a six-week course, John B. Cobb, Jr. and Tripp Fuller provide an introduction to Alfred North Whitehead’s masterpiece. In this introduction to the course, Dr. Cobb responds to the question of why Whitehead’s work worth exploring today.
Philosopher Roman Krznaric discusses his most recent book “The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking”. Krznaric explores six ways we can expand our time horizons to confront the long-term challenges of our age— from the threats of climate change to the lack of planning for a global pandemic. Do we have what it takes to become the good ancestors that future generations deserve?
Roman Krznaric writes about the power of ideas to change society. Named by The Observer as one of Britain’s leading philosophers, his writings are widely popular amongst political and ecological campaigners, education reformers, social entrepreneurs and designers. His books, including Empathy, The Wonderbox and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 20 languages. His new book, “The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking”, was published in July 2020, and has been described by U2’s The Edge as ‘the book our children’s children will thank us for reading’.
Moss is as unlikely to fascinate philosophers as, say, cockroaches or dust. But if we scratch the surface of that indifference, something else entirely seems to be hiding just beneath it. Each in his own way, Francis Bacon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche tell us one and the same thing: moss is inassimilable to metaphysics. Condensing in miniature the entire kingdom Plantae, these tiny plants comprising approximately 14,000 species throw a formidable challenge to thinking based on oppositions, to linear chronologies, and to conventional theorizations of energy. From the outside, they support projects that aim to revolutionize philosophy, to convert philosophy back to life from its obsession with death. Seen through a child’s eyes, moss becomes as cognitively fresh and refreshing as it is vividly, dazzlingly green.
Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology. He is the author of many books and countless academic articles that engage with a critique of anthropocentrism in philosophy accounting for non-human types of existence especially with respect to the ontology of plants and their modes of being. His most recent publications include: Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); “The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium” (2014); “Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze” (2015); “Dust” (2016); “Grafts” (2016); with Luce Irigaray, “Through Vegetal Being” with Luce Irigaray (2016); and “Energy Dreams: Of Actuality” (2017), Political Categories: Thinking beyond Concepts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)
Emerging technologies have unprecedented potential to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. Among the most powerful — and controversial — is the gene-editing tech, CRISPR-Cas9, which will improve agricultural yields, cure genetic disorders, and eradicate infectious diseases like malaria. But CRISPR and other disruptive technologies, like brain-machine interfaces and artificial intelligence, also pose complex philosophical and ethical questions. Perhaps no one is better acquainted with these questions than Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE Foundation and co-founder of Singularity University and Human Longevity Inc. In this session, Peter will give a state of the union on the near future and explore the profound ethical implications we will face in the ongoing technological revolution.
