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I’ve been going through a lot of writing about the political climate surrounding climate change over the past few years. This work is maybe the most impactful thus far. It’s a cogent argument for reorienting global left/right politics and argues (as other writers have emphasized) to consider our actions as part of one terrestrial body. There is an inherent difficulty in declaring something like “we ARE nature” without it sounding alienating, because it is so normal for so many of us to think of nature as a separate entity. The dichotomy of nature over there is even reinforced by the idea of nature as something you go to visit to get relief from your urban/suburban dwelling.
But to give a very concrete example, if we can’t, as a culture, conceptualize something like the destruction of a mountain thousands of miles away for extractive purposes as the destruction of part of ourselves, we run the very real of continuing to self-destruct. That doesn’t have to be a left-right political issue because no traditional political contingent has a monopoly on appreciating something about nature.
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