Response #2 (Revised)
- From most people's perspective, human society stands the opposition to the natural world. This separation has been built over many centuries. Both Barry Lopez and Robin Wall Kimmerer show us different ways to reconnect with nature. Lopez teaches us how to be present in nature, which can change us from just watching to really joining in. Kimmerer shows us the deeper meaning behind this change: we should feel grateful and give back, not just take from nature. Together, they talk about what Kimmerer calls "the democracy of species." This idea challenges the belief that humans are more important than everything else in nature.
- In the modern internet, the database would automatically read your preferences and then recommend similar content to you. This refers to a concept called 'information cocoon', which indicates that people would only receive information related to their own will and interests. Our whole world is like being wrapped up in a cluster created according to our different personas. This creates a fake phenomenon that makes people have the idea that 'The whole world is like me, like the whole world is spinning around me.' But this way of thinking did not start with the internet. It comes from hundreds of years of colonial and industrial thinking that changed how we see nature—from living beings to just things we can use.
- According to Lopez, "I needed to understand that I was entering the event as it was unfolding. It started before I arrived and would continue unfolding after I departed." Being in the natural world extends people's sensations of capturing the environment: the smell, the sounds, the colours. Growing up in modern human society keeps us receiving information in pieces, which makes us lose the ability to think in a more embracing way. The living patterns of people in modern society emphasize expressiveness and efficiency. This refers to the idea of "when an observer doesn't immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences…" What Lopez means is that modern life pushes us to quickly label everything we experience so we can hurry to do the next thing.
- However, in the natural world, everything is slowed down. Meeting a bear does not just mean 'encountered danger', but stretches to another scenario: the bear came to this place to seek food and water, during this process, the bear met humans, who happened to be us. We are just part of this moment, instead of the main character of this moment—and this realization helped them find more resources, like fish and a running river. This is exactly what Kimmerer talks about when she says "gratitude calls us to acknowledge the personhood of all beings from maple trees to snapping turtles." The bear is not just danger—it has its own reasons for being there. It is joining us in what Lopez calls "a continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer." Kimmerer says this way of thinking is "an antidote to the arrogance of our time" because it "reminds us that we are just one member of the democracy of species."
- The "democracy of species" means we need to completely change how we relate to the earth. Kimmerer points out that "we find ourselves harnessed to an economy that relentlessly asks what more can we take from the earth." But indigenous people ask a different question: "what does the earth ask of us?" When Lopez's friends "let it continue to unfold" and "let whatever significance was there emerge in its own time," they are doing what Kimmerer calls listening. They let other beings teach them instead of deciding what everything means right away.
- Kimmerer tells a story about snapping turtles that shows how urgent this is. When climate change destroyed their usual nesting places, the turtles walked into a group of scientists. Kimmerer explains their message about giving back: "they're asking us to remember that covenant of reciprocity they're asking us to honor an agreement that at the beginning of the world they were our life raft so much closer to the end we must be there's." Lopez also talks about entering an event "as it was unfolding." Both authors are saying the same thing: we are part of relationships with nature that mean we have responsibilities to give back.
- What both authors want us to understand is that we need to recover something industrial society made us forget: we should build relationships, not just use things; we should listen, not control; we should give back, not only take. This change to what Kimmerer calls "justice not only for ourselves but justice for all of creation," is necessary for our survival. The turtles are already coming to us for help. If we learn to really listen—give gifts back for what we have taken—this might be the only way we can continue living in the democracy of species that we have always been part of.
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