Olivia Strittmatter - humans aren’t in balance with the earth

April 5, 2020

In class reading 3

The quote from The Spell of the Sensuous, “...the clearest source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet” on page 22 as the basis of this blog post.
First of all, I really liked this quote because it shows that most people today don’t have a balanced relationship with the earth. Abram also said “we can hardly be surprised by the amount of epidemic illness in our culture” (Abram 22). It’s being shown right now more than ever, with COVID-19. In class we talked about how our culture and society are caught up in a mass of abstractions, and using the earth’s resources. Meaning that people think mainly of themselves and very little about their impact on the earth and its environments, as long as their lives are convenient. We focus on our technologies without stepping back and looking at the bigger picture: our impact on the world. We have to step back and remember our connection with the more-than-human aspects of the world.

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