The Extinction of Experience

Civilization may be old, but the word itself has not gathered as much dust of time.

Adam Ferguson, in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society, is the first to use the English word 'civilization'. 

In his essay he wrote, 

"Not only the individual advances from infancy to adulthood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization." 

Civilization has been happening, but the rudeness doesn't seem to have diminished. 

One of the rudest things to have happened to what we call civilized peoples is our loss of connection to the natural world.

A lack of connection to Nature is not natural. Break that connection and you break everything.

Civilization, by definition, not only separates us from the natural world, but aims to dominate it, bending it to humanity's will. 

That, along with social stratification, as well as culturally programmed narratives of progress and supremacism, and my favourite, a ruling elite to boss everyone around, is what has made civilization great since it blew into the wilderness in the first Agricultural Revolution.

Since then we have been seeing the extinction of experience, a phrase coined decades ago, to describe our species growing disconnect from its relationship with the natural world. 

“As cities and metastasizing suburbs forsake their natural diversity, and their citizens grow more removed from personal contact with nature, awareness and appreciation retreat. 

This breeds apathy toward environmental concerns and, inevitably, further degradation of the common habitat. 

So it goes, on and on, the extinction of experience sucking the life from the land, the intimacy from our connections. 

People who don’t know don’t care. 

What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known a wren?”

- Robert Pyle

This broken trust has had lasting negative effects on both the Earth, and on humanity. If left unchecked, the condition will be fatal for both.

The human family badly needs a new model. It will look a lot like the old model, when humans still lived intimately with Nature in a mutually beneficial relationship. 

The first step is exposing one's self to natural environments as much as possible, whether in the yard, the park, the garden, or the wilderness. 

Photographs, videos, and windows that look out on a natural landscapes, can all help the brain receive many of the benefits of physically being in nature.

We ARE nature and we need to experience it at regular intervals, and redevelop that relationship, if we are to maintain the health of our species.

Otherwise the extinction of experience will be the extinction of our race.