Who can own nature? And other questions of belonging...
But who really owns land and nature? Humans have no more self-evident rights than grass, trees, and squirrels, not to speak of fungi and bacteria. Property, the conceit that state-backed human social relations give us absolute rights over things, does not go far in the realms of land and nature, where people can never fully be in charge.
What people can share is not absolute rights over land and nature but the knowledge, affect, and social relations involved in living with them.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Empire’s salvage heart: Why diversity matters in the global political economy, 2012
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
What captured our attention
What if “Nature” does not exist
What if we acknowledge our relations with every entity
What if we invent an ecosystemic economy
What do you think?
Where does Europe begin and Where does Europe end
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Imagine an Ecosystemic Europe
Imagine an Altereurope
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Cross Idea
Well, where does the Danube has its origin?
It seems that, against the age-old controversies between specialists, it stems from the source of the river Breg, but the water that irrigates the meadow from which the Breg rises comes from a pipe, planted straight into the ground.
An old woman who l …
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Paradoxes in the quest of an origin
Well, where does the Danube has its origin?
It seems that, against the age-old controversies between specialists, it stems from the source of the river Breg, but the water that irrigates the meadow from which the Breg rises comes from a pipe, planted straight into the ground.
An old woman who lives in a house on top of the meadow has attached a hollow trunk to the pipe, which forms a kind of gutter. Is it therefore necessary to conclude that the Danube originates from a gutter? In this matter the first foundation is missing, the base that holds everything together; even the gutter that feeds the spring is fed by the spring]
Anonymous
The Danube that both is and is not, that is born in several places of several parents, reminds us that, thanks to the complex, hidden fabric to which we owe our existence, each of us is a Noteentiendo [a form of not understanding you], as are the people from Prague with German names or the Viennese with Czech ones. But on this evening, along the river which they tell us sometimes disappears in summer, the step which treads with mine is as unmistakable as that watercourse, and in the flow of it, as I follow the curve of the banks, perhaps I know who I am.
Claudio Magris, Danube, 1986
What if we are looking for the source of a river and we find out that it is a gutter, collecting rainwater?
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
What captured our attention
What if we tell a different history
What if “Nature” does not exist
What if we invent an ecosystemic economy
What do you think?
Collections that include this source
Imagine an Ecosystemic Europe
Imagine an Altereurope
Keep exploring
Cross Idea
When governments pursue growth as a goal in itself, they undertake desperate and damaging measures to make it happen. They chase cheap energy and keep issuing licences for fossil fuels and opening coal mines. They say they're cutting red tape in the name of business innovation, but they end up unde …
