R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
AWE Season One Episode One
Hello and a Recap
In the previous post on The Crow’s Nest, I gave a general overview of what I am hoping to achieve here. I used a framing device of Dunbar’s number, and the numbers in a typical hunter-fisher-gatherer band, kinship group, and tribe in order to demonstrate how young our species actually is. Simply put, if we were to assign the name or face of a friend or contact to each generation before ours, many of us could quite feasibly head back to the moment our species left Africa.
If you missed that and don’t want to read the whole thing, essentially the essays and posts I intend to share here boil down to a series of questions:
How can we make our lives more full through creative interaction with nature?
How can we use ancestral skills to do this?
In a world which is changing rapidly, whether through increasingly frightening climate change and likely breakdown, or through humankind’s related and ongoing destruction of nature, how can we make a difference?
And, finally, how can we do all these things, no matter where we live on the planet?
Before I could move ahead with this rebranding and increased focus, I had to think of precisely what I hope to achieve and, by extension, what I would like you to get out of this too.
The thing is, this is a journey we could and arguably should take together, even if the act of being in nature can often be very solitary; I want to show and share my own path through examples, bringing back ideas and trying to demonstrate ways we can make our own lives better whilst also aiding nature. Having deep knowledge of the natural world—as seen through the eyes of an ancestor—gives a strangely powerful sense of calm, something we could all use right now. I would also argue it gives a strangely calm sense of power too.
The word, “community” can feel mis- and over-used on the internet, especially on social media—where the companies in charge of your data have to answer to advertisers—but this is how I envisage this project, going forward, as a community.
I’d like to draw together as diverse and as interesting a group of people as possible, from as many places as I can, all linked by the common theme and goal of learning about our place within this world of ours, more on which below.