Indy Johar explores how to re-imagine a future where we are fully reconnected with our environment
Big-picture podcast with The Future of Good (player above) from Dark Matter Labs’ Indy Johar - one of our pals (and contributors) at A/UK. Here he’s beating on one of his most resonant drums: the deep shift from an object-oriented to a relationship-oriented worldview. Indy thinks this is what really stands behind our climate crisis - it’s the point at which real facts are telling us that we have to think in a more web-like, interdependent fashion.
Here’s a snippet of what you will hear to whet your appetite:
“I would argue that we are in a fundamental transition in how we see ourselves in the world and at a precipice or a moment where we actually we have to start to redefine how we see ourselves. Too often the conversation of what it means to be human has been reduced — and has been reduced in the last 300 to 400 years post-enlightenment — to seeing the human as an individual, an isolated object, an object that can be put on a rocket and fired out into space, that can be isolated from its ecosystem.
“Whereas actually what science is increasingly starting to tell us is that humans are perhaps an emergent property of our natural ecosystem. So, you know, we have 92 percent of the same DNA as mice. The trees around us: without them and their capabilities to produce oxygen and other other instruments around them, we do not survive.
“Actually we’re quasi-indivisible from the ecosystems around us. Microbiomes, their impact on our gut, on our intelligence, our capabilities: we are fully intermeshed. Our abilities for our bodies to be trained for antibodies: we’re an enmeshed thing. … And us being an emergent property of nature redefines the kind of object nature of how we see the world.”