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Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, resource depletion, new emerging diseases: scientists have raised awareness on the ecological and societal consequences of the unbridled development of human activities for a long time. Why do we keep destroying nature when science makes it clear that in doing so we risk our own destruction? How can we stop destroying our life-support system and reach some kind of harmony between humans and nature?
This book seeks to answer these questions. It describes the inability of modern society to fundamentally modify its relationship with nature, instead engaging in collective fictions such as subject-object duality, matter-mind duality, the primacy of rationality, and the superiority of the human species over all other life. Subsequent chapters identify avenues which could allow human societies to break the current deadlock and forge a relationship with the natural world. This path is rooted in a simple observation: humans have a nature that defines them as a unique species beyond their cultural differences, and at the foundation of this nature we share a set of fundamental needs. The expression and satisfaction of these needs provide an opportunity to reconnect humans with nature in all its forms.
Nature That Makes Us Human combines recent scientific discoveries in biology and psychology with deep philosophical inquiry – in addition to economic, political, and historical considerations – to understand what motivates us to keep destroying nature today and how we can engage in a new relationship with nature tomorrow. This book is for anyone interested in understanding and overcoming the current ecological crisis.
Introduction
Part one. Humans versus nature
Chapter 1. Homo sapiens, a species among many others but not quite like the others
Chapter 2. A brief history of the divorce between humans and nature
Chapter 3. Subject and object: The mirror of modernity
Chapter 4. Matter and spirit: The great illusion
Chapter 5. The underside of economic rationality and progress
Chapter 6. Journey to the centre of the modern world
Part two. Where humans and nature are one
Chapter 7. Letting nature touch us
Chapter 8. Recovering nature in us through our fundamental needs
Chapter 9. Reunifying knowledge of body and mind
Chapter 10. Building a social and economic order that serves life
Chapter 11. Embracing life that flows through us
References
Michel Loreau is a renowned ecologist, known in particular for his theoretical work on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and on the ecological and societal consequences of biodiversity loss. He has also championed an integrative biodiversity science that transcends disciplinary boundaries, and devoted significant efforts to linking biodiversity science and policy internationally.
