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I’d like to extract the core of conservationism from conservatism and replant it in a bigger pot; where many see progress, safety, science, I see winnowing, narrowing, destabilizing; I see the destruction of ecological pillars of the human self — the poisoning of the system that is the Soul.
I have the melancholy feeling that the last year has cut a major highway through the human soul: the equivalent of a Robert Moses bridge running through the old Inward Park. I see a new kind of brutalism in the ‘safety’ measures that have been put in place through fiat governance: a brutalism of the spirit.
Where, in the wake of mass vaccination, ‘experts’ see gradual, halting return to normal, I sense that the old normal — however flawed — is permanently gone: that we have rewired our nervous systems (children most of all). Inside of us, old villages have been paved over for office towers and public housing; what little of the wild in us has been replaced with unsustainable cognitive development.
