The Rewilding of Humanity?

http://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/05/the-rewilding-of-humanity/
Date Written:  2018-11-05
Publisher:  CounterPunch
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23070

John Davis looks back at the exploitation of the wilderness, where urban dwellers are now alienated from the natural world that once surrounded them, and wonders whether we can ever return and live in a more natural and balanced state.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

There has been intensive economic exploitation of the rural hinterlands but rarely stable levels of human habitation. Lands have been raped and pillaged - logged, drilled and strip mined. Once their indigenous occupants had been removed, they were often left abandoned, untended, and empty ready to become invented wildernesses subject to a romantic narrative that proclaims them inhospitable and anathema to the human presence. We have been driven out of these lands because of false narratives that support an urban civilization powered by fossil biomass where, ironically, we are increasingly dependent for our sanity on the non-indigenous animals we call our pets and perhaps a backyard garden of exotic vegetation, some raised vegetable beds or a few potted, exogenous plants.