I offer alnasense as the sum of all physical senses of all living beings on Earth at any one moment in time.
In science, the word multimodality is used when describing the combined physical senses that lead to a mental interpretation and an overall cognition of external stimuli. I offer anthrosense as an alternative. Feelings and emotions then follow – sensibility.
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Alna ~ from Proto-Germanic alnaz meaning all.
Anthro ~ from Latin anthropos meaning human or man.
Sense ~ from Latin present participle of sentire “to feel.” Interestingly, according to etymonline.com, the biological noun sense was only introduced to the english vocabulary in the 1520s AD.
Moment to sense on the river Clun (2023), photo by me.
In honour of the work of Joy Bear and Richard Thomas, who coined the word petrichor in 1964 to describe the aroma earth emits when rain falls*, I offer potamichor.
ποτάμι Potámi ~ greek ~ river.
Ichor ~ The sacred blood of the Greek Gods.
Potamichor ~ a familiar odour of rivers.
Dimethyl sulfide**, along with other elements and biochemicals, offer the familar and pungent sulphurous odour of sea spray, an important moment of the sulphur/sulfur cycle that aids protein, vitamin and hormone building – I’ll call the smell thalassicor (sea/blood of the gods).
And in the same vein, estuaries and saltmarshes create ekvolichor (estuary/blood of the gods); lakes give off limnichor; ponds – limnoulichor: swamps and bog – telmichor.
Potamichor is complex, with varying cocktails of minerals, biochemicals and olifactory matter bound to be unique to the continuums of river-place given geological, meteorological, climatic, symbiological, microbial (including respiration), ecological and anthropological (extrinsic/intrinsic impacts).
With complexity in matter and directionality, and in a constant state of flux, salmonids, lampreys, twait shad and sturgeon know more than we ever could about potamichor. They smell their particular birth-streams miles out to sea, and without the use of material and energy-greedy tools. Perhaps migratory birds use these cues to navigate too, high up in the atmosphere. And more? Imagine.
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* Bear, I., Thomas, R. Nature of Argillaceous Odour. Nature 201, 993–995 (1964). https://doi.org/10.1038/201993a0 – geosmins produced by Streptomyces, etc.
** Shemi, A., Alcolombri, U., Schatz, D. et al. Dimethyl sulfide mediates microbial predator–prey interactions between zooplankton and algae in the ocean. Nat Microbiol 6, 1357–1366 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-021-00971-3
A wilder patch of vegetation sandwiched between two commercial orchard barns, seen through a glassless window. Photo by me.
The following essay was submitted to the editors of the Rewilding Handbook, but I was unhappy with the extreme and unnecessarily negative comments by certain peer reviewers on my brief critiques of British and, especially, privatised rewilding schemes. At the final fence, it was suggested that I completely re-write using another style in order to placate the academics in question, and I would not. None-the-less, I offer the original essay here.
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TITLE: Fluminism and Rewilding: Introducing Locacede
AUTHOR: Ginny Battson
Consciousness and Imagination
I am sitting by the confluence between the Rivers Wye and Lugg, Herefordshire, taking in the air just above the water as do the mallards and the chub. At the same time, I lament a bad dose of algae on the rocky shore. Neglect and abuse of both rivers, all the way from the Cambrians and the Radnorshire Hills, has led to what can only be described as gloop, eukaryotic cells drunk on heavy nutrient loads, smothering the delicate life that would otherwise be foundational to the temperate, lotic ecosystem here where the rivers meet. Upstream to the West, there is Hereford itself, a market town sliced through the middle by the Wye, a gathering of people and bridges that is a meld of traditional agriculture, industrialisation of food and drink, tourism, and the military. Everything about the Anthropocene that is causing distress in the living world, the techno-junk, the radionuclides, oil, greenhouse gases, acid rain, human and farm animal sewage and ammonia, PCBs, fertilisers, and plastics, is pouring down these channels, building at the confluences. All the while, river life has been trying to survive against that colossal force. The Anthropocene is winning and life is generally losing. Something has to be done.
Those beautifully evolved wilder lives down there in and around the water, including the ones we can’t see or sense without electron microscopes or other high powered technologies, and every living being in the wider catch of the river’s catchment, has an inherent, intrinsic worth, a value beyond anything we can place upon it. Interconnectedness makes life the miraculous incident in space/time that it is, an ongoing process lasting billions of years. Humans are young to it and we keep breaking those connections, White European-ness, the youngest and most naïve of all.
Conservationists and preservationists alike do sense and realise the damage. It’s a pain carried like an open wound. We want to protect life and facilitate the most natural carbon and nitrogen cycles possible. The most effective way, as in nature, is a full range of knowing and belonging that harms less, joining at the confluences to usher in something bigger than the sum of ourselves. Rewilders have come a distance this last decade to show us the potential vitality of preservation at continental scale; its effect is intercontinental. It’s still early days, and there have been mistakes and omissions, but this is a process continuum, like everything else of great worth.
Outfalls from oversubscribed sewage works spew into the river on very rainy days just downstream from where I am. Life struggles to flow in an era of Property and Rights, where all that we presume to own and accumulate is measured in pounds, dollars, and every other currency invented. But it is the open sky, the vast oceans, the rivers, forests, grasslands, bogs, the soils, and the subterranean wellsprings, ancient ecologies of which we still know so little, that have the highest values for what life is truly all about. The source of everything that is meaningful to humans is also meaningful to all life. We are all together in a beautiful and spectacular continuum. What goes on up-top impacts what goes on down-below, and everything in between meets this same continuum, just as in the confluences of the Wye, the rains that fall, the estuaries into the Severn and the Severn Sea, and onwards.
Of course, humans are nature too! Some are more conscious of ecological reality than others. The people responsible for those concrete walls and sewer outfalls, perhaps less so. I celebrate the ones with real compassion and respect for all life, our brightest lights. But to bring in the leviathan scale of change necessary in a time of ecological and climatic emergency means a vast shift in consciousness, a cultural shift more swift, at least, than the pandemic that was and still is industrial globalisation and economic growth. Our one shared, complex and exquisite biosphere definitively requires the deepest rewilding of human consciousness and imagination; an openness to, and reverence for, the fullest array of ecological processes. It is more than simply survival.
Fluminism and Rewilding
Here, I offer my own ecophilosophy Fluminism as a way of perceiving nature as flow, our place within, a nurturing of those deeper forms of consciousness and imagination, and agency as a powerful form of love via devotion. Further, I introduce the neologism “locacede” as a voluntary gift of space and time to this cause.
Fluminism recognises symbiotic flows in multiple directions, the processes of the biosphere that sustain life for all to flourish. It also requires consciousness and imagination to engage in perceiving the potential relatedness: the complexity is endless, the minutiae are beautiful. Fluminists accept in fullness that we are a part of, and belong in, the flow of all life ~ I call this symnexia. By understanding that we belong, we are enabled to protect and proliferate those processes, even those unseen, towards a flourishing of abundance and diversity ~ and I call this praximund (process world).
We step into the flow with devotion because this is life at its best and most meaningful. Wherever and whenever we intervene (as is our nature) it is an expression of love, and in no way confined to the human realm. In this understanding, prejudice fades away, there’s no exclusivity, no social nor ecological segregation. At best, it really is unconditional love, a devotion, even in death (an ecological death). All is flow, so let it be a life-enhancing flow.
Critically, Fluminists may also consent not to overburden, not to interfere too much in wild processes. Where possible, this can be done with generosity, at least, in time and place given over to all that is essentially wild. Love, I contend, is a choice, something created, and very much a doing word. Ecological free reign, at scale, whilst not excluding other Fluministic forms of belonging/doing in order for humans to thrive, offers huge and valuable hope. In caring for and protecting life processes and relationships, and living daily in that consciousness, we may resist the many unfolding catastrophes of the Anthropocene. Fluminism, in a sense, is a narrative of dynamic interconnectedness of life, but also an ethic that befits life as deeply symbiotic in constant flow. Ending absolute human dominion is also to trust in ecological processes and relationships that nurture abundance and diversity.
Rewilding is a strong manifestation of Fluminism, a flow of wild, intrinsically valuable beings within a greater collective consciousness; a welldoing for the wellbeing of all life. A clear and essential call has been made to make the entire movement compassionate towards all the wild lives involved (Bekoff), and as Fluminists, this is extended towards all lives equally: Homo- and what I now call Teresapien life (non-human).
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Teresapien
Proto-Indo-European, tere, meaning to cross over, pass through, overcome.
Latin, sapiēns, meaning discerning, wise, judicious.
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Done well, it is an Ethic of Care (Gilligan), focused on what’s healing for specific places over longer ecologically sensitive periods of time, generations old and requiring patience.
Rewilding has been, so far, considered “Ecocentric,” (1) an exhibition of Deep Ecological values (Næss, et al), in contrast to the Anthropocentric or human-centric perception that all is good when it serves human interests. This holistic ethic first heralded in the 20th Century, places worth on the whole ecosystem, biome, or biosphere, rather than on the individuals that constitute the whole. The latter became known as Biocentrism (Taylor, and within Consequentialist frames, Attfield). I disagree with the main tenet of deep ecology that the whole, including non-organics, is worth more than the individual. And individuals are nothing without symbiotic relationships with many others. I have looked instead to resolve this tension between the whole and the individual through “process”. It is the processes, the relationships, the exchanges of matter and energy between life that generates more life, and therefore are worthy of the highest protection. This is the reason for the neologism, Fluminism.
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Fluminism
Latin, flūmen, meaning river; genitive plural, flūminum, meaning ‘of rivers’.
[The genitive case is one that expresses possession or relation, equivalent to the English ‘of.’]
Latin, -ismus, meaning a system, philosophy, principle, or movement.
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As an Ethic of Care, Fluminism looks at each place-case uniquely and, inherently, at people as nature, along with all other species. There is no hierarchy since each symbiotic species has as much of a role to play in processes as any other. The symbiotic ~ mutualistic and commensal ~ relationships between beings, as demonstrated by flows between mycelium networks and tree roots in the woodland floor (Simard) are clear evidence that cooperation, not competition, is conducive to successional processes. Further, Simard’s research on Mother Trees (2) demonstrates their acutely nurturing and caring nature: demonstrative love, care.
Fluminism as love
The word Biophilia was coined by Erich Fromm “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive” and was later adopted by American biologist E.O. Wilson in his work Biophilia (1984). He proposed a hypothesis that humans have an innate affiliation with nature and teresapien life, which is partly genetic. The work has been subject to critical review; nonetheless, it is influential in fields as wide-ranging as architectural design and mental health. The problem is obvious, however, in that greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, and depauperization of once-abundant ecosystems, are still occurring, regardless of scientific consensus on human causality and any innate love.
The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum refers to the structural role of the narrative in affecting emotions and, therefore, actions. Love is, to a great extent, a choice, a creative act, rather than something that is tracked down until it is found. Fluminism allows the chance of making that choice, creating and caring for that union. Even to the most analytical of intellectual human minds, thought, emotion/feeling, and action are inextricably linked. Our selves are not closed systems.
In biological or teleological response, if we experience a strong positive emotion, we have the opportunity to become motivated to act in beneficial ways. Fluministic love, expressed and acted upon as a positive emotion, exists with the strongest potential to undo or heal critical planetary harms manifesting across the globe. There may never be a better moment for Fluministic love to be embraced as an ethical force.
Love may still be regarded with deep skepticism in terms of a general emotion beyond religious norms, but love as an ethic ~ re-shaping values, binding rationality, emotion, and action together ~ may resist globalised, inegalitarian divides and the circumscription of values. I see direct correlations with the interconnectedness of all life in mutual benefits and symbiotic relations. It is time for a change in the climate of human thought, for a supersession of the axiological trinity of Cartesian rationalism, Locke’s assertions on property Rights, and Adam Smith’s laissez-faire economics.
My difficulty is in convincing others that any ethic may be shared by the more-than-human world; how can I prove other species and even the interconnectedness holds the consciousness necessary for any kind of value or ethic? I look to the word “devotion” and its meaning, and bear witness to it as a critical and logical phenomenon in all ecological processes. Look closely at the stunning nature of mutualistic symbiosis in lichen, for instance, or the Mother Trees, or the process of pollination between a fly and a flower. Feel the vast devotion of succession, nurturing and blood kinships, granivory, and detrivory. The list is immense, as immense and devoted as evolution itself.
These would surely be fascinating times, if all wasn’t so vastly concerning and I think we need to be careful with Western ideas of ‘wild’ represented through Law, Economics and Political Parliaments. My focus is on space-time, the core ecologies in places over time, some of which (certainly not all), largely exclude humans in the everydayness of their operations. In other words, an agreed sacred, a consciousness, real and imagined, motivating us to protect with the full force of our love for ecological processes. It is a different way of seeing, feeling, and doing: a way of respect and reverence towards life within the flows of all life, though not in any tight religious sense. It is in the nurturing and culture of respect through enlightenment, or Flumilightenment, education, celebration, and importantly, responsibility (Oren Lyons).
It’s actually empowering, and a mind-body-spirit relief, to know that the flows of life are engaged strongly towards abundance and diversity just by doing what they have been doing since those first cells began to emerge from complex elemental centres 3.8 billion years ago. Likewise, the more this happens across the planet’s biosphere, including and likened to parallel and convergent evolutionary adaptation, the more resilient human life will be. This is a globally scaled symbiosis ~ exquisite and miraculous. It is the co-operative relationship, the mother-daughter, and most likely the origin of the eukaryote cell itself. Mitochondria, the daughter ~ as an endosymbiont bacteria ~ consumed and protected by the ancient prokaryote, the mother; a process called endosymbiosis, tested and coined by the great evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. Neither entities may have originally been related, but now exist in nurture-kinship as an intimate and inspiring foster care: a kindship.
There should be no hierarchy here (all being flow), save purpose in being. Forces that sustain life are celebrated ~ the sun, the moon and the tides, gravity, mass, oxygen, carbon, and evolution itself. It’s a seemingly ever exchangeable and complex shaping, where life shapes all interconnections, and where all interconnections shape life.
Locacede: a generosity
Our time, “our” being inclusive of all lives right now, is not for more human-centrism, nor boundless gardening, curating, even stewardship. It is for endless human generosity towards all life in equal measure in that same space and time. It is for generosity towards those who are oppressed, homo and teresapien, and everything moves forward on creative love. There is no ending of civilisation here, but a widening of what the array of being “civilised” means; a deepening of a kind of universal global endemism, or adopted endemism in any place—andemism—(3) with the greatest respect and without appropriation and patronage.
Neither is it an abandonment of human community, craftsmanship, and agroecology, nor a distraction for the urgent need for justice and equity. It is a continental-scale reminder of our place within all. If done beautifully, it cannot be anthropocentrism, but a new belonging to something much bigger than we could ever be or imagine. Indigenous peoples with local knowledge and philosophy bring cherished, hard-won wisdom to that collective compassion and understanding. (Pierotti, Neidjie).
A flood of consciousness and understanding leads to feeling, real and imagined, of being at one with life in flows. The latter, if taken to the ends, may require be a great dissolution of Property Rights, certainly a loca-cessation of dominion and absolute “power” over air, land and sea to wild beings, sincere and hugely generous. Perceiving land, sea and living beings not as “chattels” (Leopold), humans can collaborate consciously in the reciprocity of ecological exchange; a kind of spiritual exchange of gifts (Wall Kimmerer).
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Locacede
Latin, locus, meaning place; plural, loca, meaning places.
English, cede, meaning to yield, give up.
To locacede ~ to withdraw from a place, to directly decolonise humans from an ecological system.
To withdraw oneself or a dominant human community voluntarily from a flo-loca, thereby allowing teresapien processes to reclaim. To do so is based on the best information possible and by no force or coercion, instead with fluministic love. It is a symbioethic.
This is intended to replace the language of decolonisation, common parlance in the field ‘Environmental’ Ethics, thereby leaving that to remain clearly in the domain of colonialism with respect to human political and cultural Empire.
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The physical, ecological case for Rewilding (Soulè, Foreman, et al) stands as one strong route to the integrity of natural systems by providing scaled-up, core, intersecting and diverse planes for dynamic teresapien life, and without heavy human interruption. Success, however, relies on co-operation with local people, and so it cannot simply be a blunt imposition as a scientific conservation tool.
Rewilding is a preservationist strategy, a radical one too, in the face of such huge losses as to be viewed as an ongoing global extinction event. Some find it too radical, detaching from the human-as-mammal reality that we are part of nature not exclusive of and to it, though restraint is as wild as any urge to intervene. But the result is the unmitigated growing of ecological community, of which humans may remain included when in peaceful modes of existence. Until now, it’s been almost all shout. When all is abundant once more, humans as ecological consumers will choose to participate respectfully and with gratitude (Wall Kimmerer) in those ecosystems, with a lighter touch and not the hammer hand. Sometimes, where there are glaring species-as-fluminists gaps in those beautiful, dynamic processes, predators and prey alike ~ the beavers, the mountain lions, or the auroch long extinct, or even the wild red raspberry ~ species are re-introduced to special places, or surrogates let free instead. So long as they are cared for, remain free from human persecution, and have abundant food and water, why not? Emancipation is never limited to the human experience. These beings, and their symbiotic microbiomes, may not have the choice to be born, nor where they are liberated, but liberated they are from this point on, engaging in flows of life towards flourishing.
Scientists speak of ecological “community”, and rightly so. Without community, there are no opportunities for interactions. But it is these interactions, sometimes exquisitely delicate, at other times blunt and seemingly brutal, that bring life to the next plain, mountain, ocean, or river flow. These can never really be self-willed, since the will to flourish is never of the self, but of community, and community can never be individual. These are community-willed flo-locas, the music and dance that makes everything alive, from the smallest microbial symbiosis to the magnificent blue whale caring for her young.
It’s important to look at, and attend to, the causes for that general lack of human consciousness and imagination of “wild” in order to provide depth and longevity to the concept of Rewilding, amongst other methods, necessary to turn things around. Perhaps, by taking the first tentative steps to liberate suppressed ecological interconnectedness in core places, that crucial consciousness and imagination can expand towards a point of no return. Critically, I also advocate egalitarian ecoliteracy (Orr, Capra), from cradle to grave, a deliberate and sensitive pedagogy adapted to place, for understanding life-systems and where humans fit among them. Essential too, however, is the flattening of steep hierarchies of power that will continue to arrest and oppress all if not dealt with, the rejection of economic growth (Daly), as is the validation of some of the older ways of knowing and doing that have been largely lost from living memory. Critically, forming enduring emotional bonds ~ an intimacy ~ with all inherently valuable species in interconnected flows on Earth will equate with progress on recouping the terrible losses within our one shared biosphere.
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The Anthropocene (Crutzen) describes a geological era of human dominion, climate change, species extinction, and a stark depauperization of complex ecological processes. Evidence is now indelibly being laid down in the rock record in the form of biochemical signals, techno-fossils, and radionuclides. The debate continues as to the crucial timing of this shift in ecological power towards Homo sapiens, but there’s no doubt that in the last ten thousand years or so since the last Ice Age, a series of changes in human behaviours, sometimes in quick steps, have led to a deeply concerning existential crisis.
Particularly over the last one thousand years, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, Colonialism, and the globalisation of technology, there have been large shifts in power from local communities to a minority elite with agency over greater numbers. Expansionism has abused indigenous peoples and wildlife living in relative harmony, for the sake of accumulating material wealth for the oppressors. Indigenous peoples have been divided, sold up, swallowed up, or extinguished by egoist intentions on nation building, exploitation, and extreme forms of capitalism. The ethics and values of these ancient ways of knowing have been purposefully derogated in order to maintain control, going so far as to kill off many of the intimate nature-nurturing cultures, languages and strategies that sustain life.
Even the definitions of English words have been pitched to reflect a dominant culture rejecting the very notion of wildness as being the beautiful thing that it is. Formal dictionaries describe wild and wildness primarily as qualities of being uncontrolled, violent, or extreme (Cambridge Dictionary, et al). Language and meaning shape humans in all kinds of ways, and perhaps any new consciousness begins by a greater understanding of that reality.
More, in the red mists of a celebration of competition stemming from British Victorian Social Darwinism (Spencer, et al), where it is immorally accepted that there are more losers than winners, the core reality of humans as simply a part of the magnificence of nature is almost forgotten, and intrinsic values of all living beings are subjugated to a bleak maximum utility for human use. We know extinction events have happened before. We know the kinds of triggers, and we know many of the kinds of local-global consequences, again through paleo-ontological studies. Yet still, the processes of human actions perpetuating that state are continuing in a series of consumptive, relentless, sometimes compulsive acts. They are instigated and carried out to the maximum by an inequitable human population, the human condition right now subject to vast imbalances of power.
A surrender of lands back to indigenous peoples must now happen, but also a great giving back to our fellow symlings (beings and their symbiotic microbiomes). Things are really that grave; the scale of the crisis is the size of Earth, so the scale of connectivity and movement required given climate change, and the need for egalitarian inclusivity must also be that size. How will it be possible to re-instate the essence of humanity as an inescapable part of base nature, the thick crust of all that is alive? Rewilding plays one critical part. Passive and active interventions are now way overdue on a r-evolution in understanding natural systems and where humans fit intimately into them. Industrial and technical eras have spiked, likened to, and evidenced as, a major pandemic, and with extrinsic or utility values inescapably monetised, in correspondence with a crisis in human imagination.
Easing the tensions
Opposition to “Rewilding” include a fundamental reluctance to relinquish human agency, industrial capitalist interests in land as commodity, and pastoral systems of land stewardship, in favour of ecological free-reign.
The Rewilding Thematic Group, IUCN, however, has produced heads of terms for the Commission of Ecosystem Management, surveying and agreeing criteria for international advocates of Rewilding. Critically, it includes a pre-requisite of local human consent, participation, and reciprocal reverence for communities in the designation and care of Rewilded places. This must be lived and breathed by all who advocate the cause. No wonder there is real fear that powerful, rich people are taking control of land, when land governance tends to equal power. Every move to acquire land is seen as an effort to wipe out family traditions and/or indigenous cultures. Monied philanthropists can buy out thousands of hectares of land in order to impose power, even if it conducive to a liberation of wild. American philanthropists in South America, for example, have bought lands to Rewild and then eventually be returned to the State as “commons”. The British scene [aka headlines] is dominated by the story of a private farm, who is content to sell Rewilding as the enhancement of property value in magazines such as that of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (4).
Sadly, neither Private nor State is “Commons”. Rewilding by White, wealthy humans only creates a vacuum of local participation in visualising and later experiencing wilder lands, and suffering due to continued inequality upon what land remains. Let us consider the cessation of land ownership to validate all that is truly wild. That will be hard, I understand, but contend that when Rewilding becomes a tool of oppression and injustice through human territorial structures, then it’s simply not Rewilding. It is a form of exclusive colonialism. Perhaps, in this sense, no true Rewilding schemes have yet happened.
As it was originally considered in the US, continental scale and connectivity is critical to Rewilding. Movement (ecological dynamism) particularly of large wild herbivores and their natural carniverous predators, has been foundational. Here in the UK, Rewilding in its fullest sense is arguable, and I’ll contend here, for the above reasons, not yet implemented. Whether the original concept can ever be applied to the UK is a legitimate question, given the tight hold over land by dominant power structures, Law, banks, and property valuations. Perhaps this makes Rewilding ever more prescient, because of the significant act of generosity of place that will be required towards that end.
Rewilding: Big Mutualism
There is hope, however, because to Rewild is not to obliterate pastoralism or natural craftsmanship in adjoining places. These places are as important as those Rewilded, otherwise there could be no mutuality.
Inside the Rewilding zones, a human relinquishment of power offers an opportunity to learn from much older species through observation, by emotional and spiritual connection in those deepest of flows, and to perpetuate rather than hinder evolutionary forces, and shared flourishing and abundance (Haraway). Outside, opportunities exist to celebrate the most natural ways of cultivation and human existence—food, water, shelter, medicine, and communication—yet remain protectors of the Rewilded, a new sacred, via Praximund. Climate change means we have to make some difficult choices. We cannot escape that which is already built-in, though we are still in a position to avoid the worst. Human and teresapien life naturally moves away from climatic extremes, striving to keep in synchronicity with seasons. The direction of movement is from the equator out towards the poles and from low to high ground. Interconnected, Rewilded places offer enormous potential as refugia as well as migratory routes. Humans will be able to bear witness and respond. People of all spectrums are welcome as friends ~ a “kindship” of the concerned. Collaboration and consent, as well as an ethic of care to each unique place, is key.
A devotion to all life by those humans who live in proximity to Rewilded lands, skies and waters will always be a necessity, otherwise these efforts will result in resentment, tension, conflict and failure. Rewilding advocates may provide a platform to nurture that love in multiple ways as Fluminists, through local education, art, stories, work, a very real sense of inclusion, and an open heart to naturally honour local or indigenous knowledge and practices. This is a skill, as much about listening. In exchange comes wildness, of people and place.
Fluminism and Rewilding: river of the heart
Back to the confluence of the Wye and the Lugg, and I peer into the water and ponder the great role this river should be playing in bringing carbon from the land and burying it at sea. I imagine a transformational episode to come in its long life, to a much wilder, almost unrecognisable, place.
Here in the future, perhaps, the confluence is part of a fully consented Rewilded zone travelling alongside the water from the central hills of Wales to the steep cliffs and wide tidal mouth south of Chepstow. Protected by Praximund, all manner of kinships reach deep into the flow.Shimmering springs and waterfalls up-top (where wolves and big cats once more slake their thirst and satiate their hunger) bring oxygen and shade for aquatic life via Atlantic oak woodland (temperate rainforest dripping with mosses and bryophytes) to the life of the young streams and confluences.Beavers intervene in their most prolific and biodiverse ways, generating ponds, entire wetlands, and flourishing meadows in their creation and abandonment of dams. Down-below, magnificent salmon, trout and sea lamprey run strong against gravity into the mouth of the river, bringing all their pelagic magnetism and minerality up into the hills to spawn and die. At the estuary, the rhythm of the Severn estuary sucks 4,136 km2 of the basin’s dazzling unpolluted organic matter dissolved into the Môr Hafren (the Severn Sea), coming to enrich vast honeycomb worms’ reefs in long shore drifts and sinking away into the long carbon cycle at the bottom of the ocean. In between, thick riparian zones, both sides of the water, bristle with the narratives and dialogues of a vast array of vegetal and animal beings. All hold back the land from slipping fast and furious into clear waters and an intricate rocky bed teaming with unstoppable life. Everyone, every flow, is be joined in confluences across land and sea, even as far as Siberia and Africa, and to the rest of the world.
Fluminism is my ecophilosophy of ecology, relatedness, and love in dynamic flows. Science may describe every unit of power as equal to a unit of work divided by a unit of time, and Rewilding surely brings some of that power back to the forces upon which we are reliant rather than those that we ourselves try to re-create. That shift, when it is at its utmost primacy, must bring the human heart into alignment with what is most valuable of all. This is where Fluminism, as love, thrives. It must be generous, sometimes with a willingness to locacede. We came out of the wild, and to go back in is not a sign of coarseness and contempt for human development, but the fullest possible love for evolutionary processes.
My sincere thanks to philosophy scholar, Laura Muñoz, coordinating editor of 15-15-15, Manuel Casal Lodeiro, Professor Jorge Riechmann, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid , and my daughter Gracie Battson for her Spanish translation skills. Please click on the image for the link.
Biophilia, Fluminism, Symbiocene. An interview with Ginny Battson – 15/15\15 (15-15-15.org)
Rain shapeshifts the trees and their unseen communities through glass. Photo by me.
I’ve come to realise, friends, that even some of the most influential speakers and writers of words on climate do not understand even the basics of Earth as an entire dynamic system of systems.
I go further and say that a repetitive use of the word climate as the dominant meme is now serving LIFE poorly. LIFE is mutualism en masse, symbiosis as a continued wave down deep in the rock to surprisingly high in the atmosphere. This is why I have coined the word symbioethics.
Please, think about how you use the word climate, despite the big crowds in high politics going on and on because of pressure to “do” something as opposed to “nothing”. They aren’t system thinkers. Their goals are linear and flat. In terms of Earth Crisis/es, they are the Flat Earthers. Neoliberalism is particularly exploiting the situation; it’s raw like drawing blood. To these people, carbon and carbon dioxide are exchangeable units to trade, and mass electrification means Business-As-Usual in all other aspects of LIFE. There’s blood all over the place, and more to spill.
All aspects of modern life, I’m almost afraid to say it, are what led to the invention of fossil fuel exploitation in the first place, and hence the unfurling, energized, continuing nightmare that is Earth Crisis. Climate change is a symptom, not the disease. You have to recognise this, surely, because those politicians and capitalists may have less of a clue than you.
Earth is different as a planet because of LIFE. I’m animating LIFE in capitals, so as to know and perhaps feel your way into how things really are. I don’t care much about these competitive and anxiolytic obsessions with targets and meeting them, just please stop for a moment and take this in.
LIFE came about because of LIFE.
Sure, it took long-gone, variable qualities of non-organic systems, the chance events of matter, including water, reacting and compounding billions of years ago until an opportunity existed for the emergence of early RNA-like substances, DNA, viruses, and bacteria and cells. In certain conditions again, perhaps under a newly generated organic methane shroud, like smog to deter ultra-violet violence, these basic cells merged again, forming metabolizing and photosynthesizing cells, and in more than one place in similar timescales (symbiogenesis).
LIFE then really took off in this swirling flow of abundance, and when these earliest colonies of dazzling (Lynn Margulis) living matter grew into and around others, more cells found novel roles and began to coalesce in the form of more complex organisms. You only need to understand lichen to realise how it is LIFE that changes the conditions for LIFE. Lichen turns rock into soils; soils are hotbeds for LIFE. And that’s just one example we can all see with our own eyes.
Since those magnificent Earthly points in time and space, LIFE has gained strength by manipulating those very same inorganic and organic systems that produced them, changing them to suit more LIFE (Gaia Theory, even if weak). LIFE has evolved for billions of years subjecting, and being subjected by, the conditions of Earth as a system (Lovelock).
Fast forward three billion years—and five previous extinction events—and here we are, and every living being is still a colony among colonies.
Climate is just one of many interconnected systems that sustain LIFE, though inescapably critical. Its power under change is rage, but the rage should be ours because members of our own species created the volatility, and a minority still pursue it ~ for cash. Climate, on the other hand, simply describes the weather conditions that prevail in general or over a long period. Climate does have the power to let LIFE thrive or die out. But even the atmosphere is largely a product of everything else going on in the world, chiefly… LIFE. Climate is a symptom. As such, it isn’t just physics. The neoliberals, the corporate capitalists, deny it. They may have begun to engage under pressure, at last, but it is only on their terms ~ cash.
Let’s look at LIFE instead.
What are the LIFE supporting systems?
LIFE on Earth is symbiotically related to several Earth and cosmological systems, which are mainly energized by the Sun, our aspect towards the Sun, but sometimes by sources from within the Earth itself. These are all intimately related in flows. We can try to separate them for the sake of study, but the reality is a giant existential, moving system, full of subsystems, cycles, and processes. All is relatedness, flow.
On Earth, the main sub-systems are as follows.
Hydrosphere
Geosphere
Biosphere
Atmosphere
Each one is interconnected to the other by processes and cycles, transforming and exchanging matter and energy over time from the nano-second into deep time.
Evaporation, erosion, convection currents, transpiration, photosynthesis, weathering, erosion, rock formation, ocean currents, climate…no beginning nor end. Carbon, sulphur, salt, food, nitrogen, water, energy, cycled on into LIFE and back again, including human LIFE, which can’t exist without them all.
There are even more systems and processes, macro and micro, even sub micro and meta macro, many of which we have no understanding nor measure. But we know the consequences of them – LIFE on Earth. Sometimes, we have to imagine. Or simply trust in them. But this means leaving soft imprints everywhere we go, or none at all.
SIXTH Extinction Event – Humans.
Scientists relay via peer review evidence that we are into Earth’s sixth extinction event. This includes leviathan climate change.
The five previous extinction events we know about because of the rock record, have been initially caused by activity outside of the organic experience. We know there are historic “orbital” rhythms to climate, which we call the Milankovic Cycles, named after the scientist who mooted the theory, and we know that vulcanicity, tectonic drift, and even giant comet strikes have all altered the stasis of Earth’s spectacularly unified systems that sustain a gradual flow of LIFE.
The problem is that we humans have so manipulated all four of Earth’s main systems that we are changing global stasis and therefore climate (for the sake of argument, the conditions of life as we understand them) earlier and faster than it would otherwise do so. And it is happening so quickly, driven by a power-crazed minority that wrongly perceives accumulation of wealth as the aim. Climate is the global feedback as are ocean currents slowing due to melting ice, displacement of bacterial and photosynthetic drivers of certain cycles, including changing salinity. Yes. Climate change IS heating and weirding and will create more torment and suffering to LIFE, because of the feedback loops in linked systems, like the hydrosphere (flooding, drought, etc).
Existential LIFE on Earth is inherently magnificent. It is so even without humans considering it merely here to serve our needs. But that magnificence is being killed off by humans through overreach in all aspects. All kinds of human development block the flows of LIFE, the processes, and relationships that sustain communities. Climate change so far (no nuclear winters just yet) is a result of the destruction of living and geological systems that trap carbon in long cycles. Significant anthropogenic (human-caused) changes have happened since the emergence of human agriculture and cities, but sky-rocketing because of the industrial revolution, wide-scale fossil fuel emissions, and a rapid greenhouse effect. Smothering soils with tarmac and concrete, burning peat, harvesting woodland, churning out pollution and waste, fragmenting all kinds of ecosystems with hard infrastructure and agriculture, killing sea LIFE ~ all effects the carbon cycle. Space Capitalism is exacerbating all. This is not just about climate!
Kill off LIFE, and we kill off ourselves. Remember, we are all communities within communities. Nothing is separate.
There are signs and signals everywhere that something is seriously wrong with the systems that sustain LIFE as we understand them, the global COVID19 pandemic in humans being simply the latest. Many more exist beyond the human realm if only more of us understood.
Words matter.
Human words are critical in how we relate experience to one another, but are also significantly powerful over all other LIFE forms because that’s the state of play right now ~ human dominion over all LIFE. I’m sick of people suggesting to me that words do not matter, despite them using words to try to communicate that fact. Your words, my words, act as communication capsules fronting deep memory, transformation, emotions, belonging and doing. They can be used as weapons, salves, or instruments of new ways of thinking. Words do matter, especially those repeated and repeated in the public sphere. We should be way more aware of their power.
I’d like to hear the word LIFE just as much, if not more, than the word CLIMATE. It is LIFE that is ultimately of profound worth, even though a clement climate is ideal for life in different regions as we understand it now. To avoid LIFE and its diversity in our language allows human power structures to focus only on CO2 in the atmosphere like a currency and climate as if it were still dissociated with all those systems that sustain LIFE.
Climate this and climate that. Even critical areas such as justice and equity aren’t adequately served well by its narrow framing. Just look at water and food supply, and the terrible inequities of pollution streams. Some solutions to fit the climate narrative even go so far as to kill more LIFE when LIFE is the evolutionary response to climate warming. Curtail LIFE and you are doubling, tripling the problem.
Systems thinking, please, and in the use of language. To continue isolating the language of climate is a folly. It is a kind of othering, something difficult to handle for almost everyone else. Too big, too ethereal. Something only for learned and passionate experts, or politicians.
The way we live our lives in community, as community among many communities (human and teresapien), is the change. This will help steady the symptom of climate change, though we know the genie has already let rip. It will critically help LIFE in mutualisms and flows. Teachers can be a huge part of facilitating that community change by example. As can any local government, library or hospital officer with responsibility for public buildings and grounds. I’ve little faith in private, competitive interests (at the heart of Capitalism), but maybe there is some hope here. I will wait to see if the practice of locaceding is accepted. Meanwhile, Governments can help or hinder, but the change must be a groundswell. At the moment, voting records still show contempt and apathy from the ground. They will take heart from this, and carry on ignoring LIFE.
It is my greatest hope that Fluminism, on the other hand, is a positive word from the get-go. As a symbioethic, it relates easily to all flowing mutualisms, processes, cycles, and systems that sustain and proliferate LIFE in diversity and abundance. As a word with meaning, I use it as a resistance to those Earth scarring ways of perceiving, being, and doing in this world. It’s a treatment of the disease and the symptom. Perhaps you might use it too. Once understood, it is do-able by everyone equally and daily, and a perception of the world that is then very difficult to un-know.
Hey you, who abandoned me at life’s worst moment; who lied to all of us. Who told me of a love, un-encounterable to most. The path that cut steep down through red soils was lined by light. Tiny stars of wood anemone watched over my eager feet as I moved down through the bluebells having their first conversations with the early bees. All seemed so narrow, a weight, but with an unfurling canopy of shock-green saving me from a complete molten, lead sky.
But at the base, where woods fall literally into the river, the sky came in with a bright summer blue, and I stopped to take a deep breath. Breaths are gold, each one, even on ventilin. The river moved like a sliding plate of silver down the table, pausing by me, almost stationary, to hear an ornicophony of riverbirds, and the faint shriek of peregrine somewhere high above. Remember, you asked me to write a poem.
Everything opened up to me at this place, Capler, and to everything, flowing through my veins and into my lungs and to the lips. This was what I came for. To try to heal.
I’m suffering again, not in your arrogance, in your image fixed into the eye of red-bellied black snake (poor snake), but a realisation that a lifetime of my own difficulty here at my desk, might be a neural difference, an unbidden mindset, unseen and unfelt by all who have tried to help me until now. I don’t like the terminology (this is a symptom too), though I sometimes give too much of my attention, and am hardly inattentive to others. But it only takes a hairline fracture to let the light into pitch black.
The DNA-flow of great grandmothers, grandmothers who died by their own hand, mothers (me), daughters who swim beautifully but who still feel they are drowning ~ I just thought this is what it meant to be a woman. To be let down by men.
Apparently, only a few are weighted by this “attention deficit”. The anxiety that has ripped through all life’s traumas—there have been many, about as many men in our lives—I just thought we were sensitive. Perhaps, that’s just all we are. It’s hard to contemplate another turn of mental anguish ~ I’ve only just come off the pills.
So the path swings left as the river widens into the most exquisite vista to the south, the Wye leaning into a high slope of woods, carving the opposite bank where thick Herefordshire farmland sits heavy. There’s a grandmother over there, with her granddaughter, and they are throwing pebbles in the stream. Bredwardine memories stop me still and then empty me.
Butterflies filled me up ~ at least six species; little flighty wings got my attention. I sat among them for a moment, down in the undergrowth, smiling with them. How do you tell a butterfly she is beautiful? Then the path sunk into the bedrock cascading in steps to where the salmon try to run old Ballingham, where the proto indo european rip of riparian—that deep climatic tear—is plain for all to see. More butterflies lay prone on the rock, soaking in the heat. I felt lost there, truly lost in that most profound, good sense.
When I came to my other senses, where dream-brain switches into task-brain (as I am now told), I followed a bee into a wide holloway, pushing up into the steeps under Capler Hill Fort, and into a vast auditorium that would have blown your mind.
Ravens sounded their wings in circles above me (put that sound in my pocket and save it for later). Giant red-tailed bumblebee queens looked like tiny ants as they rustled their buzz under dry, tongued ferns. All the passerines from all over the Earth were here it seemed, super-high among the quarry-top trees. One oak lay crashed down at the bottom of the cliff, fallen from the topsoil that looked so thin at the top. Another big tree that looked small because of the scale dangled precariously, its roots like tentacles feeling the air. All life is so reliant on that thinness.
Then, to hear a slow-rising noise, the shallowest anthrophony of cessna above, of brightly coloured canoe-shouters in the channel, and a sit-on-lawnmower droning slowly towards me. Here, at this place! I could hardly contain my anger. I talked to him later when I’d cooled down, about grass clippings and river ecology—they don’t mix—and he talked to me about keeping things tidy for the tourists, and the fly-fishing licenses; saving the kids from being stung by nettles (I laughed out loud); saving Earth from the scourge of balsam. And litter, to be fair. Even a Ford Capri. And I thanked him for that.
I walked back alongside his engine, and we stopped to listen to the noisy peregrines eyeing two-day old ducklings swimming the big, scary river, in little flurries.
The man told me the quarry I’d found may have been the source of the red sandstone that is now Hereford Cathedral. A hole in a hill the size of nine hundred years. These peregrines live there now, perched on the quarry ledges. Peregrines also hunt their quarry around the Cathedral tower.
I think I found a feather of a female the other day near the remains of a dead pigeon. It’s pinned to my notice board for me to admire the inward beauty of her. Like a shock.
Then one flew right over me casting avumbra. And that was the healing moment of the day. The silence of avumbra. I came home wanting, by the habit of four years, to tell the image of me in the mirror ~ you. I wanted to tell the other one too, the earliest bud of cherry blossom, but he’s just told me he found someone else, before the flowers have even fallen to the ground.
Over the next few months, I’ll be doing a series of moments on the Wye; an in situ telling and collection of personal experiences that helped shape my creation of Fluminism as a symbioethic.
One: Eaton Camp, Wye.
Trigger Warning: Contains distressing descriptions of the memories of suicide ideation and behaviour. If you are feeling vulnerable in anyway, please, don’t listen. Seek urgent help. Help is available. If the first help isn’t positive, try and try again until you find the RIGHT help for you. You are unique. The right help IS there.
Convergence of root to trunk, Cage Brook, Herefordshire. Photo by me.
Flumilightenment: A resistance to birfurcated thought, and a rejection of the word “environmentalism”.
For too long, environment has been treated as something external to us. We are drip-fed news about the non-descript environment as if it were:
External to us – somewhere “out there”.
A choice, option, preference, or hobby.
Something that others make a fuss about because they don’t have to worry about daily traumas such as racism, all other kinds of prejudices, conflicts, ill-health, paying the rent.
This is a blind alley, and perpetuated through words, phrases, and headlines every day. We live with language and meaning as something that shapes how we live. We shape all because of it.
Our young are being cultivated, too, in this now damaging misnomer ~ the “environment”.
I am suggesting nothing short of a new Enlightenment.
~~~
The physical reality is that ALL IS FLOW, AND ALL LIFE FORMS (EVEN IN DEATH) ARE INTEGRAL to all. Nothing is truly separate in the realm of reality.
What has been separated is our mental and emotional state of being. And continuing to use separating language perpetuates planetary catastrophe.
We must now DROP the term “environmentalism” for the sake of saving life itself.
What we *think* we are putting into the *environment* is actually going into living beings and ourselves in our one shared biosphere.
As symlings, we are infinitely connected at every point within our porous bodies, and the bodies of all symlings, and our porous bionts (our microbiome, including bacteria and their viruses), with all other dazzling matter AND their wave effects within our biosphere and beyond.
Every moment, we are penetrated by atoms and electromagnetic waves, chemicals and biologies of so-called others. And we do the same to and with them. We are flow.
It’s like a kind of giant melding, a sexstorm, a kinmaking, the ultimate anti-racism, anti-speciesism, anti-anthropocentrism, a oneness in flow.
Sometimes, our imaginations are able to envision, though the crisis of imagination right now is profound. Sometimes, we may even think we feel it (I call this sanguimund – bloodearth). I want us to be able to protect it all (I call this praximund – processearth).
Life-changing, Earth-saving stuff.
~~~
This is not an Indra’s net I speak of, nor even an entanglement (suggests that we are still separated, at least by a single barrier), but an incredible, complex, porous flow, from the cosmos down to quantum level, in constant exchange in what I call the nagorasphere, which I write about in more detail in Humans and Nature’s Kinship Anthology series published in September later this year.
Within the chaos of the formation of this universe, at least, come patterns and exchanges (Bookchin) that exist through our every cell, breath, heat, and every cell is a symbiosis of other beings (Margulis).
~~~
It IS our absolute existence, even without sensing it with biological organs (we glimpse so much more via the tools we have created). But now our minds and emotions MUST follow, and the way we express all through our utterances and the way we live our lives, each and every day. Please, don’t use the word environment without, at least, considering fully what I am saying.
A FULL KNOWING of fluminism and being it every moment in complete union is a new enlightment; the physical reality, but also the mental and emotional consciousness of this reality. A Flumilightenment: The Great Mental and Emotional convergence.
I hope this makes you feel alert and empowered. You need to be.
Last summer, I am swimming in the cool Arrow just west of ye olde Penebrugge, keeping my nose above the silk-smooth, trying to find a rhythm against the strong flow. The sun is strong, and all winter’s ghosts abandon me for the ocean.
Under me swim a million Atlantic salmon lost to hunting and distress. Above me are the spectres of a thousand white men culpable for the loss. I’m not grieving for the men today.
I get out of the water, and warm blood returns to my cold skin, flush-blush, and I breathe deep the oxygen offered free by the immigrant balsams that shoot from anthroturbed, hot, shade-less, phosphated banks.
Man ~ anthro ~ disturbs ~ turb, from Latin “to stir up”. Anthroturbs.
You ghosts! I ache for you to come back to me, animated and full of the essence of life, like the blood returns to my epidermis, as real and vivid as you ever were.
I look up to a mewing raptor circling under a bright cloud in a deep blue sky ~ a fantail. Buzzard in all her glory, kindred buzzard; your lungs take in my air and mine yours. What are you saying to me? I think I might know. Your polarising eyes bear witness to my dullness under all the silver drops of water and soaked, sun-bleached hair. You’d rather talk to the others who might come to you, and avoid my predatorial shadows. I understand this. I am whiteness, and with all the river washing, I cannot get rid of that.
But you are utterly safe today in the brightness, as I neither possess the inclination to kill you nor a gun. My love for you is about as iron-strong as things are. Do you know it? Others are harming with poisons, and game rearing, and poultry sheds, and I do fear they will turn you into a ghost if you don’t stay away from people who look like me.
Can we ever stay away? “Stay away” is really an impossibility of matter in our dimming biosphere, because we are altogether in flows, bound into processes, like it or not, even in death. You are inside me, and me you. I’ll just sit here and warm for a while, and smell the undergrowth, and keep my eyes open for any other symling to greet who flows into my senses. The river will do its thing, taking my skin cells and some of my microbiome with it.
~~~
This early Spring, dressed hard for cold weather, in boots and jeans and overcoats, there is a human path I follow worn down under cracked willows, where the tree creepers hop from bottom to top. It’s a place forced under pressure between the sewage works ~ subcontracted to a profiteer by the not-for-profit water company ~ and the banks of the Wye just South of Bartonsham Dairy. Raging floods dig down deeper into the buried shingle of ten thousand years, like salt in a wound.
I’m going to check the sewer outfall for a point-source phosphate pollution event.
The path here is the beginning of a chasm, and there’s a terrible and awkward dance to walk it. I call it the Bone Path, where salix roots finger across it like skeletal hands. Fishermen come here with their maggots, their carbon rods and alum hooks. I sometimes find the nylon bits in tweavelets, and they do anger me on behalf of all the animals.
I find the outfall and it is spewing white foam that reeks of soap. White foam of phosphates, the wastes of capitalism down the supermarket aisle where you and I buy our plastic bottles full of washing liquids and chemical softeners. I take pictures, imagining the entire journey to get these eutrophiers here.
There are three fishermen waste-deep in the channel across from the spewing, and I am not sympathetic. But then I change my mind, worried. So I shout across through twigs and willow tits, and suggest they take care with all the phosphates coming straight at them.
“I do not know what you are talking about,” one man shouts back in a heavy accent above the din, and continues to throw his line.
I repeat my concern and he waves me away like a bothering mayfly. They laugh at me. I reach for home, passing more flood erosion, where the river in its fury took more lives from the soils and dumped them somewhere downstream and unappreciated. Ghosts.
I am thinking about the freshwater, which is hardly water at all, so full it is of symbiotic life. Here is where all is easily indivisible like me swimming below buzzard kin and breathing balsam air. We are to them, and to everything in the air, and everything that has been stolen. All matter leads to the ocean, oceans to oceans. We are all ghosts, and that is my exquisite grief.
I have just sent my pictures to the non-profit. We’ll see how it goes.
We know the forces for good in walking as part of nature. And I do it myself. So I have been considering a word for it.
Walking doesn’t have to involve legs, let me just say. It might mean all kinds of devices as extensions of our bodies ~ enabling. Moving through time/space at walking pace.
Med ~ PIE root for “take appropriate measures”. Also root for meditation.
Ambulare ~ latin for “walking”.
Medambulare ~ walking as welldoing for wellbeing. Also, the closer within nature’s flows we are, the growing fluministic love we have for all life, the more we will defend and protect. Soul food.
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