With Wild Nature

Going to the woods is going home.

John Muir

Após vários dias a aguardar a encomenda efectuada através da Amazon, finalmente chegou TreeGirl – Intimate Encounters With Wild Nature. Trata-se de um livro, de Julianne Skai Arbor/TreeGirlÒ, que prima por uma estética primorosa e cuidada, com fotografias fantásticas e textos interessantíssimos sobre a ligação seminal entre os seres humanos e as árvores.

Deixo-vos aqui uma ínfima mostra, de texto e imagens, que servirá certamente para despertar a vossa curiosidade e abrir-vos o apetite por esta obra incontornável para os apaixonados pela Natureza em geral e pelas Árvores em particular.

The act of climbing, whether trees or mountains, has been identified as a “core human interaction pattern”, or “nature language”, in Peter Kahn and Patricia Hasbach’s book Ecopsychology: Science, Totems and the Technologic Species. The authors affirm that human patterns of interacting with the elements in Nature – being near or on moving water, gathering around fire, sleeping under the stars, tracking and hunting animals – are as old as the human species themselves and are ingrained in our psyches and bodies. Indeed, these ingrained relationships cannot be buried or evolved away from no matter how technologically dependent we become. With the exception of some arctic and desert regions, Homo sapiens have lived in direct relationship with trees for over two hundred thousand years. So it’s fair to say that the tree-human connection is genetically and psychologically ingrained in us. [p. 51]

E.O. Wilson popularized Erich Fromm’s term biophilia, the “love of living things”, which refers to our innate affinity with Nature. He proposed that biophilia is an instinctual drive – that the deep affiliations (or philias) humans have with the rest of life are rooted in our biology. Human beings, he suggests, subconsciously seek out connections with other living systems because those relationships help us, and everything else, survive. Biophilia is commonly seen in people’s love and care for companion animals, their fascination with wild animals, and their care for houseplants, landscaping, or gardening. Similarly, it explains why ordinary people sometimes risk their lives to save others – human or animal, and even trees and natural places. He proposes that emotions of empathy, compassion, and love are actually biological and genetic. [p. 52]

Edição: TreeGirl Studius LLC (Santa Rosa – Califórnia, 2016, pp. 192)

ISBN: 978-0-692-72604-4