Nature loving us

Going back even further than the 2013 ICAF, there was a 1994 movie that captivated me: The Secret of Roan Inish.

Set in Ireland after World War II, war-time evacuation took a family away from their island home. In the process, one of the children was lost. 

During the evacuation the gulls and seals were very upset to have the family leaving; that is why they took Jamie and kept him with them. Of course, there was a selkie ancestor, so the seals are really all kin and Jamie was a "dark one", so more seal-ish.

Okay, that is fiction, and folklore. What struck me at the time was the strong sense of connection to place. The people were tied to the land and the sea in a mutual way that seemed lost for our time and place.

I remember discussing it with a friend. Part of it seemed to be that these were people whose living was more tied to nature. Jamie's family were primarily fishers, so were going out onto the sea all the time, needing to be aware of the weather and changes and how it works. 

You could have similar ties with hunter-gatherer societies, and even farmers, but there are different ways of farming. If you are sowing genetically modified corn that goes straight into High Fructose Corn Syrup, it might be hard to feel connected to that.

(King Corn from 2007 could be relevant here, but that is a very different movie than The Secret of Roan Inish.) 

Here are things that I am thinking about in conjunction with the movie:

There are some plants that do better when harvested, which may include wild populations. This includes sweetgrass, as mentioned in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and camas, as mentioned in the following article:

https://www.vox.com/climate/377249/climate-solutions-traditional-indigenous-foods-water-potato

While selkies themselves are from Celtic and Norse lore, various Native American groups have many stories of people being adopted by or marrying or spending time living with animals, as well as other stories focusing on the relationship between them and plants or animals that are a food source. It would be easy to write them off as folklore, but that would be missing the point: different lifeforms are intimately connected and we need each other.

Some of the recent reading has been about economic changes and the rise of capitalism, where we also see the trend toward urbanization. In some ways, the estrangement from the means of production was really estrangement from nature.

Now, this probably seems like a good launching point for just going off on capitalism. I am not ruling that out.

However, there is a really recent story that is all kinds of wrong, and I think I am going there first.