Diversity and Planetary Health

How variety is not only a spice of life, but essential to it

“Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.” –Wade Davis

Ethnosphere, as defined by Mr. Davis is “the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness”—the ethnosphere is humanity’s greatest legacy. It is truly amazing, the varieties of life, thoughts, and perceptions that have developed in the various habitats throughout the world.

Every ecosystem depends on vast diversity for its health. Since there are no “separate events” in the world—its all one big happening, ultimately every thing is dependent on every other thing to maintain equilibrium. Is the variety of perceptions and thought, born in the array of surroundings through the utilities of life, any different? Is not consciousness, as natural a resource as any other form?

Enter religion

There is one way of being human that holds itself in the highest of regard. It dismisses naturally grown cultures and interpretations of the world as inferior ways of being. It has done more to destroy the ethnosphere through its total ignorance to the value of variety, and if they have their way and bring everyone to Jesus or Allah, the earth is doomed. The ethnosphere is every bit as important as any natural habitat. When one idea or specie artificially inflates its numbers, it detriments not only its own health, but the well-being of the entire system.

Would it be moral in any way, to visit an indigenous culture for the sole purpose of getting them to think like you (under the ignorant guise of love and concern, no less?) To abandon thousands of years of diverse existence to live the monochrome life, where everyone thinks the same and lives by the same rules, now has nearly the entire planet living in a state of constant anxiety. How superior is that?

Author: jimoeba

Alternatives to big box religions and dogmas

71 thoughts on “Diversity and Planetary Health”

    1. Out of all the things I have ever learned here, this has to be my favorite. If I could redo life, I would come back as Wade. He does have his frustrations though. Everywhere he has lived remote, he has had to deal with missionaries trying to undo what he was celebrating.

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    2. I remember a quote from Wade but I’ll have to paraphrase. One of his favorite moments in all his travels was when he would attend the longhouses with all the different tribes in full regalia. “The only thing missing was the fuckin missionaries”. They did not enter in those heathen gatherings.

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  5. Aw, don’t you folks wannabe poor capitalists? Then reframe your society, and become rich wage-slaves. Don’t like that either, okay, then how about wandering hermits, with a begging bowl and a handmade fork. Will the people provide for you? I doubt it. Damn, I lost my thought. Anyone want to complete it for me? Or for yourselves is okay too.

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  7. I enjoy experiencing the natural outdoors, but I also enjoy the advantages (medicine, dental care, clean water, etc.) granted to me by modern civilization. Perhaps the solution is to strike a healthy balance experiencing both worlds without developing an unhealthy fixation for either.

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    1. I’m not sure how celebrating diversity and accepting it as a legitimate form of living, could be considered an unhealthy fixation, when diversity is so incredibly rare at this point that it’s narrowed down to two warring factions (black and white) with nothing better to do than sit on their asses and read opinions—then copy ideas that have no utility. How would they know it? And christianity won’t be satisfied until every last soul is saved. The point is; the health of our planet depends on diversity in every way, and this is no different.
      What about people who are happy without modern medicine, dental care and “clean water” that is polluted by industrialist mindset? I know its hard to understand from our elite chairs in the modern world, but I for one, have lived a primitive lifestyle several years and missed nothing—and would be happy to die that way. But do-gooders just can’t seem to fathom that existence can be better, even if its shorter.
      Living free in the jungle was the ultimate life experience. What we have here pales in comparison, but modern living has a certain heir that loves living on the verge of anxiety. Happiness wont come because of some new technology, but by embracing out nature that we have abandoned.

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      1. Are you trying to convince me or yourself? Because you grant the impression that it’s really the latter. If living free in the jungle was the ultimate life experience, then why did you return to the USA? Plus, isn’t it a bit arrogant to assume that those who have never experienced western life are happier? Given a choice, how long do you think those currently spending the better part of their day and life in search of food, fuel and water (pure or impure) would continue that lifestyle if offered the conveniences of modern life? We westerners have the option of “playing” primitive outdoors-man until we tire of it and return to modern life — but they don’t.

        As to your treatise on diversity: This is the fantasy of men. Raw nature doesn’t give a hoot about such things. Our planet can easily carry on without any lifeforms until the Sun becomes a red giant and burns it away.

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        1. I returned because the kids wanted to go to college. So what? We (I) typically return to modern life not because I tire of it, but because I am stuck in a system that creates it own necessity and forces your hand (taxes, money, regulation) yet I have managed to raise a family and spend 10 years of my adult life living my life on my terms. Very happy I got to live as a free man, living my dreams for at least a time. Many, many people have stated to me that I was living theirs, yet here they are still stuck, unwilling or unable to take a chance.
          “Raw nature doesn’t give a hoot about such things”
          Primitive living and the diversity that developed naturally is a display of nature. Not a fantasy that was killed by modern synthesis. Modern life and religion rests on the heels of a few inventions as end-users. This is not in any way evolution, but a system of end users that conquered multiple ways of life with steel, not by some genetic underpinning of natural selection.

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          1. Please note that I’m not casting moral judgement so much as wondering out loud. I’m still unclear how you are trapped in a system you claim you once escaped. If you were living for free off the land, then monetary concerns should have been non-existent, no? Or did I miss something?

            On the second issue, by definition, everything that occurs in nature is natural — including the human developments that led to our modern world. Your continued survival necessitates causing some alteration to your preexisting environment, be it gathering sticks to build a fire or pouring concrete to build weather-resistant shelters. So it’s all just a matter of degree.

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            1. I thought I made that clear. I am not the only voice in my family. The kids wanted to go to college. While they do meet the requirements for free college in panama, they wanted to go here, vs moving to panama city or Las Tablas. I’m not advocating separatism nor do I lord over my family, so here I am, vs being alone.
              I understand at this point, not everyone can do or want to do what I did (I think most would get bored of it) but should that not be an option? Do we have to live this way or that?
              Less and less this type of living is discouraged, like here, they have regulation against tiny homes and if power is available, you must incur the cost of hookup and wiring even if you don’t use it. So there is little room for simple living. when you cant even have chickens or goats in many jurisdictions.

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            2. Then your real issue isn’t a lack of diversity — it’s coming to terms with the trade-offs involved in making hard choices. If you want to marry, you must forgo the independence of being single. If you want to have children, you must forgo the freedoms of being childless. If you want to be a vegan, you must forgo the taste of meat. If you want to live in the jungles of Panama, you must forgo the pleasures of living in the US. If you want to move to the Northeast, you must forgo living in the Southwest. If you want to own a home, you must forgo the flexibility of renting. If you want to accomplish something with your life, you must forgo the desire for idleness. That’s just reality 101.

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            3. Todays reality is foregoing wealth for symbols of wealth. You can no more quench your thirst from the word water, than you can derive nutrition by eating a dollar. Its a quirky system we’ve learned to accept as normal where the words and symbols are confused with reality. Im well aware of reality 101, but I really don’t like pretending.

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            4. Money is neither good nor bad. It’s merely a tool used to facilitate the exchange of goods and services — nothing more. And few people are willing to provide goods or services on a continuing basis without receiving something in return. That “free” college education in Panama isn’t really free because the professors and support staff expect to be compensated for their services. So the government extracts the monies required to fund those obligations from its taxpayers — just like the US and everywhere else.

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            5. Actually medical, university, and housing for the poor comes from panama canal revenue. There is a copay though—$1 for an ER visit and $20 if you’re admitted for any length of time. I wonder why we can’t have something like that here?

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  8. I REALLY like this — To abandon thousands of years of diverse existence to live the monochrome life …

    It totally puts things in perspective of what happens when one “converts” to religion.

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    1. There are myriads of legitimate expressions of the ground-being (not as a deity) that grows spontaneously in a multiplicity of beauty.

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      1. indeed. god is not some ‘deity’. it is pure being, the ground of all manifestation. even the ugly has a place in it. beyond ‘this’ or ‘that’, is the space of full acceptance and peace and the birth of real wisdom😊🌳🌷🥕

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            1. Im an Aries too, but what does that mean? When the earth orbits through my birth zone, should feel different—an energy boost of nostalgia?

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            2. i don’t take astrology very seriously, but for fun, i’ve learnt some things about it. Aries is ruled by Mars, God of War of course, so we tend to be more aggressive, impulsive, more action-oriented. so we may go through periods when these traits are emphasized.

              for example, when Jupiter goes into Aries, (Jupiter being the largest planet) it magnifies everything. that’s when i’m most likely to hurt myself, overstretch muscles, etc. sort of like that.
              it’s an extremely complex system, and i only scratched the surface

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            3. Its hard to scratch anything with a pulled muscle. For some odd reason though, the ancients were quite expert on these alignments.

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            7. i don’t take astrology very seriously, but for fun,

              Says the woman who knows what happens when Jupiter goes into Aries …. and I certainly don’t want to venture down THAT path.
              So, just sort of seriously …. as in, most definitely not on Wednesdays because we all know what happens when Saturn aligns with Uranus and it’s that time of the month for Io, especially when Pisces people get out of bed on the wrong side and the neighbour, who is a Capricorn wear that red dress.

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            9. Well, I’m an Aries too, or a curmudgeonly an old goat as my wife would probably suggest, so staying away from people is not really our nature, is it?
              🙂

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            10. Mother always told me, since times were so hard they shipped my twin brother off to England. Perhaps it is you? Whatever they paid for you, it was probably too much. Chuckle ha ha hee hee

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            14. The other story she told me was that I was never actually born—the a seagull crapped on a rock and the sun hatched me. Which story is true I’ll never know. But it all happened on the 13th.

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            15. Reminds me of the tale of the kid who asks her father where she came from and the dad replies:
              ”We found you under a cabbage leaf in the garden.”
              ”And what about you and mum?” she asks.
              ”Er …” mumbles the dad, feeling awkward having such a conversation with his daughter.”We were found under cabbage leaves as well.”
              ”So what about Gran and Grandad”? persist the young girl.
              ”Oh them too, I expect.”
              ”And their mum and dad?”
              ”Yep!”
              The young girl sighs, shakes her head and says:
              ”So, dad, are you honestly telling me that there has been no sex in this family for three generations?”

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  10. That reminds me of Mark Twain’s book Following the Equator (at least I think it was that one). He goes into a detailed description of the abuse of the people of the south seas by the “missionaries” who were going to bring Christ and civilization to these “poor savages”. But the native peoples of the islands actually had a pretty good life that was rather carefree because of the climate and abundance of fruit, fish, etc. But then along came the white man who brought slavery, disease, christianity, near genocide, indentured servitude, torture, rape… You know, all the good things “civilization” and christianity brought when they met a new culture.

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    1. Mark Twain may have gotten that from here—”With my own eyes I saw Spaniards cut off the nose and ears of Indians, male and female, without provocation, merely because it pleased them to do it. …Likewise, I saw how they summoned the caciques and the chief rulers to come, assuring them safety, and when they peacefully came, they were taken captive and burned.
      They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike.
      They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!”
      They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house.
      They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim’s feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen,       in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive.
      With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands and hung them round the victim’s neck. They made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them.Bartolome de las Casa—1504

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      1. That’s one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read. The atrocities committed by the colonial powers are enough to give anyone nightmares. Just look at what king Leopold and his people did in the late 1800s to the people of the Congo. Or what the “great” founding fathers of this country did to Native Americans and their toleration of and even acceptance of slavery. So much of our history has been sanitized by people who desperately refuse to accept the fact that a lot of our ancestors were sadistic, breedy bastards.

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        1. “ are enough to give anyone nightmares.…if they survived. This is a first hand account and went in for forty years. De las Casas (the attending priest) estimated 12 million Caribes were filled this way over 40 years.

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  11. You Stated — “(religion) It has done more to destroy the ethnosphere through its total ignorance to the value of variety”

    My Question — Isn’t the opposite true from an atheist perspective since that individual would see religion as part of the ethnosphere?

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    1. Ok, ill be specific, and as we speak, christian missionaries continue to push their monism on every organically grown perception of the cosmos that is not christian. How will the world be when everyone thinks in christian? I think you already knew what religion i was speaking about.

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      1. Every religion sees every other religion as an ethnospheric aspect and each pushes intentionally or passively it’s understanding or belief.

        With that said, we already know from history and Christianity that no one religion will ever become the only world religion.

        We also know that Christianity fuels an ethnospheric reality (denominations for example) and science resists the concept of an ethnosphere entirely. Reason and science attempt to convert the ethnosphere into the known biosphere. This is to say that all things from a scientific perspective are simply aspects of nature.

        Mankind as a whole (outside of science) seeks to dominate a certain conscious understanding of the unknown, which in turn fuels the ethnosphere even more.

        Philosophy, on the other hand, could be seen as an ethnospheric science. Easily merging all factual knowledge with conscious creativity. I often say that philosophy may be the only real aspect of mankind worth pursuing.

        Just a thought

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        1. For thousands of years the d’Dinga of south sudan did not impose their religion on anybody. Do you see the beauty of this conformity you seem to support?

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            1. “ Mankind as a whole (outside of science) seeks to dominate a certain conscious understanding of the unknown, which in turn fuels the ethnosphere even more”
              This part of your comment is what we call “winging it” and is complete rubbish as illustrated by the picture. What part of religion besides the abrahamic religions, seeks to dominate. Did you know in buddhism you are free to leave at any time? No hard feelings, your time is done, enjoy your next chapter. The perception of domination stems from christianity and islams relentless pressure is making the diversity of the world defend their heritage and their history. There is no “fueling the ethnosphere even more” by conformity to one particular way. I know christians believe this, that they can be dinka and christian too, but look around Lander.

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            2. Then let me double down.

              Mankind does in fact seek to dominate all understandings of the unknown. This is a fact, it’s what we do.

              Not only that, we fight and kill each other to control that understanding of the unknown. You may think that it’s rubbish but it’s how we deal as a species with anything we don’t know. As an example: We erase black people from history books in America to control our conscious understanding of white men in founding the country.

              As for seeking to dominate out side of “abrahamic religions” keep in mind that Hinduism has over 20 hells Oo

              We are not limited to religion with our need to dominate… we are tribal at all times.

              Passive religion is just as dominating as aggressive religion.

              When I talked of our conscious understanding you say I’m “winging it” but I’m saying we work hard to train ourselves to have a picture of how the universe works. This is a conscious effort to hard code who we are, how we think and how we react.

              I would also add that this is done through fear and violence.

              Just Saying… we have issues (all of us as a whole)

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  12. You Asked — “What part of religion besides the abrahamic religions, seeks to dominate.”

    My Response — I never said any religion seeks to dominate or not dominate. I clearly said mankind seeks to dominate.

    My Original Statment — “Mankind as a whole (outside of science) seeks to dominate a certain conscious understanding of the unknown, which in turn fuels the ethnosphere even more””

    Your response is aimed at something I didn’t say.

    On Religion I did state the following which is still true — “Every religion sees every other religion as an ethnospheric aspect and each pushes intentionally or passively it’s understanding or belief.”

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    1. seeks to dominate a certain conscious understanding of the unknown. So what is this? It certainly reads like a backdoor religious endorsement.
      Mankind does not seek to dominate. Do you? Do your neighbors? Systems of religion and politics seek to dominate. Both are the same thing, thinking they’re using the other for their benefit. I would suppose that any men seeking to dominate is because the founding philosophy of their current culture is in complete error.

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      1. You Stated — “Mankind does not seek to dominate. Do you? Do your neighbors?”

        My Response— Of course my neighbors seek to dominate. Haven’t you heard of the home owners association and the neighborhood watch.

        People have literally been killed opposing said groups in their own neighborhoods.

        Mankind continuously attempts to control through any social, economic, political or religious group.

        As for me the answer is again yes. I have a black lives sign in my yard while the opposition has confederate flags.

        This is what we do as human beings.

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  13. I like the concept of the ethnosphere and the necessity of diversity. Unfortunately it does not rule out religion as part of diversity. But monoculture will kill us when a certain pathogen comes along, e.g. Irish potato famine.

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    1. Diversity in religion was killed by one bad idea that is not from a natural conclusion through evolution or utility, but through the strength of steel that it was spread. Now most of the genes left in the pool are the compliant ones.

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      1. Creation of weaponry by humans is a natural evolution. We are as much a part of nature as any other living thing. That we live to kill, destroy, control seems counterproductive, but maybe it really IS about survival of the fittest.

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        1. The human body to me, is pretty much proof we haven’t evolved nearly as fast (if at all) as end-users of technology. Obesity and other factors tell us we haven’t kept up with the advances. Does our ability to use a gun or a sword mean we’ve evolved, when those primitive cultures could learn how to use it just as quickly?
          Survival of the luckiest, not the fittest, when we constantly try to hedge nature. Some descriptions I’ve read of the natives in america and the Caribbean told the story of superior humans in every way. Is being able to subjugate them make the colonizers more fit for survival? That’s a tough call for me. Through technology in medicine we save nearly every defect. Maybe that’s survival of the fittest, but not to our long term benefit. Time will tell I suppose

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          1. Even before metal, people were killing and dominating one another with rocks or fists. Native cultures in the Americas weren’t an exception. There are books devoted to whether this is human “nature” or not, but it isn’t a settled issue. Sure, a lot of survival comes down to luck. And those that do survive may appear to be less than the optimum of the species, but that’s a pretty subjective call. I wish all the ugliness that humans inflict on each other and the planet would go away, but it is not likely to happen.

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            1. I don’t seem to know anybody that wants bloodshed and hate individually. It’s kind of a group thing. “I wish all the ugliness that humans inflict on each other and the planet would go away” Im curious would wish this, if it’s all perfectly natural? Why interfere?

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