Emergence Magazine Podcast Kinship, Community, and Consciousness – a conversation with Richard Powers
5 snips
Jan 31, 2023 AI Snips
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Episode notes
Encounter With An Ancient Redwood
- Richard Powers recounts encountering a 1,500-year-old redwood that transformed his view of human centrality.
- That moment launched a years-long journey to reappraise humans as part of broader living communities.
Fiction That Restores Kinship
- Powers intentionally uses a literary 'bait-and-switch' to shift readers from human-centered stories to ecological kinship.
- He argues world literature historically treated humans and nonhumans as inseparable, not separate domains.
Separatism Fuels Ecological Collapse
- Powers links the ecological crisis directly to human separatism and commodification of life.
- He says recognizing reciprocal communities of life is essential to reversing environmental destruction.