Forest-City Connection: A Cultural Unlearning

Abstract

These pages aim to bring the reader closer to a topic that is commonplace in certain human communities — generally Indigenous and less transculturated ones — yet quite foreign to most of society (the wider society): the existence of forest spirits and their binding role within a larger living being called the forest. This piece also briefly addresses how the city, a refined expression of culture, tends to drive these spiritual manifestations of the forest toward more natural spaces, leaving a void in the surrounding environment and a discomfort that produces persistent dissatisfaction in human societies due to artificiality. In this way, "niche" voids are created within the new system (the anthroposystem), which are then addressed with an increase in artificial creation (culture); however, this only generates a constant, growing loop of the phenomenon, along with a human sense of separation from life or the ecosystem. Furthermore, the ongoing relationship between the two great systems — culture and nature, expressed as environment — does not appear to achieve balance at local scales, such as in metropolises, and tends powerfully toward imbalances at global scales. It is therefore proposed that the cultural system may need to partially unlearn its advances and reduce or eliminate its aspirations to dominate the natural system, in order to reach a different position, closer to planetary empathy, and consolidate the notion of environment as a more conciliatory and integrated system.