TOWARD A NEW ART MOVEMENT (Segment)

By Trevor Burrowes

Our open space along the Turquoise Trail is replete with macro and micro watersheds. It handles all the water that falls on it, and does not flood or require costly storm drain systems to maintain it.

LAND COMES FIRST

By Trevor Burrowes

With watershed planning, people tend to see reason. They tend, unless they are deranged, to get it that everybody in the watershed needs water, and so they are encouraged to think as a community. I really don’t see a counter to tribalism other than to put land first and people second.

Many "doomers," people who accept and fervently believe in Near Term Extinction (NTE) for humans, hope for a scenario where humans disappear, leaving the possibility for life for other species. They dream of humans exiting physically. But what if humans exited symbolically by substituting land centeredness for human centeredness? The flow and health of the land would come first, and how local people could make a life on it would come second. Nature gets her gas mask put on first, and humans' come after. Such a paradigm seems like the easiest path for resisting our untimely demise, but why can no one else see that?

With the extinction of 200 species per day, what makes doomers believe that humans would just be nice and exterminate themselves while allowing other species to survive? I contend that humans, within the current paradigm, will ignore, as we now do, the demise of other species as long as we can delude ourselves that this will not bring us down as well. But putting land first not only puts other species first, but also conceptually integrates people with these species. It is land use which determines the state of the environment. And we either see or we don't that ecologically healthy watersheds present the quintessential land use measure for erasing the planet-destroying detachment of human beings from the rest of nature.