WHY IS REGENERATING HUMAN-ECOWEB
SYMBIOSIS CRUCIAL?
It is urgent
Billions of human beings across the world are suffering as a result of ever-increasing extractivism. This suffering takes the form of food insecurity, oppression, violence, impoverishment, climate crisis, inequitable access to resources, water scarcity, forced displacement, loss of identity and culture, disenfranchisement, and environmental degradation. Unless there is a fundamental change in the systems enabling and perpetuating this extractivism, both we humans and the biodiverse ecowebs we rely on for our survival will be irreversibly injured, and possibly annihilated.
The extractivist system is becoming increasingly entrenched
A new system of amassing wealth for small groups of shareholders (corporations) was developed in Europe at least four centuries ago, taking the form of government-sanctioned exploitation of humans and ecowebs through the use of ‘legal’ tools, like charters and the doctrine of discovery. In this system, European monarchs granted to small companies of European men — for a share of the profits — exclusive rights to:
- trade across entire continental regions,
- exploit — in an unbridled manner — vast tracts of land and water already under the stewardship of Indigenous peoples, and
- own, control, and dispossess human beings.
This government-backed corporate extractivism that — within a short period of time — subjugated nearly all of the world’s Indigenous peoples and the biodiverse ecowebs they thrived in for millennia still persists today. Not only does it persist, but it is fiercely protected and promoted through a system of laws, economic prescriptions, and governing structures (legal-economic-governance system) that is imposed on almost all of the world’s peoples through autocratic global institutions.
Human communities must regenerate and re-integrate into ecowebs
Systemic extractivism has caused human communities to be disconnected from the biodiverse ancestral ecowebs they preserved for thousands of years through sophisticated regenerative knowledge, technologies, and practices. This disconnection — resulting from forced human displacement and ecoweb destruction — has in turn devastated the self-sufficiency, self-reliance, identity, and culture of communities and compelled them to become increasingly dependent on corporate commodities and influence, thus perpetuating and deepening the cycle of extractivism and suffering. The only way to end this cycle is to restore human-ecoweb symbiosis through the regeneration — by Indigenous, tribal, and migrant/settler communities alike — of systems that nurture and sustain, rather than extract and eradicate.
