Discontinuity with the landscape

The planetary alarm bells are now clanging so loud that the human race has mostly gone numb to the warning. We are in seriously warm times, each day we inch closer to ecological cataclysm that does not necessarily spell the End of the human race, but the end to the particular kind of human race we have become. Nevermind anyway our extinction, really that's not the point, for it is the overwhelming amount of extinctions happening to all the non-human species over the Earth that is rather cataclysmic and should be making us stop right where we are and make radical changes to the current paradigm of society. It is a society based on discontinuity with the landscape.

Discontinuity with the landscape in what way?

1. with past, traditional land-based communities
2. with human beings as integrated physically, economically, domestically, and psychologically in the surrounding landscape.
3. with the land as a source of life across species
4. with its sensory experiences
5. with its future as a wider transcendent, evolving shaper of all
6. With landscape as a place outside as well as within

Broken from the landscape society has been able to achieve the scientific and technological advances to create the kind of living standards that have enabled us to make choices about our lives which previously were not possible. We have chosen material comfort and pleasure in the mainstream, and banished the apparent hardships of a former age of drudgery (though look at the kind of drudgery we have made for ourselves today, at least the drudgery of a non-mechanised age was in your hands) . We exist in a time where we stand at cross roads with the opportunity to look back at what was good and what was bad in that prior age, and to look into our time, weighing also what is a benefit to humanity and not a benefit. This has to be weighed with Earth and all the species we share it with. Our great grandfathers and grandmothers could not have possibly be able to conceive the dilemma modern man would be faced with within the space of half a century. Who would have thought it that mankind would become so over populous that Earth would become unable to support our accelerating demands on her resources? They also wouldn't have imagined how dependent we would become on fossil fuels. We now dwell in a fossil fuel powered world, and seem horrifically unable to make changes to how fast we are guzzling the oil out of the Earth, or to even conceive of a future where there is less consumption full stop. But the human race here in the west has only lived like this for half a century, and seems to think it must go on like this. But it cannot. Our past and our future rests in the landscape.
A return to a continuous existence with the land is what we must embrace if we are to endure and restore harmony between us and Earth. At all levels of our lives we now experience discontinuity, as number 2 in the list tells us. It has become very dangerous now the road humans have embarked on. Land has become abstracted, tarmacked, and removed to a state of being a commodity and property. The change in the western world in our day-to-day living standards and expectations of living may have been a beneficial achievement to us at least, but it has resulted in a cheapening of the landscape and a general passive acceptance of its demise, pollution and continued commercialisation of the land. This is in no way beneficial or indeed acceptable to the myriad species that share the landscape with us.
There is a concept that the only way the human race can survive into the future is through increasing development and pervasion of technology into our lives at a biological level. This current mode of civilization we have got ourselves into a mess with, is fixated on maintaining the levels of consumption and luxury we apparently need and would have us rather than change our ways develop a even more insulated and isolated technological existence. It is a vulgar, degraded and spectacularly arrogant position some humans would wish us to perpetuate in our relationship with the Earth.
I believe the only way humans must go is by returning to the land, not as exploiters or imposers, but as children with their eyes and senses open to new learning.
Can you see out there how the landscape yearns for us to remember its sensuality and song?
But we are blind and fallen lot, going about heads down, television, cars, supermarkets, money. Hemmed in by concrete, believing all there is to it all is walkers crisps and the cuddly BBC, we are waiting to slough off a skin that holds us all back from waking up to reality.
If we continue to forget the land as somewhere that is directly connected to us and the future and the future of all species besides us, then we may never wake to remember because not the land but we will have passed on then into the fossil record.
The land calls us now to dream a new walking forwards for humans!
Let us surrender to the beauty and possibilities that throb in the Earth!
There is nothing more to be done than to let Earth now enter our lives as a flower opens and fills our eyes and soul with that nourishment we have so forgotten and neglected to give her.