As humans, we lived within ecosystems for hundreds of thousands of years. The parts of these ecosystems changed and we in turn changed in order to adapt. Today, we are still a part of the system. Now, however, we provide more of the change than ever before. Some of this has been good beyond our wildest dreams, some of it has been unintentionally bad for us. Modern medicine has saved millions of lives and industrial agriculture has allowed more human souls to exist than ever before. However, despite this increased security and safety, I’ve often felt less social, more anxious and more detached from the realities of life than what I suspect many people experienced in the past. I don’t think I’m alone in that feeling either. There is an illusion now that we don’t exist within ecosystems at all. A thought that we graduated from primitive ways of being.
I’m not someone who thinks humans are bad. I don’t think a mass suicide of humans is the key to unlocking a healthy Earth. I don’t think a National Park locked away from any sign of human life is “pristine Nature”. We are still a part of the system. The system maybe doesn’t need us but it has history with us. Wilderness loved who we were. There’s no going back to the small tribes living with the land. And we shouldn’t.
How do we find a way to have our cake and eat it too? How do we align the incentives of ourselves and the greater system we exist within? How do we capture the magic of a strong, small community that finds beauty, awe, and abundance within nature with the industrialized and innovative world we’ve created? We don’t get to an alignment with our ecosystems by reverting humanity back to some state, but by walking forward toward a new world.
We’ve lived in tribes so deeply embedded in the ecosystem that we felt the daily pressure of survival and we’ve lived in the industrialized, technologically advanced world where our survival is relatively easy but finding community, awe and stillness is hard.
Imagine a life with deep community ties and deep connections to the ecosystems your ancestors lived within for hundreds of generations. Now imagine we take that life and give the benefits of today, modern medicine, the communication networks, the knowledge, the safety. When I take the trash out at night, I look at the stars. Interacting with the stars every night creates a feeling in me that I can’t imagine not having now. I step outside no matter what. I find myself thinking why did we ever stop? Why don’t I stay all night out here? Then, I remember the dangers that came with this immersion.
Even a small mosquito bite could mean weeks in pain, even death. A cold snap could cut a life short or leave your family without food. Older ways of being are beautiful and romantic to me but I understand the drive toward the life we are at today. The realities of death and suffering above all need to be addressed. Life for much of humanity was a brutal struggle for safety and survival. However, today it feels like we may have insulated ourselves a bit too much from the rest of our ecosystem. It has cost us the daily interaction with the beauty, awe and abundance of humanity’s first relationships.
We can leverage our knowledge and technology to create a new way of being — one with that awe, beauty and stillness of early life combined with the safety of today.
There’s no clean, perfect solution and I’m not exactly sure what this path looks like, but the forward momentum toward it is all that I think about and why I had to create Quest End.