> What would you recommend to an average person who goes to work every day, has a family, and doesn’t have time to go dumpster diving or to grow his own food? What could he or she do to waste less food and live more ecologically?
>> It strikes me that people from the city have completely lost their sense of seasons and cycles. In the city you can’t really tell what season it is, and you’re not very aware of cyclicity, there’s not much of a difference between day and night, and the cycle of life and death isn’t very visible. Death, whether human or animal, is pushed away and kept out of sight. Another thing is a strange desire for sterility, which we see in some of the people who visit here. A requirement that anything human or social be kept strictly separate from what’s natural. Example: people come out here on a field trip, and a mom lets her kid play in the grass. What she’s familiar with is a close-cropped lawn with no insects or organic remnants. The kid gets stung by a bee, then falls into some chicken poop, and the mom gets upset with us for not having kept things properly separate. People want to enjoy the country, but without smells, blood, and suffering. Like going to the zoo, where everything is behind glass, it doesn’t smell, and you live in the illusion that the animals are just fine, but you don’t see what’s happening behind the scenes. I think the zoo is a good example of how people feel about nature.
This interview is both infuriating hard for me to follow and also a very captivating story. I wonder if that is the writer, Viktorie Hanišová’s, style or the interviewee.
>> It strikes me that people from the city have completely lost their sense of seasons and cycles. In the city you can’t really tell what season it is, and you’re not very aware of cyclicity, there’s not much of a difference between day and night, and the cycle of life and death isn’t very visible. Death, whether human or animal, is pushed away and kept out of sight. Another thing is a strange desire for sterility, which we see in some of the people who visit here. A requirement that anything human or social be kept strictly separate from what’s natural. Example: people come out here on a field trip, and a mom lets her kid play in the grass. What she’s familiar with is a close-cropped lawn with no insects or organic remnants. The kid gets stung by a bee, then falls into some chicken poop, and the mom gets upset with us for not having kept things properly separate. People want to enjoy the country, but without smells, blood, and suffering. Like going to the zoo, where everything is behind glass, it doesn’t smell, and you live in the illusion that the animals are just fine, but you don’t see what’s happening behind the scenes. I think the zoo is a good example of how people feel about nature.
Such a nice perspective I didn't expect.