in jan 2019, we organized a community discussion on ‘from inclusion to equity: the diversity advantage’ at the gandhi institute for nonviolence. the idea came out of an interview i did on wxxi. i was talking about the partition of india and the insanity of wanting to homogenize richly plural cultures, languages and religions, when mary scipioni called in and shared the need for diversity in her work – landscape architecture. more diverse systems create resilience and strength, as well as beauty. this prompted a conversation on diversity, approached from different angles and areas of expertise. so happy to come across material, all the time, that highlights the connections we were trying to make.
David Abram: ‘It seems to me that falling in love outward with the more-than-human earth is the deepest medicine for this, because if there’s anything that the local earth wherever you live teaches, it’s the need for diversity, the need for the whole, weird multiplicity of shapes of life and styles of sentience—all of them shaped so differently from you and from one another—to be interacting with one another in order for the land to be strong, to be healthy, to be resilient. And so as we open our hearts and open our senses to the wider sensuous earth, I think we imbibe this deep teaching of diversity, of the need for an irreducible pluralism, and for celebrating otherness and radical alterity, radical otherness in our world, not looking to just shelter ourselves among those who think just like us or speak just like us or look just like us, but taking deep, new pleasure in otherness and strangeness.’ More here.