Poll Of The Month: Can beautiful manmade buildings alone provide all the nourishment and beauty required for a healthy mind and soul?
September, 2025's poll in the Mirrors For The Mind, Heart and Soul series
I stumbled across this essay linked below thanks to a share from a man I respect a great deal ( Paul Cudenec ) and then once I read the whole thing, a deep sense of loss and sadness came over me… looking at the world through the lens the author of this essay presents, it leads one to the conclusion that we could be happy, healthy, inspired and complete living on a Ecumenopolis.
(essay linked below)
The lens of beauty appreciation that this essay looks through seemed very anthropocentrically tinted to me.
I appreciated their attention to detail and realize that focusing on the natural beauty of the more than human world (the architecture of the Creator embodied in something like an old growth forest) may have been beyond the purview of this essay, but this compelled me to ask what the author’s thoughts are on the the awe inspiring beauty of that which exists outside of towns and cities.
I asked the author what are the ramifications of the uglification of the beauty of those expressions of Gods’ architecture (such as an ancient forest, or a desert habitat, or a high alpine meadow) no response so far.
The essay presents a very compelling argument which shows that the weaponization of the form that our shared environment takes alters human psychology, emotional states and essentially stunts the spiritual growth of human beings.
In that we are in total agreement, but (as I stated in a previous note) what I find somewhat unsettling is the fact that (while the author mentions guerrilla gardening within a city, which I appreciate) they make no mention of protecting, propagating, or acknowledging beauty outside the confines of cities and towns.
Taken to the most extreme expression, that mentality seems to espouse that we (as human beings) could be whole, happy, complete and able to achieve our highest potential in a world that has no wilderness, old growth forest or non-human beings left in it (as long we have really awesome architecture in cities that aligns with the right frequency and a few gardens in the city here and there).
I apprenticed as a stone mason, I learned about cathedrals and the importance of the key stone in an arch. I worked on high end mansions in Whistler BC (where oligarchs hired top end globally renowned architects to deign their house and the masonry company I worked for put in 2-4 million worth of contract to make the place look like a fairy tale) so I know about architecture, what it takes to do it right, its effect on people and its artistic worth.
However, I was also raised to spend time going into the Creator’s cathedrals in the ancient forest and I can tell you that when someone enters a primary old growth forest (as I recently did) they are evoked into a state of awe and humility (and on a different level than any manmade structure can elicit).
In the essay linked the author mentions “The Broken Windows of the Soul: How Ugliness Programs Behavior” and this makes me ponder whether or not an anthropocentric (city dwelling centered) life (devoid of time spent in the original architecture God put on this earth) could also serve to break the windows of the soul and program behavior to veer in the direction of favoring the creation of an Ecumenopolis…
I see this mentality reflected more and more as the generational amnesia and shifting baseline syndrome of urbanites, city dwellers and those living in extremely ecologically degenerated landscapes.
It is a mentality that the woman (Elizabeth Nickson) I quoted in the post below embodied and it is a mentality that sadly infects the minds of people of all ages, colors and creeds.
Thus, given the author never responded to clarify, and given the implications of completely omitting the divine architecture embodies in something like an Old Growth Forest in her writing, I felt this essay about “Uglification” deserves more careful scrutiny and contemplation.
Firstly, I will quote some sections from the aforementioned essay below, offer my own interpretations on what was said and its implications, then I pill pose the poll of the month below so we can look into the mirror of the soul keeping all of that in mind.
The following quote were written by “Unbekoming” in her essay titled “The Uglification Agenda: How Oligarchs Weaponized Architecture” :
“In 987 AD, envoys of Prince Vladimir of Kiev entered the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. These hardened warriors, accustomed to blood and battle, found themselves weeping. "We knew not whether we were in heaven or earth," they reported back, "for on earth there is no such vision, nor beauty... We cannot forget that beauty." Because of this encounter with architectural transcendence, Prince Vladimir chose Christianity as the religion to unite the Russian people. Beauty, quite literally, converted a nation.
Well I would argue that those men could have the same transcendent experience walking in the Cathedrals that God himself made which are called Old Growth Forests.
Also, choosing the Constantine manipulated Roman imperialism compatible version of Christianity as a way to “unite” the Russian people was a move that condemned them to centuries of needless bloodshed, anthropocentric delusion, ecological degeneration, the imposition of statism, erasure of animist worldviews and suffering.
In pre-Christianized pre-statist “Russia” there were an array of animistic indigenous cultures that shared many of the same types of worldviews as my Gaelic indigenous ancestors.
Well, in a similar way to how St. Patrick and his fellow Roman propagandists and thugs imposed Constantine’s distorted (anthropocentric and imperialistic) version of Christianity onto my indigenous ancestors in what is now called Ireland, Scotland and Wales, so too did the Teutonic Order of Russia engage in cultural genocide and stamping out of place based animistic worldviews.
Rather than build churches with walls that separate humans from the sacred inspiration and embodiment of Creator's design, many of these ancient animistic indigenous cultures chose to recognize and/or create spaces for prayer, sacred ceremonies, knowing the will of the Divine and blessing rituals that were centered around flowing springs, sacred groves of trees and/or sacred wells.
People visited the springs and wells for their traditional virtues of healing and divination. In the time of the Druids and the Brehon, sacred trees of the Ogham were planted as both offerings to the water spirits and to serve as guardians of the springs and wells. If a physical cure was sought, the seeker would drink or sometimes bathe in the water. And in fact, the water of some holy wells have indeed been found to contain curative properties, mostly due to the presence of certain minerals. But the healing influence of the wells was due to more than their medicinal qualities. The well or spring itself was viewed as a shrine dedicated to the miraculous emergence of living water, in all intact indigenous cultures, it is a symbol of generation, purification, and the matrix of life itself. To quote Mircea Eliade, ‘…water symbolizes the whole of potentiality; it is fons et origo, the source of all possible existence.’
Spiritual qualities automatically cluster about the manifestation of such a powerful archetype. The holy wells of Albion (aka the British Isles) were, in fact, such popular places of worship in pre-Christian times, that the early Roman Church took great pains to stamp them out. But, as is the way with an insuppressible archetypal force, the forms changed while the essential mystery continued unaltered (becoming part of new traditions with quasi-Christian trimmings).
These sacred groves, sacred springs and sacred wells were tended reverently for millennia, in many cases becoming spectacular old growth forested habitats that simultaneously provided a space for ceremony, blessings and worship for connecting with Creator while also providing habitat for our non human kin and also protecting the waters. However, as was well documented in Fred Hageneder's book "The Spirit of Trees: Science, Symbiosis and Inspiration", the Christian church began an aggressive crusade to destroy these sacred groves, sacred wells and sacred spring sites in an effort to destroy the cultures of all peoples they deemed as "heathens", "savages" and "pagans" starting around the year 723 AD in Europe (and continuing in Russia after Romanized Christianity was forced onto her people by the Teutonic “Knights”
Traditional ethnoecological worldviews of many of the pre-christian animistic indigenous cultures described above had recognized a relationship between trees and rain (eg. indigenous peoples had, and have place based wisdom that taught how the trees invite and call the rain to them). Science now proves this to be accurate.
“This science validates what traditional cultures always knew. When Russian envoys reported that Hagia Sophia's beauty convinced them "God dwells among men," they were describing a phenomenological truth: beauty creates frequencies of consciousness that orient us toward transcendence, meaning, and moral elevation. The cathedral's acoustics, its proportions based on musical harmonies, its play of light through colored glass—all generated a field of vibration that induced altered states of consciousness.”
This anthropocentric interpretation feels very arrogant to me. I disagree with the author about “traditional cultures” and feel her description of their wisdom regarding how “beauty creates frequencies of consciousness that orient us toward transcendence, meaning, and moral elevation”. was more related to how those cultures perceived the more than human world, the forests, living waters, mountains and beings outside of cities and manmade buildings.
Pre-Christianized Russia was an animist culture that saw the trees, waters and land as living and imbued with a spirit. That sacred frequency and understanding was paramount in their orientation toward transcendence, meaning, and moral elevation. That is, until the Romanized distorted Christian worldview imposed an anthropocentric delusion of grandeur onto those people.
“When beauty becomes absent from our environment, we seek intensity through ugliness—horror movies, violent video games, degrading pornography. We become addicted to aesthetic shock because we've been starved of aesthetic nourishment. These shocking frequencies further dysregulate our nervous systems, creating addiction cycles that make us ever more susceptible to control.
The uglification agenda isn't just about making things look bad—it's about creating environments that vibrate at frequencies hostile to human health and consciousness. By disrupting the harmonic frequencies that support biological coherence and psychological wellbeing, ugly environments make us sick, anxious, and morally confused. They quite literally tune us to lower frequencies of existence.”
I agree with much of this, however… when we look only within cities for beauty, that too is a form of degradation of our ability to perceive beauty and sacred geometry.
Many of us live in areas that were once covered in biodiverse climax forest ecosystems only a couple centuries ago and are now mostly denuded of trees. Children born into these ecologically degraded landscapes can now often recognize more than a thousand corporate logos but can identify less than ten species of plants.
One of the many degenerative inevitable results of this widespread ecological illiteracy or “plant blindness” leads to a sort of impoverishment of the soul. Plant blindness leads to spiritual blindness. It does not matter how many times someone is brought to a building or institution designated as a place to know/connect with the divine, if one lives with plant blindness and in a place so ecologically degenerated that they can no longer walk in the Cathedrals that the Creator designed called Old Growth Forests then their ability to perceive and know the will, genius and beauty of Creator’s design is impaired and their perception of beauty skewed.
Being raised in a place devoid of the ancient majestic rooted beings that once dominated the landscape distorts peoples baseline assumptions for what a forest is influences increasingly anthropocentric, materialistic and degenerative lifepaths in humans raised there. Multi-generational amnesia results and ecological illiteracy leads to poverty of the heart and imagination.
That is the process that some have described as becoming “civilized” (in other words, living in a city and being a tax slave to statist regimes).
No amount of well designed manmade architecture or church attendance can make up for that gaping hole in the nourishment that God intended for humans.
For more on that read:
“beauty either resonates with you or it doesn't. When it does resonate—when you stand before a sunset, a cathedral, a perfectly proportioned building—you experience a momentary knowledge that God dwells among men.”
This mentality is one that arises from a city dwelling “civilized” mind, and it is not one that I share.
Wilderness places, whether it be a canyon filled with sacred geometry, flowing water and soothing sounds or the deep nourishing silence of an old growth forest and all the life that dwells there, resonates with any and all that are present with an open heart as beautiful and offer evidence that God’s genius is painted on a canvas all around us in nature.
“Digital Exodus: Ugliness as Gateway to Transhumanism
The uglification of physical reality serves a purpose beyond social control—it prepares humanity for the ultimate escape. As James Lovelock stated in 2014, instead of trying to save the planet, humanity should focus on evolving from biological creatures to merging with technology. This vision requires a specific psychological preparation: making physical existence so aesthetically impoverished that digital transcendence seems like liberation. This isn't science fiction. Active development of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) will enable consciousness to merge with AI so that we will collectively constitute the AI ourselves.”
Much of that contains truth, yet there is more than one way to become a cyborg…
Watch the full video the clip above is an excerpt from below:
The Monster Of Modernity/Wendigo Thinking, The Path Of The Sacred Warrior, Re-membering our Humanity and the Reclamation Of Our Indigeneity
Our human family has been stricken with a spiritual sickness.
“The oligarchs understood this. By making the physical world ugly, they create demand for digital alternatives. By destroying traditional beauty, they eliminate the aesthetic experiences that root us in our bodies, our places, our mortality—everything that makes us resistant to uploading ourselves into their systems.”
I agree with what she says here, yet at the same time traditional beauty within pre-statist cultures had more to do with looking at God’s architecture, lending our hands to enrich it and being in the midst of the ecosystems he designed, than it did manmade buildings.
“Neuroscientists have mapped how beautiful environments activate reward centers in the brain while ugly ones trigger stress responses.”
Agreed, and the most beautiful environments cannot be found in a city
Here is some evidence of that:
Exploring The Beauty, Peace and Majesty of the Cathedral Lakes
For anyone that would prefer a sound track of some mellow instrumental guitar, piano and downtempo beats to enjoy this album to, scroll to the bottom of this post before beginning.
“By degrading the aesthetic environment, they weakened humanity's connection to physical reality, traditional culture, and natural beauty—all obstacles to the planned transformation.”
It is more than just aesthetic, the beauty of natural environments nourishes in a way that is deeper than only that which physical stimulus can provide.
“This transformation from transcendent beauty to soul-crushing ugliness didn't happen by accident. It was engineered.
The systematic uglification of our world represents one of the most successful yet unrecognized forms of social control ever deployed.”
I agree again, yet I think we need to ask ourselves this question as well:
Poll Of The Month : Why have we settled for a World/Earth that grows uglier and more degraded/less biodiverse with each passing year?
In my most recent post I provided a small sampling of evidence which shows that we have in fact settled for a world that grows uglier and more degraded with each passing year, but why is this so?
“The Broken Windows of the Soul: How Ugliness Programs Behavior”
I would argue that statism, a city life devoid of God’s original architecture (intact forests and wilderness) and materialistic/anthropocentric viewpoints of the more than human world inflict more ugliness onto the human mind regardless of how many pretty buildings exist in the cities where one lives.
For more info on the ugliness of statism and how it programs behavior, read:
Implanted Sociopolitical Identities - weapons of mass destruction delivered through trojan horses of the mind
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
“Nikola Tesla once said, "If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration." Beauty and ugliness operate as different frequencies that literally tune human consciousness to different states. When we inhabit beautiful spaces—with harmonious proportions, natural materials, and coherent design—our bodies resonate with these ordered frequencies. When we're surrounded by chaos, discord, and visual noise, our biological systems struggle to find equilibrium.
The health impacts are measurable.”
The health impacts of this are measurable as well
Poll Of The Month: If all the minerals required for the modern technologies in your life had to be extracted from mines directly adjacent to where you live, would you still want the tech?
We have all been told a story about the glorious accent from “primitive” “hunter-gatherers” to “civilized” city building people in various ways, but few of us ever stop to really think about and look into where all the materials come from that make this modern way of life
“Conversely, neuroscientific research reveals that viewing environments considered beautiful consistently engages brain regions linked to reward and emotion, particularly the orbito-frontal cortex.”
Yes indeed, but why does not essay not mention beautiful environments like this?
“Every authentic expression of beauty is irreducibly particular because it must resonate with specific conditions—the local light, the surrounding landscape, the cultural traditions, the available materials. A grandmother's garden works with the specific soil, climate, and plants of her place. A craftsman's carved doorframe emerges from the particular grain of specific wood, the tools in his hands, the traditions he inherited. These cannot be mass-produced or globally standardized without losing the very frequencies that make them beautiful.”
Well said, and the same can be said of a old growth forest designed by Creator, or an old growth food forest co-created between members of an intact place based culture and nature
“Beauty as Resistance: The Frequency They Cannot Synthesize
Beauty possesses qualities that make it inherently resistant to universalist control. True beauty requires both order and surprise—a dynamic tension that cannot be algorithmically generated or centrally planned. This is why totalitarian systems, whether communist or capitalist, always produce ugliness: beauty emerges from the intersection of tradition and innovation, discipline and freedom, universal principles and particular expressions.
But there's a deeper reason why beauty resists control: it operates through frequency and resonance in ways that cannot be mechanically reproduced.”
I whole heartedly agree that beauty (frequency and resonance that aligns with God’s design) cannot be mechanically replicated, and it cannot be fully replicated by a master mason nor a master wood carver either, emulated perhaps, but to see the real balance and genius of God’s design, one must look outside of cities and artificial creations of humans to the original Cathedrals.
“Beauty carries truth and goodness not as concepts but as frequencies—vibrations that bypass intellectual defenses and resonate directly with the soul.”
Well, said, this is why I am trying to get kids and families out into the forest to perceive God’s original expression of beauty.
Here is some footage
“Practical Aesthetics: A Handbook for Beautiful Rebellion
The first step in aesthetic resistance is recognition. Once you see the uglification agenda, you cannot unsee it. Every strip mall, every glass box skyscraper, every piece of corporate art becomes visible as a weapon deployed against your consciousness. This awareness itself is liberating—you stop internalizing the ugliness as normal or inevitable.”
Yes, again, much truth, however, it goes further than just human architecture.
The decimation of old growth forest habitat and other places with intact ecology where our pre-statist ancestors once gathered wisdom, strength, resilience and understanding (through learning from and being inspired by our more than human kin) is also a very insidious means of social control.
In the post linked here, I describe that attack on humanity and our place based cultural foundations as a sort of imposed “spiritual poverty” (as no amount of church attendance can replace walking in the Cathedrals that were made by the Creator which are called old growth forests).
“However we got here, we have managed to create a culture in which we have alienated ourselves from the rest of life. We try to convince ourselves that this alienation is the same as freedom. But for more and more people who are cooped up in cities, who never see the stars and never breathe clean air and who can only cherish their bond with wild nature with the grass that grows between the paving stones, this is no freedom at all. We have made caged animals of ourselves, and no gadget in the world can compensate us for what we have lost.”
- Paul Kingsnorth
For more along the lines of the quote above, read:
Are There Limits To Growth?
Many people who work closely with the living Earth have concerns about the trajectory of our modern industrial civilization. These are people who will put the comforts of modern life as a secondary priority to giving a voice to wise and ancient beings that cannot speak for themselves
“Seek out beauty actively. … … Support local craftspeople who still create ornament and decoration. Buy from businesses that maintain beautiful spaces…
Document and share beauty. When you encounter beautiful architecture, gardens, or spaces, photograph and share them with explicit recognition of their beauty. Create social media accounts dedicated to local beauty… … Make the hunger for beauty visible and legitimate.
Create beauty bombs. Guerrilla gardening, yarn bombing, unauthorized murals (or better yet unauthorized community food forests)—these interventions insert beauty into ugly spaces. Even temporary beauty disrupts the psychological programming of ugliness. Communities transformed through beautification see reduced crime and increased happiness.”
I really appreciate the author’s mention of gardening and sharing beauty here, I just wish she would have also described beauty in the context of that which exists outside a city.
For more on Guerilla gardening in the city and combining beauty with food/medicine cultivation in your front yard (even if you have a fascistic HOA), read:
Covert Food Gardening In The Era Of The Lawn Nazis
It may sound absurd to anyone not living in a “G7 nation” city or modern suburb, but there are places in the developed world where it is illegal to grow anything other than a monoculture of grass in your front yard and you will be fined by bylaw officers for
“Protect existing beauty. Join preservation (and conservation) societies. Every beautiful… (forest) …saved is a victory against the uglification agenda.
Educate about beauty. Share the research on beauty's neurological and social effects. Teach children to recognize and create beauty. Learning to appreciate beauty is like learning moral virtues—both require discipline and courage. In a culture that treats beauty as trivial, insisting on its importance is itself countercultural.
Build parallel institutions.”
I am with you on this sister, yet again, I would like to emphasize that teaching children to recognize and create beauty outside of cities is far more important than artificial manmade forms of beauty.
My own efforts to build parallel cultures and communities is embodies in this post:
Designing Bio-cultural Refugia : seeding ancient wisdom in the fertile soils of modern Regenerative knowledge
(This post serves as the 19th post which is part of the Stacking Functions in the Garden, Food Forest and Medicine Cabinet : The Regenerative Way From Seed To Apothecary series)
“When we preserve beauty, we maintain connections to our ancestors and traditions. When we share beauty, we build communities of resistance.”
“The oligarchs know this, which is why they've worked so systematically to eliminate beauty from common life while hoarding it for themselves—their private art collections, their beautiful estates, their access to unspoiled nature. They understand that beauty is a frequency that nourishes human consciousness, and they want to control who has access to that nourishment.
But beauty cannot be fully privatized because its frequencies persist in nature, in human creativity, in the mathematical constants that underlie reality. A single flower growing through concrete vibrates with the same life force that created galaxies. A moment of kindness beautifully enacted generates frequencies of compassion that ripple outward. A song hummed while working harmonizes with the rhythm of breath and heartbeat.
Even small acts of creating beauty become acts of resistance against the forces of commodification, brutalization, and spiritual impoverishment. Each beautiful thing we create or preserve maintains frequencies that the controllers cannot synthesize or suppress. We become tuning forks for beauty, helping others remember what human life can be when it vibrates at its proper frequency.”
“its frequencies persist in nature” indeed, so why not spend more time in nature as opposed to places made of concrete and glass?
We can indeed become the tuning forks that embody this frequency, yet to me, this requires more than any city life could ever offer.
“In the end, creating beauty is both the simplest and most radical thing we can do. It requires no permission, no funding, no institutional support. It requires only (a handful of seeds, the willingness to get to know our non-human kin) the recognition that beauty (and ecological integrity) matters, the courage to create it, and the determination to defend it.”
Yes! Beauty can be recognized and defended in nature, created in the kitchen, and even within the artificial constructs of a city, the important thing is that we remember the pre-civilization forms of beauty and seek to perpetuate, learn from and emulate those as well.
Thus, in closing it feels apt to share the following post and quote:
“Everything in Nature ran according to its own nature; the running of grass was in its growing, the running of rivers their flowing, granite bubbled up, cooled, compressed and crumbled, birds lived, flew, sang and died, everything did what it needed to do, each simultaneously running its own race, each by living according to its own nature together, never leaving any other part of the universe behind. The world’s Holy things raced constantly together, not to win anything over the next, but to keep the entire surging diverse motion of the living world from grinding to a halt, which is why there is no end to that race; no finish line. That would be oblivion to all.
For the Indigenous Souls of all people who can still remember how to be real cultures, life is a race to be elegantly run, not a race to be competitively won. It cannot be won; it is the gift of the world’s diverse beautiful motion that must be maintained. Because human life has been give the gift of our elegant motion, whether we limp, roll, crawl, stroll, or fly, it is an obligation to engender that elegance of motion in our daily lives in service of maintaining life by moving and living as beautifully as we can. All else has, to me, the familiar taste of that domineering warlike harshness that daily tries to cover its tracks in order to camouflage the deep ruts of some old, sick, grinding, ungainly need to flee away from the elegance of our original Indigenous human souls. Our attempt to avariciously conquer or win a place where there are no problems, whether it be Heaven or a “New Democracy,” never mind if it is spiritually ugly and immorally “won” and taken from someone who is already there, has made a citifying world of people who, unconscious of it, have become our own ogreish problem to ourselves, our future, and the world. This is a problem that we cannot continue to attempt to competitively outrun by more and more effectively designed technological approaches to speed away from the past, for the specter of our own earth-wasting reality runs grinning competitively right alongside us. By developing even more effective and entertaining methods of escape that only burn up the earth, the air, animals, plants, and the deeper substance of what it should mean to be human, by competing to get ahead, we have created a brakeless competition that has outrun our innate beauty and marked out a very definite and imminent “finish” line.
Living in and on a sphere, we cannot really outrun ourselves anyway. Therefore, I say, the entire devastating and hideous state of the world and its constant wounding and wrecking of the wild, beautiful, natural, viable and small, only to keep alive an untenable cultural proceedance is truly a spiritual sickness, one that will not be cured by the efficient use of the same thinking that maintains the sickness. Nor can this overly expensive, highly funded illness be symptomatically kept at bay any longer by yet more political, environmental, or social programs.
We must as individuals and communities take the time necessary to learn how to indigenously remember what a sane, original existence for a viable people might look like.
Though there are marvellous things and amazing people doing them, both seen and unseen, these do not resemble in any way the general trend of what is going on now.
To begin remembering our Indigenous belonging on the Earth back to life we must metabolize as individuals the grief of recognition of our lost directions, digest it into a valuable spiritual compost that allows us to learn to stay put without outrunning our strange past, and get small, unarmed, brave, and beautiful.
By trying to feed the Holy in Nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own.”
(from: The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive)
Now that I am done my rant, I would like to pose the poll for this month’s mirrors for the heart, mind and soul series:
I would appreciate it if you could elaborate on your reason for voting for what ever option you chose in the comments section to promote constructive discussion.
Thank you in advance to those who are taking the time to vote and comment to promote constructive discussion and hold up a candle to the mirror.
No. Shelter and its spin offs are but one of the 5 essentials in my personal framework. The other four: food, clothing, medicine, story (including arts and keeping account). Also our relationship with non anthro reality(s) keeps us ‘in place’.
how to house them in cities, towns, and villages in an arrangement for the maximum benefit for both humans and non-humans if you can. Your ‘rant’ about the article seems to only raise the point that forests are better than civilization, but misses the context which the vast majority of us live within. So to answer your question of which is better, I think it’s a rigged question because it ignores the fundamental material conditions of the present and future. Please recognize that we’re on the same side, and you don’t need to choose between forests and cities. Questions phrased as such can be divisive and prevent leftist unity. None of us know what’s really going on, but an article about the destruction of beauty phrased in an anthropocentric lens for those living within the farms of modernity is incredibly useful even if it misses some key points. You did not need to rant about this, your anger is best directed towards those actually creating the walls of this prison and burning the outside, not those who expose the prison’s architecture of control. You may be right, but it’s not helpful unless you offer an alternative. Despite my critique of your critique I appreciate all you’ve done and hope you continue to fight for the more than human world without looking away from humanity entirely. As a side note I would appreciate an article talking about the deeper insights you’ve found within the old growths instead of reacting to wetiko. What does the architecture of the forest reveal about the hidden forces which shape our lives?