Defrosting knowledge.

From broadcasting to adaptive engagement

In a time of info-overload, the digitization of connections, and hegemonic knowledge — all of which, I believe, are making us less adaptable, less in tune with the complex needs and full humanity of one another, and less aligned with the dynamic and diverse landscapes we are embedded within — I’m offering some working reflections that might help us to re-examine our relationships with media, social engagement, and language.

(At the end, I share lots of additional resources and a personal update.)

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From the overturning of Roe v. Wade, new incidences of mass shootings, ongoing inflation pushing many workers and families to the brinks, updates about persisting wars and conflicts, findings about our various health epidemics, to the worsening crises of land degradation and climate change and beyond, once again, I feel that sense of news exhaustion I wrote about back in April.

For the past weeks, I’ve repeatedly started drafts about particular topics, only to get sidetracked by another crisis or tangential issue that demanded my attention.

Where do I even begin anymore?

And are we, with our humble little selves and minute levels of consciousness, even equipped with the capacities to endlessly process happenings at a global scale?

I’m starting to believe that the answer is no — that our bodily senses and awareness have simply not adapted to be able to handle this overwhelm coming from bottomless streams of information, never giving us the proper time to digest them fully before we are distracted by yet another story and another one.

Of course, there is incredible value in becoming more educated about the state of the world. Developing a global awareness helps us to continually calibrate our lenses, find common threads across issues, and gain maturity and a greater sense of purpose in how we show up for our own communities.

But I think it’s also important, and a relief, to come to terms with the fact that we have never been here before, having to repeatedly hear about new, heart-wrenching, or infuriating stories from across the globe — many of which we cannot directly affect. So it’s okay to feel lost. We have never in the history of planet Earth had this many people take their attention “online” simultaneously, in a worldwide web that makes info-overload the default. So it’s okay to want to “disconnect” and to “turn it off.”

This is worth a reframe, however — that “to disconnect” has so commonly become verbiage referring to our relationship with the digital.

What if we reoriented our focus toward our relationship with community and the landscape right around us?

If I were strolling through a park with my attention fixated on my phone, I cannot be intimately porous with the vibrant world around me. On the contrary, only when I shift my focus away from the screen to the immediate environment would I be able to “turn on” and engage all of my senses and re-embody the greater living community I am a part of.

What might we compromise as the world continues to digitize our attention and all forms of social interactions, inevitably simplifying the complex experience of life and preventing us from being as attuned to the living world?

Broadcast less, engage more.

“Instead of looking at things at scale, what if we looked at the potency of a moment, the potency of the depth that we go with each other?”

–Konda Mason (Green Dreamer EP332)

Ever since I started writing about my considerations for divesting from social media, the idea of intimate engagement has remained on the top of my mind. The distinction I made in terms of the mainstream social media platforms was between the type of reactive, superficial engagement that their algorithms reward and incentivize, and the type of deep, authentic engagement that I was craving to cultivate — and that I believe is necessary for the health of society-at-large.

Here, I take another step back to think about the broadcasting nature of digital platforms and mass media — compared to opportunities when we get to actually engage interactively and intimately with the stories and topics we get exposed to.

The former mediums of communication, for me, sometimes feel dehumanizing. But this isn’t about my feelings. Broadcasted information cannot incorporate one of the most important tenets of effective communication — to listen first. The same core message or the same storyline necessarily needs to be translated into different framings based on the different cultural presumptions, states of being, and preconditioned worldviews that people have.

This tells me that mass media, especially with their marriage to commercial interests and political establishments, are incapable of guiding the world towards deep, revolutionary change.

Even media with smaller platforms usually appeal to very particular groups of people who already somewhat align with the values and worldviews of those outlets, however. This means that platform media tends to function better to grow in-group thinking rather than to blur boundaries and queer perspectives.

What could it mean to reclaim our consciousness from being disproportionately held and delusionally tethered “up in the clouds,” where most are just bystanders observing a reductionistic version of the world, and to bring it back down to earth — grounded within communities that are much more visceral, contextualized, complex, and participatory?

What do we need to be reminded of the beauty, resilience, and power that come from having our networks of relationships and collective awareness be rooted in place, much like the quiet yet potent, intricate mycelial networks underground?

And what if we shifted our goals of growth and scale from scaling in quantity to scaling in depth and intimacy?

This last question is something that I often sit with, as orienting towards scaling deep with my work has helped me to value and embrace “slow growth”. I would rather move, stir, and inspire a thousand people in transformative ways than have a million followers just clicking “like” on trite statements that I make.

Because of this, though, I am not under the illusion that my work can speak to everyone. Interestingly, this is something I had learned from my marketing courses back in college: It is not possible to speak to everybody, and in order to reach people effectively and deeply, every message needs to be tailored to an intended audience, the more specific the better.

Most of my listeners and readers are people who are somewhat similar to me — open to questioning norms, critical of mainstream narratives, and generally interested in learning more about issues pertaining to sustainability and our collective health.

If I were publishing for people completely new to these topics, I would write in very different ways. If I were speaking to someone who’s been completely sheltered from the socio-ecological concerns of our times, I would frame what I say in very different ways. If I were conversing with someone who I know to be self-righteous with their out-of-touch views, I would approach our discussion differently, too.

I would need to be much more fluid and context-dependent with my communication, as there is no one-size-fits-all template for effective engagement.

This is why I believe that ultimately, no broadcast platform can have a more potent impact than live conversations between people who take a genuine interest in and care for one another as whole human beings. As the world continues to digitize social networking and relationship building, as if that can ever truly replicate raw, sensorial human-to-human interactions (much less human-to-beyond-human interactions), I worry about what we may lose.

Knowledge as alive, relational, ecological

“I think there’s an idea that the oral precedes the literary and that the literary is somehow more sophisticated.

Yet anybody who has done any work with traditional storytellers know that the sophistication of the orator is really mind-boggling, often because it requires so much of people’s memory, but also their ability to engage an audience in thoughtful ways, and to compel the audience to be part of that experience and to share in the creation of the story.” – Daniel Heath Justice (Green Dreamer EP366, publishing 7/26)

While many historians and cultural critics pinpoint things like the advent of agriculture, the industrial revolution, or the spread of colonial capitalism as the roots of the many crises we face today, writer Sophie Strand has gone much further back to consider the ways that the shift from oral to written cultures likely transformed people’s ways of conceptualizing and relating to the world.

As Strand shares, “The transition from oral cultures into written cultures, for me, really signals a conceptual change that then uproots us from an embedded, environmental, relational existence, in such a way that a certain analytical, linear, and reductionist thinking becomes possible…”

This sparks some really provocative food for thought.

What if we saw the possibility of orature as allowing knowledge to be alive in a sense — with it necessarily involving more fluidity, interactiveness, and context-dependence on time, place, and community?

“For thousands and thousands of years, most of human history storytelling has been oral. That's almost too simple to say. If you had no history book or dictionary, you had to constantly be telling stories. You had to have storytelling gatherings every week in order to keep knowledge alive.

There was no residue. There was no object where you kept knowledge.

Knowledge lived in relationships. It was never a solitary activity.

We have a chirographic lens of looking back on oral cultures, which is problematic… What they were really doing is constantly adapting the story to shifting political and ecological, climatological pressures.

Stories were always updating.”

– Sophie Strand (Green Dreamer EP365)

One of the commonly accepted truths of life as Earth (my reframe from “life on Earth”) is that change is the only constant.

But to me, it is quite clear that all of the systems that the dominant human societies have created — knowledge, economy, politics, infrastructure, etc. — are becoming more and more immutable, “locked in”, and homogenized, and rooted more and more in universalized abstractions rather than the much more diverse and dynamic living world.

As Catriona Sandilands emphasized in our conversation:

“We sometimes forget that the knowledge systems we use to conceptualize the world are not necessarily exactly the same thing as the world that we’re conceptualizing.

We mistake the model of the model for the thing that is being modeled. We mistake the map for the territory. We mistake the word for the thing.”

Perhaps driven by the human ego, many have forgotten the role of language, the written language, and our conceptualizations as mere tools to help us better understand the world. So we often make decisions entirely based on generalized models, historically inscribed laws, reductionistic, deadening maps, or categories created to simplify much more queer realities.

Evident of our “crisis in form”, the dominant culture values “formal”, accredited education coming mostly from inside of sheltered classrooms, validated by standardized exams, over “informal,” non-uniform education coming from everchanging community dynamics, ways of the land, and beyond. And dominant institutions value knowledge acquired through controlled, fixed settings, with goals to reproduce repeatable outcomes that ideally can be generalized, over knowledge that cannot be generalized, that is much more place-based and context-dependent.

“For me, oral culture is about knowledge as a relationship, and knowledge as a movement….

[Oral cultures] see that there's no such thing as an individual node of cognition. Our intelligence is interstitial. It only exists when we come together.

The movement from oral culture to written culture is the movement from relational consciousness to objectification. The biggest difference is you cannot and you would not tell a story alone in an oral culture. It was always about communal knowledge.” –Sophie Strand (Green Dreamer EP365)

None of this is to say that written literature is inferior or that we should abandon it — evidently, it has had an invaluable, complementary role in our society. A lot of these are philosophical questions for which there are no simple nor directly applicable conclusions. But these realizations might inspire us to re-examine our relationships with media, communication, and language — and think about how that influences how we treat and care for one another and our planet.

As one often with more questions than answers, I’ll leave you with some inquiries to ponder:

What forms of media do we view as having more credibility? What types of social engagement are incentivized and rewarded?

How much weight do we give to representations of the world compared to the real world itself? What is our relationship with language, labels, and frameworks?

What types of knowledge (and whose knowledge) get upheld as superior, as truths? What gets validated as formal education and intelligence?

How do we process and then ground high-level stories to place-specific contexts right where we are, learning to syndicate rather than replicate? How do we honor historical texts while liberating their lessons from rigidity, so that the systems we create may follow and become more adaptable and attuned to the ever-changing needs of the Earth and their varied communities?

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Dive deeper:

• “Rewilding myths and storytelling,” a podcast episode ft. Sophie Strand

• “Sacred activism and contextualized spirituality”, a podcast episode ft. Alnoor Ladha

• “Algorithmic capitalism and digital dehumanization,” a podcast episode ft. Scott Timcke

• “Botanical colonialism and biocultural histories,” a podcast episode ft. Catriona Sandilands

• “Indigenous literature and decolonial libraries,” a podcast episode ft. Daniel Heath Justice (publishing on 7/26)

• “A different type of growth,” a podcast episode ft. Tyson Yunkaporta

• “Slowing down and surrendering human centrality,” a podcast episode ft. Bayo Akomolafe

• “Reclaiming community and the power of silence,” a podcast episode ft. Brad Evans

• “News Exhaustion,” my previous Substack article

• “Divesting from social media: Self-sabotage or shapeshifting?” my previous Substack article

• “Nature in culture: Multi-sensory mapping with the Marind people,” a podcast interview ft. Sophie Chao (Sydney Environment Institute)

What I’m reading:

• This article: “‘Fortress conservation’ violently displaces Indigenous people. In Tanzania, attacks on the Maasai are the latest in a global pattern of violence highlighted by a new report.” (Grist)

• This report: “Flawed Plans for Relocation of the Maasai from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.” (Oakland Institute)

• This article: “Reproduction is Capitalism's Last Frontier.” (Offshoot by A Growing Culture)

• Make Me Good Soil, a newsletter by Sophie Strand

Resources from the community:

• A magazine, Climate Justice: Black and Native Attention as Miracle: “Created in collaboration with a constellation of Black, Native, and Afro-Indigenous contributors, this immersive and in-depth magazine looks to the movements for Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty for guidance on how to organize, reimagine, and transform in the midst of disaster and revolution.”

• Sage Magazine Issue 07, featuring yours truly, is a “100+ page book centering stories at the intersection of outdoor storytelling, community care, and advocacy work.”

• A 6-week course, Start:Empowerment Summer School: “Combines guest lectures, workshops, and practical skill learning to Redefine Justice in the Climate Movement, brought to you by Sustainable Brooklyn and Start:Empowerment.”

• A course, Myth and Mycelium: “Rerooting & Rewilding the Gospels.” Runs from 7/19 - 8/23, taught by Sophie Strand and hosted by Advaya.

• A gardening course by Wild Abundance: “This Online Gardening School will show you how to grow bountiful food, whether you’re gardening on your apartment balcony or you’ve got a quarter acre of sunny ground to work with, or if you’re somewhere in between.”

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Personal update:

After almost two years of not being able to visit my family in Taiwan due to the island’s stringent pandemic travel restrictions, I finally was able to make it back a few weeks ago. I’ll be here for the rest of summer to make up for the lost time.

Here’s a photo from Taitung, one of my favorite coastal regions of the island with all of the rich agriculture, lush forests, and stunning beaches:

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[I shared more photos and personal updates with subscribers of this newsletter. Sign up below to receive them in the future!]

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Final note: I will be undergoing eye surgery in two weeks. It will require me to minimize my screen time for a few months, however, so I can optimize my healing process. I’ll likely take two to three months or so off from publishing longer thought pieces here, but as my condition permits, I will pop in to share shorter writeups and other updates with supporting subscribers of UPROOTED.

Green Dreamer will continue to publish weekly podcast episodes, and we will continue to send out weekly newsletters and resources there. Sign up for Green Dreamer’s email list here.

Wishing you and your beloveds all my best in the meantime,

kamea