any large group we make is deadly
This is basically our challenge, finding ways to organize large numbers of ourselves in ways that are far less exploitative of other humans, and other life, than the systems we have going now. Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything suggests it’s not quite as hopeless as many believe.
A little confused by this, but maybe it was intended to respond to one of the comments?
Haha yeah in no way was I trying to say that, “humans are being good caretakers of the planet” because as an overall statement that would obviously be false. However, it is true that there are countless examples, even today, of people being good caretakers of specific ecosystems, or of social/political systems which can impact some ecosystems.
videos or documentaries…about specific conservation efforts that focus on the actual project and what it accomplishs
Yeah, that kind of stuff. Any you’d recommend?
I’m with that the question of scale is very, very important. [edit: LOL, forgot I’d already mentioned it!] Graeber & Wengrow (Dawn of Everything) pulled together a bunch of research on there being plenty of past, larger societies which did not yield self-/other-destructive habits. But we certainly have a lot to learn about living together, especially in the large groups/networks/etc. we now have. Participedia is a good source for things in that direction. Mini-publics, citizen assemblies, sortition, a variety of good facilitation methods, online tools such as Pol.is, are all ideas/areas that explore how to do better at this. Healthy Democracy is one of the larger organizations working on related stuff in the USA, a smaller one I’m involved with is https://www.co-intelligence.institute/
Their Wise Democracy deck: https://www.wd-pl.com/
Deck about group patterns: https://groupworksdeck.org/