What does it mean to “stay in your own nature”? To allow nature to guide you? To be a free range human? In this episode, we learn from a blind chicken how to live independently and develop new skills, innovate and thrive…isn’t that what life is?
Dr. Victoria Alexander is the author of Free Range Humans, published by Springer in 2021. She and her husband live on a 5 acre farm in upstate New York where they grow vegetables, raise sheep and chickens in a semiotic way allowing animals and plants to work with them for the best outcome for all. In the end it is less work on the humans to let the plants and animals assist and quite often come up with a solution to a problem.
Her extensive research in the field of complex systems sciences found that intelligence is not a top down system but distributed throughout the entire system.
People are learning the benefits of free range stock and Dr Alexander believes we need to apply the same idea to humans. Let them learn from mistakes, not be ordered to do something, to be creative again and perform satisfying work.
We also discuss the lack of a natural reward system in the modern world which pushes us to find the rewards in unnatural and less satisfying ways.
The more artificial we and the foods we eat become, the less satisfying life will be. We will be stuck in a loop, like rats in a cage. How do we stop the cycle? By returning to our nature, which is linked to the natural world.
To return to nature, you could, grow a plant, plant a tree in your yard, create a kitchen window herb garden, plant a garden, get a couple of hens, shop at a farmers market and shake the hand of the farmer or rancher, hike outdoors regularly, go outside at night and see the stars. Reconnect with your true nature.
Alexander is also a philosopher of science, author of The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature and Nature. She is a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center alum, former Public Scholar for the New York Council for the Humanities, and 2020 Fulbright Scholar at the Digital Humanities Lab at ITMO University in St Petersburg, Russia. She is a member of the Third Way of Evolution group and her work in saltational evolutionary theory appears in Fine Lines: Nabokov’s Scientific Art, published by Yale University Press, which has received much praise from major international publications.
RESOURCES:
Read the full paper: Free Range Humans
Read all of her work at her website.
Listen to the Ranching Reboot show featuring Dr. Victoria Alexander "Even a Blind Chicken"