The reason I haven't posted for a week or so is that I've been away on a much needed holidays in Tasmania for a week travelling in the west-central and south-west of the island----a place that some conservationists call wilderness that is contrasted with the technological mode of being in which we treat ourselves as resources (human capital) to be enhanced without appeal to subjectivity.

That conception of wilderness presupposes that we can reconnect with the beings around us. Wilderness is a discloses that not everything can be instrumentally reduced to the status of a human product, project or construct; wilderness is the 'other' that reminds humanity of its own dependency on the ecological life systems that underpin our society. It discloses that we can modify, in small ways, the current understanding of being in that human begins can become preservers, they can cherish things which gather and focus local practices whether such things be old stone bridges, restoring old buildings, or preserving old growth forests from logging or drowning from hydro dam building.

David Stephenson, Drowned, No. 176 (Arthurs Lake, Tasmania) 2002

Amidst the old resource economy (hydro, logging and farming) and its technological mode of being Tasmania is full of local practices based on preserving and a letting be that gather together.