Tickling the Tsaheylu

 

Reality is less cool, but at least it won't make you go blind. Copyright: Lightstorm/20th Century (credit: Ollympian)

Humans are not supernatural beings. This might, on the face of it, sound like a statement with which the vast majority of us agree. However, it is anything but. Western Agro-industrial civilization holds at it's heart two overriding principles. Principles that it shares with the Abrahamic religions, and which have survived the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason completely intact, and which it could be argued have even been reinforced by them. These principles, those of anthropocentrism and of human supremacism or exceptionalism, declare humans to be supernatural beings.

These beliefs hold that humans are exceptional creatures, and are a distinct and entirely separate living being from all other life on Earth, and from Gaia/Nature/The Biosphere as a collective whole. We are literally supernatural beings, floating ethereally above, separate from, and superior to any and all aspects of the living world. We talk about "animal welfare", "animal extinctions" or "animal rights" (in the positive), or "animal instincts", "behaving like an animal" or "no better than an animal" (in the negative), as if humans were not one among millions of species of animals ourselves.

The Abrahamic religions tell us that our supernatural essence can escape the "fallen" Earth and be received in a heavenly world. Modern industrial culture tells us the same thing, dressing up the same trope as "science" or "rationalism" by substituting "Mars or "Singularity" for "Heaven", and "rocket" or "AI" for "salvation".

Neither the Abrahamic nor "Scientific" supernaturalism is either true or beneficial. If anything, the latter (pseudo)-scientific claims are even more ridiculous, for unlike the Abrhamic god and it's heavenly promises, we can, much like the medieval peasant observing the field of f**ks on Mars, see that it is barren. Both, however, are magical thinking.

 

Mars: So devoid of life that even f*cks are in short supply.

 

We are animals. And, like all our sibling species, both animals and others, we are inseparably a part of, entirely dependent upon, and physiologically, evolutionary and psychologically belong to, and are inextricably bound to, our parent organism. This bond is spelt out in our DNA, is the oxygen drawn into our lungs with every breath that sustains us second by second, and the water that saturates or body with life. Our bond defines us from our bone marrow to our philosophy. It is ever present, unbreakable, and involuntary. This bond is not a covenant with a deity. It does not depend on belief or acknowledgement. It is not weakened by an imagined sin, nor is it strengthened by prayer. It is formed before we are born and lasts after we die.

Supernaturalism, be it abrahamic or scientific, seeks to use magical thinking to wish the bond away. But it cannot. We merely engage in denialism. But what is the point in such denialism? It stymies understanding of ourselves and the big, beautiful world around us. It taints every relationship with have with more-than-human life. It stymies our ability to build a lasting, stable and resilient society that exists in harmony with our siblings and our parent. Such denialism has brought only destruction, loss and impoverishment to both human and more than human alike.

So let us not give into magical thinking and denialism. We can instead acknowledge this bond - and we might as well, since it will never go away. We can celebrate and seek joy, meaning and connection in our bond - it is our belonging to our world,to our parent, a reciprocity of gifts, dependency, purpose, meaning and understanding.

Reflecting on the bond, be it through meditation, prayer, or an act of obligation is something central to my daily life. Each sunrise, I go to my place in the rainforest reserve behind my home, and engage in a breath meditation that focuses my thought.

Breathe... slow... steady... deep.
Breathe... slow... steady... deep.
Breathe... slow... steady... deep.
Hold that last breath.
Tell yourself... I am not of this world. I am separate from it. I am better. Above. Exceptional. Etheral. I do not depend on this world. It is nothing to me.
Repeat...
And again...
And again....
Believe it.
Make it feel real.
Beginning to feel the desire to breathe.
Repeat...
Desperately feeling that desire now. Don't forget. You are exceptional. You recognise no bond.
And again...
And again...
Must breathe...
And again...
And again...
Now at last, breathe out that carbon dioxide, and draw in that oxygen. That relief. That joy. That gift. The moisture in the air, that the tiny specks of life from the forest shall latch on to give us clouds, rain... forests... soil... life... sustenance. Our bond. 

Our bond is that gift. I receive it with gratitude, reverence, adoration, and a renewed commitment to my obligation - and my mind and heart are put into that mental, emotional and spiritual space where I can focus on that gift, my communion with my siblings, my parent, knowing I belong.

This does not strengthen my physical bond. It does not please Gaia. Neither are possible or even conceivable. The first is unbreakable, and the second is no more possible than it is to have a conversation with your own skin cells. But neither of those things are the purpose. It strengthens me. It allows me to better fulfil my niche, to be better adapted, more aware, more purposeful and more resilient. It ensures my bond is treasured and understood for what it is. It is not a shackle. It is being led hand in hand to the realisation that heaven isn't a supernatural fantasy, nor a science fantasy, it is here. We evolved as part of and within this world. We are perfectly adapted to Her. She is our paradise. She is what we must we must serve, heal and protect above all else, for She is where we belong to, and what we rely on - completely - every moment, waking or otherwise.

Grasping the stinging tree

 

Grasping the hairs of the stinging tree can be painful, but it must be removed so that one can heal. Credit: CGoodwin

The rainforests of the Australian east coast are revered for their age, beauty, diversity and richness. Among their countless species is the Gympie-gympie, a tree whose hollow, hypodermic like silicate hairs inject some of the most painful plant venoms on Earth. Touching the trees large, heart shaped leaves has been known to cause such agony as to induce delirium. No human in their right mind knowingly seeks out this plant to touch, but for those unfortunate enough to be confronted with it, healing cannot begin until all these fine, microscopic needles are removed. To heal the harm caused, someone must grasp the hairs of the stinging tree.

The dominant culture here in the "Global West" or "Global North", even in the south-eastern corner of our world, is a culture of silence. For a culture that prides itself on knowing many things, and of girdling our world with it's communications networks, sharing far and wide media saturated with it's stories, it remains a culture of silence, and of denial.

That we are approaching, if not already beyond, many of the tipping points of the ecosystem - our parent organism - is not news. Even in the Murdochian swamps of mediocrity, one is confronted with warnings of "Faster than expected", "Precipitous decline" and "Verge of collapse".

However, deeper discussion of the causes of the various crisis afflicting our big, beautiful world, and what actions are needed beyond the cosy, comforting feel-good gestures (be it buying a Tesla or buying a reusable coffee cup) is not encouraged. 

Silence.

There are two trends whose names cannot be uttered in polite company, and they both involve degrowth. Economic degrowth, and most of all, demographic degrowth. Both are needed. Both are inevitable.  We must grasp the stinging tree.

Looking out for our brothers and sisters

99% of all vertebrate biomass on Earth is either human, or others we keep as farmed livestock. Everyone else lives on that 1% leftover. Credit: Population Matters

 

Demographic degrowth is the conscious and deliberate cultural and social decision to embrace smaller families and thus bring about a gradual decrease in the human footprint among the entirety of life on Earth - to allow us to take less land, water and resources of all kinds, ensuring that more is available to our sibling species, so that they may recover from the losses they've suffered and thrive alongside us. We don't need to be 8,150,000,000 individuals (projected to be 10,400,000,000 within the next 50 years) while our siblings are being driven to extinction by a cultural fixation on a simplistic, toddler like demand for more, more, more.

 

We now sit a critical moment, where 99% of all vertebrate biomass on Earth consists of either humans, or "livestock". All other vertebrate life - every one of our siblings from the Blue Whale, the largest individual animal ever known to have existed, down to the Amau Frog - share the remaining 1%. The tiny slither of space in the biosphere that our obsession with infinite growth of our numbers (be it dollars on our spreadsheet, or the Muskian obsession with fertility) has so far not cleared, starved, or "harvested". 

 

It should not need pointing out, yet it does, that this situation is not sustainable. Infinite growth, as we learn in high school science, is impossible within a closed system. Thermodynamics forbids it. Here on Earth, we are blessed to live within a holobiont system that is self-regulating, so as to maintain an internal rough homoeostasis that perpetuates her existence - much like how we maintain our own internal body temperature and the internal balance of gut bacteria. An explosion of any one species would, without any counterbalancing factor, destabilise and ultimately collapse the entire biosphere and end life on Earth. Fortunately, this does not happen (under normal conditions) as, while we have population explosions, the depletion of their prey species or a non-living resource such as breeding sites, water etc. kicks in as a brutal but efficient balancing element, starving or displacing the explosive population to the point where it re-enters a sustainable footprint. Like all natural systems, it is efficient - and completely abenevolent. Gaia, Nature, the Biosphere - call her what you will - neither knows nor cares about the suffering of individuals, or even entire populations. For the sake of avoiding misery and suffering for our own species, we have no choice but to remain within balance and equilibrium with our sibling species - lest, my dear first-world reader, your own people experience that same abenevolent efficiency, normally felt only by those without the luxury of hoarded excess, the 65% of Africans with no access to the internet, or those who belong to the Pacific, existing on smaller and smaller slithers of life, as their home environment disappears beneath the waves for the last time.

 

Won't somebody please think of the children?

As much as those hard-boiled culture warriors of anthropocentrism bark and growl about "Ecowarrior cults demanding child sacrifice", a culturally - not bureaucratically - led movement toward smaller single-child and child-free families and relationships is a culture that celebrates, reveres and treasures life. The lives of the coming generations of humans will be of far greater quality and their odds of success far better in a world less overstretched, overexploited and degraded. A more sustainable population would allow each person to have a larger ecological footprint, providing far more ecological space for the 19% of humans who live without any access to any kind of basic sanitation, or 9% who live (and all to often, don't) with severe malnutrition to increase their consumption of basic resources needed to live a dignified and secure life.

This is all the more important going forward, for the longer our current over-exploitation of resources continues, the more lower the long-term carrying capacity of Earth is degraded, shrinking the possible footprints of future generations.

The lives of our children, and indeed the children of all our sibling species will still be incredibly hard, there is no sugar-coating it. The damage wrought by the unbridled consumption, expansionism and hubris of agro-industrial capitalism will leave deep scars on Gaia that will compromise the wellbeing of all her diverse life for timescales we have yet to fully understand. Many, human and others alike, will not make it. But we can give them the best possible chance, with focused quality time, attention and love to impart them with the cultural, social and practical skills needed, and the resources to go with them.

 

[1] No, I'm not being hyperbolic - the spectre of child sacrifice has been invoked by the religious right against advocates from demographic degrowth. https://canberradaily.com.au/opinion-the-environmentalist-cult-demands-human-sacrifice/

 

Ma ay'eylan, lefpom zìsìt mip!

Happy new year! I haven't forgotten about this project, but time and other things... most especially the wish to not be at my desk have taken my attention from this. However I do have some articles I wish to share, so do have the intent to try and share at one writing per month here going forwards.

Certainly, events from the past trip around the sun for our big and beautiful world has given plenty of food for thought.

Space: The Ethical Frontier

Photo by William Anders / NASA

 

"It was the death that I saw in space and the life force that I saw coming from the planet — the blue, the beige and the white, and I realized one was death and the other was life."

- William Shatner

The Moral Vacuum

This article is a revised and tidied up view on my thoughts on spaceflight that was initially posted on the Tree of Souls discussion forum. The original post and ensuring discussion be be found here.

It is often said that my generation, that sociologically challenged cohort of older millennials, missed out on the so-called golden age of space exploration. By the time Gaia drop-kicked us out of the womb and into a world of unaffordable housing and underpaying jobs, the moon landings had been and gone. Space was watching people float around in a metal box in low orbit, eating packets of dehydrated slop and sponge bathing.

However, for several years now, we've been living though a rehashing of that Cold War fever dream of anthropocentric separatism and human exceptionalism - that humans are somehow separate from this world - a vainglorious belief in a sort self-deification or supernaturalism. A new "space race", except by billionaires instead of empires. Elon Musk, and many of his fans and Tescreal^[1] fellow-travellers have been making much of the need for humans to establish colonies in space, and that humans must become a multi-planetary species.

To be clear, I do not see spaceflight per se as harmful, either to human cultures to the interests of life as a whole. The use of space technologies has brought things of great value, including insights, understanding and tools that can serve to benefit all life on Earth. Advances like satellite navigation, the Cospas-Sarsat search and rescue system, weather observation, and environmental monitoring/study are of undoubted benefit, and can genuinely be said to be truly for the good of all and be rightly regarded as achievements we can and should be proud of as a species. 

Children of Earth

However, the idea of space colonisation, that is to say a humans living permanently in space (be it on another world, or in a floating metal box like the ISS) is clear cultural, societal, ethical and spiritual failure that has encouraged the aforementioned sense of separation of ourselves and our species from the environment we belong to, are entirely dependent on, and have evolved to live completely within, and to deny that bond to our home and our parent ecosystem forever condemns the survivors and their decedents of these colonisation attempts - should there be any survivors - to an eternity of misery, eeking out an existence on processed air and survival rations in a closed, airtight metal box surrounded by an alien environment hostile to life itself, hoping and praying that the next supply drop will make it.This is a twisted, isolated, insular perspective of who and what we are as humans - not arrogant ghosts floating above the world, but a part of Her fabric, the leukocytes in Her blood, the cells of Her skin and fur - meaningless and dead on our own, but full of life, purpose, meaning and value as part of the environment we belong to.

Honouring Our Obligations

From this view of humans as spectres disconnected from the rest of life comes the assumption that Earth is doomed. Two aspects of this should trouble us, and both come down to the issue of responsibility and obligation to other than human life - neither being concepts that are fashionable in the Tescreal mindset. As creatures of Earth, we can’t avoid our responsibility in working to heal the harm caused. We caused this destruction and it is on us to fix it. This is our obligation to all life on Earth, down to and including ourselves. As an additional point in this theme, until we learn to see the harm we have done, to accept responsibility for that, and strike to play a part in alongside all life in making it right, take responsibility for our actions here, on the world we belong to, how can we expect to do any better on an alien world that is no relation of ours?

Nearer My Spacebucks To Thee

Thidly, while national space agencies have traditionally focused on scientific and academic study of space, these are private ventures are led by explicitly for-profit companies that seek private gain. While contracting has long been a part of space exploration, and is part and parcel of any self-respecting industrialised, consumer-capitalist dystopia, the desire of private, for-profit corporates to specifically get into space colonisation is profoundly disturbing. This opens up a slew of questions over the rights and wellbeing of the colony inhabitants, especially given the vast resources and costs needed to keep even a single individual alive, let alone mentally and physically healthy. What of the world the colony is on? Despite the dubious viability of such ventures, if they are even possible (more below on that), the only remotely feasible source of profit would be strip mining this brave new world for resources that are rare and unknown on Earth but have potentially valuable uses in industry (such as Tritium) – an activity that even on Earth, where oversight is somewhat possible, doesn’t have an enviable reputation of respecting either it’s workers or the world in general. Putting gilded age robber-baron company towns in space doesn’t magically make their horrific flaws disappear. On the contrary, it concentrates and encourages them, and removes any realistic potential for independent oversight. When Elon Musk said he wants to be the “Imperator of Mars”, it is quite possibly the only honest thing he’s ever said. In light of all this, we can perhaps breathe a sigh of relief and thank our lucky stars that Mars and Luna are already dead, sterile balls of rock.

Furthermore, the scarcely imaginable natural, technical, financial and mental resources being wasted by this quixotic quest are draining expertise, focus, finance and real resources away from where they are needed. Much as this is a private, for-profit venture by Musk, Bezos and co., they are, in best capitalist style, doing it with giant wads of public bailouts, grants, contracts and concessions. These resources as desperately needed on Earth to tackle the problems of our own making, rather than expanding the scope of our destruction to new worlds.

What Goes Up Must Come Down

Finally, all this might well be for naught. One of the big issues, especially with Musk, but with many other grifters of the techbro variety, is grossly overestimating the technology humans (let alone they themselves) posses, and the scale of the issues of space colonisation. Humans don’t handle exponential mathematics well, and space colonisation is full of such issues. Mars is, of course, not “the next step” after Luna. The sheer difference in distance involved is hard to grasp and frequently ignored . The difference between shipping half a dozen highly trained, professional, disciplined astronauts to low earth orbit for a six month stint in a science outpost is a tad different to sending one million fare-paying civilians to Mars for the rest of their lives (along with all the belongings fare-paying passengers expect to take). This exponential difference is trivialised. The threat of radiation is trivialised. Same with microgravity. Same with shelter, food, mental health, reproductive health… and so on. And if Earth is "doomed" because of our mistakes, then these "multi-planetary species" humans will only outlast their parent world by a few months. Once the last supply ship is gone and it's cargo finished, the "multi-planetary species" will too be finished. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
 

My feelings are that the governments and space agencies of the world should come together to give a clear message that space colonisation is neither possible or practical with current or near-mature technology, nor is it a desirable project. It should be made clear that no private colonisation effort will have any legality or legitimacy, and will not be tolerated. We should work toward a system similar to the Antarctic Treaty System to be applied to all celestial bodies – limiting human activity to scientific/academic research and conservation only, as well as setting up clear standards for non-contamination of these worlds, and of absolute protection for any life identified.

[1] TESCREAL is a philosophy common among billionaire technologists and their techbro acolytes, referring to a right-libertarian, technosolutionist, hyper-individualist combination of transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, so-called "effective altruism" and longtermism.

Kaltxì!

This blog is primarily my stream of consciousness of anything and everything relating to the world around us, and thoughts for the future - hopeful (ultimately) despite the dystopian nature of our world.

Having posted on Twitter in the past, and having tried Mastodon, I felt a blog, though old-fashioned, is ideal for this. After all, long-form and free-form commentary and thought still has its place in an era of tl;dr instant gratification.

Why the Avatar theme, if this isn’t a fandom or movie related blog? Well, because way back in the year 2009, when The War Against Terror hadn’t yet given way to the Culture War and Elon Musk hadn’t yet launched Martin Eberhard's car into space without his permission, I, like most of the planet, was keen to see this big new gazillion dollar movie that for some reason used the stock Papyrus font for it’s title (because, ya know, gotta skimp somewhere!). While it’s become a cultural trope that the biggest grossing movie of all time left no cultural impact - it actually did, and it certainly did on me. It rekindled an interest in the environment, botany and the ocean I hadn’t then felt for almost a decade. I returned to scuba diving, gardening, my love of the natural world in general, and it led to my first car being an EV (a little Peugeot that affectionately became known as “Iona”). It did not, however, engender any love in me for 3D, something for which we can all be grateful.

So, it felt appropriate, with this blog being less about politics than my previous social media (there will still be some) and more about “blue sky” thinking that it makes a small nod to the genesis for many of these thoughts. Without doubt, some sci-fi fandom will find it’s way in too, especially since it seems we’re in for a lot more of James Cameron’s world building eye candy, and who can complain at that? Love or loathe it, you can’t deny it’s beauty, and, Cameron’s awful take on the Lakota aside, it’s message.