https://link.medium.com/LOnEQ0tnQBb

Over thousands of years, our idealizations of the world collapsed into single-valued, mechanistic ‘thing’ vs ‘thing’ models. The reason this can succeed in human cognition is that the damage that would otherwise result from a completely absurd world-image… is offloaded into Nature. The anciently conserved ecologies… the moment-to-moment origin of our bodies and minds… take the hit silently.

Because we no longer listen to their voices. Many ‘rational’ humans today would not even believe it is possible to ‘listen to’ Nature, other organisms, the ocean, the sky… or the forests. Having no experience of this, and no concepts about it… Nature appears to them as an array of commodities ripe for harvest. A collection of ‘dead inside’ objects.

If indigenous peoples attempted to treat the world as we do, they would rapidly die of the results. Perhaps some of them did. We moderns — our societies at any rate — just continue to watch the world burn under the weight of our object-cultures as if we are viewing a film, and as if we are ‘separate from’ or ‘above’ Nature.

One imagines fishes who thought they were ‘above’ water, because they swim.

In a truly bizarre turn of events, the only animal we know to be formally representationally cognitive… turns on its origins, attacking them with incredible mechanical force.

And even if we mourn this, what can we actually do?