“Long and careful observation of animals, plants, insects and Nature have conveyed to me a surprising insight: although there are aspects of relation in nature that can be reasonably understood as sentimental — that is to say involving emotions, care and intimacy — there is a surprising and unexpected resilience that underlies the activities and orientations of living beings and places. This resilience is fundamentally opportunistic; it is oriented toward opportunities rather than, for example, nostalgia or regret.

This is probably how life survived previous phases of crisis and extinction — by reorienting to a world that is actually at hand, rather than one remembered or ‘desired’. And this capacity is deeply involved in all of the processes of our bodies. Our metabolic processes hitchhike on each other in every aspect of our biology. They await and recognize opportunities to ‘reduce the necessary expenditures’ and are, indeed, geniuses of this.

This profound opportunism involves the recognition of change, rather than resistance to it, and the immediate reorganization of temporal relationships, resources, and potentials for benefit. Our bodies use the moon, the environment, and, particularly warmth… in ways we are unprepared to imagine, let alone admit.

But know this: in nature, all of nature, processes and relationships hitchhike on each other. One of the crucial recognitions that emerge from this perspective is simple: by obliterating terrestrial ecologies, we are obliterating opportunities for health and advancement we have failed to understand, and we are consigning ourselves and our children to hitchhike on the processes of machines, which are crude and inflexible, cruel and disembodied… especially as they involve our metabolisms and the necessities of our nature as human beings and animals.”

— an anonymous informant