Isn’t it astonishing that all the profound sophistication we believe we enjoy can rarely, and barely hold a candle to the constant and natural authenticity of animals?

Often I have heard the word animal employed as a way to suggest a slur against some person or group; yet in light of exemplary fact such figurative speech should denote high praise more often than savagery or primitivity.

Indeed, are there animals more primitive or savage than we? Have there ever been? Compared to us, the terrifying idealizations of the piranha seem almost comforting.

Even were there such creatures somewhere… were they granted the nearly endless cornucopia of gifts and resources that we abuse and take for granted? I mean, our species is overtly punishing the living planet all day every day, in force. On purpose. We use explosive radars to map the ocean. Would you care to be ‘mapped’ by a shotgun blast? Does that sound even moderately ‘advanced’ to you?

Perplexingly… I have never seen these ‘animals’ torturing millions of humans in cages for the sake of attempts to establish arguments about and descriptions of nature. I have never seen them trading in the artifacts of arbitrarily assassinated humans, or whole cultures of other living beings. I do not think an animal ever just looked at something and decided to kill it simply because it was endowed with the power to dispose of the lives of other beings. Nor, I suspect, are they generally available to bizarre descriptions of reality that drive them around like killing machines. Do they level ancient forests for charcoal or irradiate the planet in an attempt to produce electrical power for machines? No? How strange.

Someday the word ‘animal’ will be used with the reverence its actual nature demands of thinking persons. Compared to us, they are angels. But even this view is confused, because humans and animals belong together, always. This isn’t a fairy-tale or a description, its the fact of our nature. We may survive their disappearance in some form, but it will be at best a cruel caricature of what our nature is and has long been.

We become the nature and character of our relationships with the living world and our extended environments. We have become too sophisticated to understand this. We are, indeed, too smart by two thirds. We have, in our generation, a last chance to urgently understand and rescue the living places from being reduced to numbers in machines. What happens to them will become our destiny. Pay attention. This generation is the moment because the anciently evolved ecosystems cannot be simulated, or remade. What is destroyed in them, is destroyed in us. Now.

Animals.

Yes, someday we might aspire to be animals again. How strange we saw our descent as as ascent. How ironic. Perhaps it began when we were no longer able to see and hear the other living beings in our hearts and minds. This is what happens when they become commodities. They are disposed of.

Animals.