“I would estimate that about 2% of our available faculties, specifically inclusive of intellect, can be catalyzed in the environments and contexts now common to our cultures and activity-perspectives.

This portion is and will generally remain that measure most in compliance with the goals, perspectives, and activities that pervade and inform our cultures.

The likeness of our activities establishes and sustains structural change in us, to our great benefit or detriment. We do not so much possess intelligence as we are flexible; we are the animal who becomes like what we do to an extraordinary extent. This, in turn, either plays into or inhibits the evolutionary assets our bodies preserve not as possessions but potentials. This is to say that contexts call us into being and developmental expression or inhibition. Directly, and constantly. And we respond.

Nature is the -only- context in which -all- of our faculties can be reasonably catalyzed and developed. She is the Alexandrian library of human evolutionary, cognitive, and relational history, and only when we visit her are the assets within us properly fertilized, ignited, and reborn anew as our minds and lives.

As we burn this library (actually a sophisticated distributed intelligence demonstrably older than the planet even if native to it) to the ground in our florid confusion over the only possible basis for value… we are extinguishing the essential catalysts of forms of relation, learning and experience which are not only absolutely essential to our humanity and intelligence… but represent the irreplaceable keys to our own history, moment, development and future.

We cannot become human outside of nature. And our acts are not ‘natural’ that eradicate the contexts in which our humanity and intelligence become sustainable or even meaningful. Most of what we are is in the forests, the rivers, the plains… in the eyes of the insects and flora and animals of our world. In the relationships. The distributed context that only living beings can express and comprise.

Most of what we are and may become has nothing to do with what we are doing, and thus, we have never seen it and have strange religious fables about it instead. Let’s put the ghost to rest, shall we, before we become it.”

— an anonymous informant