The genesis of human intelligence took place in the seething womb of living places. The beings, relationships, and mysteries of these places became metaphors that we used to bootstrap the onset of our peculiar form of intelligence. They were, in every case, metaphors from nature, and, particularly, from living beings and places.

As we began to denude these places of their vitality and convert them to function or resource, we lost track of the source of the metaphors we would use in our need to know ourselves. It become, for us, inconvenient to recall that only living places produce and sustain living beings. Dead places consume them for the sake of product or profit. Or worse. We became so confused that we began to actually think of or treat living beings or places as functions. Even ourselves.

The children’s book full of animals is what we have left of a universe of anciently conserved and impossibly sophisticated living relationships. We have cartoons. Pictures of elephants and lions. Giraffes. Pythons. But we live with machines. And, more and more often, for them.

We cannot understand or develop our humanity in the likeness of objects and functions. Only living beings and places can provide the necessary richness, depth, mystery and compulsion that ignite and call forth our most deeply cherished and hidden abilities. Only they can catalyze the metaphors that fit us, because we evolved together. The basic character and shape of our intelligence is both animalian and bears the likeness of its evolutionary companions. They are not not now functions, resources, statistics, or populations to be weighed and disposed of at our leisure. They never were. Neither are we.