Nature is the fundamental basis of meaning and identity. The form, character and activity of each organism is a direct communication of meaning. This is not representation; they mean what they are and there is something transcendental in this.

When meaning is sufficiently abstracted from this living context and its translinguistic influence something misfunctions in our intelligence. We begin to become more and more like our representations and the technologies they spawn. Our lives and minds lose crucial dimensionality, flattening into the likenesses of words, models, catalogs.

In a way not entirely dissimilar to some experiences of dreaming, meaning and identity remain somewhat fluid in nature, being more functions of action and relation than the results of taxonomies. This diverse fluidity nurtures and challenges our intelligence to intimacy and interaction with it. The boxes and machines we make cannot replace nature, any more than they can replace dreams.

It is not surprising that the most severely representational aspects of our collective intelligence have so little regard for nature. To their way of seeing it doesn’t represent anything other than another opportunity for conversion into wealth or power. And there is something of this trait in our common relationships with language, as well.

As we systematically attack and erase the anciently conserved life forms (and relationships) of the biosphere, we are attacking the basis of what it is and means to be human, amputating whole aspects of the living web of relational symbionts in whose presence and intelligence our own human intelligence was born, and, I think, upon which it continues to depend.

Our own humanity cannot long survive these attacks; as we continue to abstract our relationship with nature, and nature itself into technologies, we are losing the insight necessary to register the repercussions of this catastrophic agenda. And we are losing contact with the basis of meaning, without whose context-generating influences our own intelligence becomes estranged from itself, and prone to rabid forms of destructive misapprehension.

The meaning arranged around and within us as living beings, the meaning of living places, organisms, and relationships, is the basis of meaning and identity for humanity. When one observes human beings and collectives systematically laying waste to this, it’s a signal that our intelligence is attacking itself in the reflection of nature. You may be assured that we shall be the next targets, collectively and personally.

This is a sign of emergency, and requires that we immediately discover and resolve the causes and behavior that propagate this disease. We must recover our relationships with the basis of meaning, with each other, and with nature. And we must discover what has gone haywire in human intelligence, and repair it. Together.