“Any species that acquires the capacity to use tools and solve complex environmental and relational problems (thus also to invent them)… can be thought of as intelligent by the standards commonly applied to evaluate this trait.

But any such species that invests these capacities in activities that aggressively obliterate its only environment and catastrophically counterfeit its relations with nature… can no longer be reasonably considered intelligent. Especially if their goal in doing so is the ceaseless production and consumption of commodities. Or war.

So while it is possible that your species was once intelligent, it is absolutely clear that this is not presently the case.

There may be an exception in that there are still human beings who feel and understand this to be true, and are unwilling to participate in the wholesale obliteration of the remnants of the terrestrial ecologies.

So while I no longer consider homo sapiens to be intelligent, there are yet among them some few who have retrieved their possible intelligence from the chaos that reigns in its once-revered place.

In the unlikely event that your species has any future at all — believe me when I say that it depends on those I here distinguished.”

— an anonymous informant