“It is only in intimate relation with the other living beings of the world, the plants, insects, fishes… all the animals and living places… that the real promise of our otherwise largely nominal humanity lies largely neglected. For we are the one animal in whom all of the others are reflected, we have a special magic which lifts them beyond their ordinary scope of action and meaning, and they possess the same property for us.

We are not made human by compliance with cultures of commerce and text, for the likeness of our humanity is not in economies or machines, and will never be found there. The exception is if we choose this fate. If we choose to believe that we are and should become machines, then we surely face that danger.

But I say that our humanity lies held in trust for us, in relationships we, as a species and as large collectives have too long abused to take proper account of. As we lose or eradicate the intimacies we have long enjoyed the cognitive and biological benefits of throughout our evolutionary history, we are amputating irreplaceable -human- potentials which lie latently encoded in active relation with the beings and places we are converting to product or wasteland.

We are a being whose intelligence depends upon our active relationship with living contexts. Like a mirror in which the living diversity is collected and magnified, becoming the peculiar intelligence that is the hallmark of our people. But without that live input, our minds do not really become human.

Our minds do not arrive fully formed — they are developmentally context-sensitive to the degree that we may observe their plasticity in the face of human and behavioral culture. This is a great benefit if the inputs to this developmental process are diverse, organic and alive. It can rapidly become a deficit if the inputs are domineering, parasitic, tyrannical or omnicidal.

Our evolutionary role is not yet precisely specified. But if we here choose to obliterate those beings and ecosystems in which has been conserved the lion’s share of our future opportunity for health, intelligence, and development… if we are stupid enough to trade this incredible, impossible paradise of gifts for the cold metal and cartoon realism of the machine, we will find ourselves even more bereft of human soul and sense than ever before in history.

A human is an animal that must be surrounded and supported by vast circles of other animals, places and plants. This is not an accident, and I do not mean ‘as food’. We are a -relational- animal, and we require the intimacies of our heritage and history in order to survive, prosper, and come to know what it is we are born to be and become.”

— an anonymous informant