Chapter 1: Inundation
The year is 2024, a quarter-century past the millennium’s turn, and the tides of change have risen sharply, swift and unrelenting. The world has pivoted — an intricate dance of smartphones, 5G networks, pandemics, and algorithms reshaping the fabric of our daily lives. We drift on seas of information, where every current pulls us further from the land we once knew. Yet, academia remains anchored, tethered to a 1975 that has long since sunk beneath the waves.
Beyond the shorelines of our stubbornly unmoving institutions, a new reality unfolds — fluid, dynamic, alive. Islands of technology float freely, adapted to the unpredictable rise and fall of waters that erode old boundaries and carve new paths. Amidst the ruins of what was, life clings, mutates, and grows. The sea is rising, both literally and figuratively, filling coastlands with melted glaciers, dissolving familiar ecologies while seeding habitats for creatures yet unnamed. This is no extinction; it is metamorphosis, a restless evolution that does not ask permission.
I am one who learned to swim. I dive through submerged structures — monuments to the past — then surface, blinking in the sunlight of this strange new world. But to the landlocked, those who clutch at stone foundations that crumble beneath the tides, this change spells death. Theirs is a fate of sinking, of building ruins destined to be swallowed by the sea before they ever stand complete. New castles rise on shifting shores, but their footings stretch only as far as the flood allows. A new architecture emerges: unfinished, unfinishable, uninhabitable — a ruin from its very conception.
Ruins endure. They provide a coarse solidity, a grounding texture for what comes next, though they can never fulfill the dreams that once built them. And so, we face a choice: do we continue to erect monuments to a bygone age, or do we embrace the flood, adapting to its uncertain rhythms? To thrive, we must become amphibious — creatures of the in-between, able to traverse both the ancient foundations beneath us and the ever-shifting flotillas above. Amphibiety is not merely a survival strategy; it is a state of mind, a way of being that refuses to choose between land and sea, past and future.
This essay is a summons to a new kind of evolution — one guided not by the blind forces of nature but by the purposeful hand of pedagogy. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s speculative visions, I propose an evolution laced with intention, where adaptation is not just a necessity but a choice. This is a time for education to shed its stagnant skin, to become amphibious and agile, to teach us not only how to survive but how to flourish in the inconstant world we now inhabit.
We are bound to our environments, woven into the atmosphere that sustains us. As the air thickens, as the waters rise, so too must we change. Evolution, in this context, is not a distant theory or a gradual unfolding; it is immediate, a matter of survival that blurs the lines between the old and the new, the human and the post-human. The ruiners will persist in their futile attempts to anchor themselves to sinking ground, but they are not the future. The divers — those willing to submerge, adapt, and explore the depths — will carve out new paths. In this flooded world, we must learn to breathe underwater.
Our present crisis poses a fundamental question: Why do we educate? To what end do we labor and learn? In a world postured towards productivity, the temptation is to align education with the relentless march of capital — training bodies and minds for markets that promise little more than the next wave of displacement. But this is a shallow adaptation, a strategy that reduces us to cogs in a machine that is ever rusting, ever at risk of drowning.
Instead, I propose a more profound amphibiety: an education that teaches us to dwell in the uncertainty, to navigate the waters not with resignation but with curiosity and courage. We must foster a pedagogy that resists the binary of land and sea, old and new, labor and leisure — a pedagogy that dares to float. The flood, after all, is not just a threat but a chance to see the world anew, to build upon the ruins without being bound by them.
This is the beginning of a larger conversation, one that extends beyond academia’s crumbling walls and into the very heart of what it means to be human. As we dive deeper into these waters, we must ask: How do we live, learn, and create in a world that refuses to stand still? The answers are not fixed; they are as fluid as the sea, as adaptable as the amphibious creatures who have long known that survival is not about clinging to the shore but embracing the depths.
