Us & Our Planet (Home)
All species interact with the planet in a gazillion ways. Obviously.
Except that us humans, over millennia, have created layers of physical and conceptual/mythical abstractions atop the planet. Today we’re at a juncture where we interact only with these layers, by and large, and hardly with the planet.
This is true as we walk, or drive, or live in our homes, or shop for our needs, or earn our money, or get our water. Of course there’s the physical realities of the food and water and materials in all of this, but our attempt is to wrap in layers of these abstractions as much as possible — now most of us know very very very little about those physical realities and the cycles and planetary realities that govern them.
The real world scares us, or even disgusts us. Up close, it’s snakes, and spiders and mud, uneven surfaces and heat and unmanageable water flows. A few make sorties “into nature” once in a while, but by and large we are no longer comfortable with and in it.
Starting with food, and then onto other needs, we have tried reducing the huge complexity of the planet to a few functions and variables that we are now comfortable with, and try making predictable. This happens at the cost of most other variables and functions — our lack of knowledge, empathy or concern around them. We definitely do not consider or understand the trade-offs involved in ignoring and even destroying those inadvertently as we chase the few we care about, through the lens of our abstractions.
Our idea of value (and valuations) today comes from the abstractions too. Any work at the intersection with the real planet is considered low-skill and low-value, and the higher order the abstraction, the more value we assign to it. It’s the same for knowledge. Most of us know have a very poor understanding of the geology, or biology around us. We understand the theoretical abstractions in terms of physics and chemistry a little, and the acknowledge and worship the wrappers of technology around all this way more.
These wrappers and abstractions are also orders of magnitude more energy intensive, and polluting (waste and unusable by-products). They lend to fragility and break easily, given how much unpredictability they create in the underlying planetary systems on a continuous basis.
The climate crisis and the biodiversity collapse we see around us is, in a sense, a net result this journey.
Those graphs you see of increased GDP, population, wealth concentration, CO2 ppm etc are all essentially the same graph and correlate with the rate at which we’ve “gotten off” the planet and started living almost completely through these layers.
If we do not acknowledge, understand and work with, and not off the planet rapidly, we may not be able to even adapt well, leave alone reverse the effects of this destruction our myths and abstractions have caused over millennia and more so over the last few centuries.
