The sky is our home. The earth our winding path.

This is a piece of writing with a collage, created to an invitation from artist Robyn Woolston. She has made artworks, held interviews and invited creative responses to the phrase ‘Yours, In Extraction’. Her works and the publication, funded by Creative Scotland, launched in Texas at Fort Worth Contemporary Art, will also be shown in Australia and Scotland.

“The sky is our home. The earth is our winding path.”

This title is from a 1971 advert for Japanese Air Lines that I found in an old National Geographic. It’s at the centre of this collage, which explores upward, skyward aspiration and escalation, but also the impossibility of this movement given our dependence on Earth. What follows below the collage is my written piece, which is about the Overview Effect, and musing on ‘intractivism’ as an opposite to extractivism.

The Overview Effect happened after seeing our Gaian planet from out there in the upper atmosphere, a tiny blue oxygenated sphere. This novel experience converted some astronauts into environmentalists. But it also converted the extractivists into astronauts, who are now convincing us to pay for their impossible ventures.

These extractivists are holding Earth like a plaything in their hands, squeezing out the last drops of oily elixir. So addicted are they, and we, that few can see the conundrum that the black juice for ever-lastingness is reaching its last, that the potion for growth is destroying all the growing things. Never ceasing from exploration, we have reached the end of our exploring, and find ourselves nowhere near the beginning. In seeing our whole place for the first time, it can look like…nothing so very much after all.

If you look at it that way, the only way is up. The sky is our ideal home. Earth is just the take-off pad, the fuel silo, the winding path upwards to riches for a few.

But this isn’t the whole truth, because some of us are digging in, clinging on to the winding path of planet Earth, in ways that are different from digging for gold or gas, or uprooting trees or building concrete towers. This different way, actually an old way, is intracting. It’s making do, looking within and bedding down. Intracting is also interacting, seeing soul in everything. We intractivists are refusing to extract if we can choose not to.

Intracting is to turn to look at the weeds between grasses as you walk, seeing gossamer between them, which means spiders have been working in the night. It is choosing to notice the drops of dew in morning sun, or a fly caught there and thinking of ways to mimic the tensile strength of that silk, able to contain that frantic flapping thing. The intractivist’s seeking mind flows down to feet, opening eyes in the soles, feeling through shoes the crunching or squelching on the ground. There’s the wonder of being able to name those feeling-sounds, and give new words to them if we want, gifting them to others. Then turning to the miracle of our vertical skeleton, balancing heavy heads on top with brains inside, teeming with shadow images of things not present, things past and yet to come, impossible things that mix together to make possible things.

Every moment the mental journey could be different, splitting off as two intractivists walk the same path, opening out more as they hold a conversation, evolving each day as they try new things in a place, interacting with more people or species and their wisdoms. Multiply this for all the people bedding into places. Multiply it by all the places, and by all the species that have been, and are yet to be. The fractal possibilities of the intractivist imagination are endless.

The only way is down. The Earth is our ideal home. The sky is the limit.