We are facing a fundamental revision of the entire Earth-system, a dramatic shift away from the state it had inhabited since long before the dawn of human civilisation toward a new and unknown state for the future.

Earth was born about four and a half billion years ago, alongside several sibling planets, all of them formed from fragments of material left over after the birth of the Sun.

Fire is a phenomenon as unique to Earth as life itself.

The ice age shaped what we are. And in it we thrived.

Energy and materials flow through this circle of life—really, multiple interconnected circles, or a web of life—with each species occupying its place, or niche, within the flow. But now, humans are strangling the web of life, triggering an extinction event such as our planet hasn’t witnessed since the age of the dinosaurs.

Popular narratives tend to presume that our ancestors lived materially simple lives because they were primitive brutes, simply incapable of building anything more ‘advanced’ or ‘civilised.’ But such narratives mythologise both the past and the present in the service of rationalising the status quo, including the present distributions of global power, wealth, and exploitation.

Despite the stories we tell ourselves today about growth being linked to human ingenuity and progress, we have clearly been paying attention to the wrong signals for systemic health and wellbeing.

The ‘Agricultural Revolution,’ regularly presented as a grand origin myth of modern civilisation, was neither a swift nor serendipitous innovation eagerly embraced by all. Nor would it herald a giant leap in the social, healthful, and creative prospects of humanity.

Continuing to increase our dependency on these fossils in any way makes literally no Earthly sense. We must instead imagine a system that moves away from burning fossils, altogether, rap idly and completely.

Today, we of industrial civilisation belong to a death cult where the prasad offered by our high priests is oil. We gulp it down, believing it to be our salvation.

Rather than imagine that any individual can do something to slow down climate change and other ecocide, it seems most useful to first orient ourselves toward a broadly conceived vision of a more equitable and less consumerist world.

We must have intention to change in some very particular ways: reduce excessive consumption; decrease ecological destruction; expand mutual-aid social constructs and local cooperation; phase out the mechanisms driving inequality.