The way we make our spaces needs to change. The way we think about space needs to change, and the way we consider ourselves the main proprietors of it, must be reversed constitutionally.
Humans leap off world to take more of it. Quite literally, colonising celestial bodies; the universe’s most persistent parasite. Surely it is only cosmic balance to stop this.
Stop what though?
Human progress?
Never
but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if we thought about what the other lives need. Or simply consider how life begets life begets life. In an ideal world.
I think it's well within our reach to get there. We’ve come this far, albeit in the wrong direction.
Human persistence is one thing we can count on to pursue the profits. So how to make profit plain? To show the value of other lives. That’s a difficult task even amongst humans.
So much disagreement on what’s important and who’s important. No one seems to realise the answer lies in what we leave behind. Lives begin and end everyday, as do the eras that bloom surely fade with time. But there is something that persists- the human thing that connects us.
It’s in what we surround ourselves with. It’s the way we rebuild ourselves every morning, and how we unfold ourselves each night. It is home, work, getting there, who is there, and a return.
A repetitive but often surprising existence. Inside spaces. Which may speak of human intelligence, or more than human intelligence.
I, myself, consider more than human intelligence far more intriguing.
Environments in which what is considered human and what is considered other, are not so easily distinguished. Where perhaps, we might fold ourselves in for the night and remember where we came from. Before we were us, and they were them. Before we crept onto land and looked about and found green. Before the plant realised the fungi could help them eat. And before the fungi knew what they could get in return.
Yes, they came before us, and they are the reason we are here to begin with. Whatever gross miscalculation of science fiction brought man to believe in hierarchy, instead of ecology- it doesn’t benefit to argue about it. Only consider the what if, of it- what if we had not had such disdain for the greatest systems architects of our world? What if we grew together? In intelligence and all else.
But now, how might we negotiate a role in that architecture? It thrives there beneath our muck. The wild lives we cannot conceive of. Of which we cannot hear, because we do not know how to listen and we cannot see because we do not know how to look.
It remains a foreign thing, the idea of integrating our spaces with other living things. Strangely, in this context segregation is not considered colonial. I disagree. But this is not a game worth playing. Because the future rushes down upon us, and we are not ready.
Will breathing be easy? Are we fighting for air? And water? Is human intelligence the answer to human problems? Is it time to consult outside ourselves. And look to new ways of doing things, of building networks, of managing resources, of adapting to changing patterns.
Where to begin, interspecies collaboration with a beings we do not know how to communicate with? It’s a code I’m sure we can break without being brutes. As we have been in the past. Amicable relations, and knowledge exchange.
Respect.
We can be more than this.