How Humans Became Aliens on Their Own Planet

This is a short piece. The longer essays go much deeper.

Ecological consciousness is never a mental asset, but a spiritual muscle that humans lost long ago. It is a language that dies unspoken, a houseplant long forgotten, a desperate bird song coughing itself into a cacophonic abyss of incoming traffic. Nature is here, where it has always been; it is humans who have stopped inhabiting the present. They have been adsorbed like molecules of a colourless gas into the charcoal filter of their own artificial reality. Over the millennia the smartest brains in this civilisation masterfully crafted countless false narratives about human supremacy over nature, which they vilified as a wild, hostile beast to be tamed, punished, and eliminated by trophy hunters. These narratives became the lullabies for every future generation and integrated into humanity’s purpose. Without realising it, this species became a house of cards in the wind, held together by a flimsy web of hallucinations, drunken lullabies and distorted images.

The supremacist narratives that built this civilisation directly equated the desecration of nature with “progress”. Earth became the setting of an interstellar tragedy where humanity was effectively domesticated by its own economy: a financial management entity we call “capitalism”, which became tasked with breeding generation after generation of consumatronic cattle provided with credit cards, e-mail addresses and social insecurity numbers and told to buy this product over here, puke it over there, and help turn the river of civilisation from a slow-moving sewer into an excremential tsunami.

With each new generation of urban-reared human cattle, nature was progressively forgotten until it one day became an alien entity, a stranger, an enemy. I know people who hate grass. They don’t simply dislike it. They hate it, viscerally and emotionally, and they’d rather pour cement over it or replace it with plastic turf. This bizarre species with an anti-life agenda is an aberration to Earth’s ecosystem.