Exit Music (notes)

We have such a poverty-stricken understanding of what life is, that when we create new technologies that replace living processes, we can’t even comprehend what it is that the technology replaced.

It’s tragic that ideas such as “harmony” and “flourishing” are mostly now written off as feel-good eastern mysticism, or even worse, new-age woo, even while western science itself is only just beginning to discover them for itself.

That mycorrhizae are essential to soil ecosystem health and thereby fertility, and that trees are essential to the presence of mycorrhizae, are now accepted in botany and ecology, is still irrelevant to agricultural industries that look at soil as a porous medium for the conversion of seeds into crops by the addition of nitrogen compounds produced with unimaginable quantities of fossil fuel. That people have, for thousands of years, had practices that keep soil alive, able to hold water, and a fertile bed for the cultivation of plants without the help of the Haber-Bosch process, is irrelevant to those who see feeding 10 billion humans in a dangerously warming world as an engineering challenge.

The problem with ancient practices, of course, in a modern world, is that the processes that ancient practices supported are no longer the means by which industrial humans make their living in the world. Our connection to the physical is largely mediated by machines – machines that cause or require the destruction of natural systems and traditional practices. We have evolved our machines to have effects at ever-larger scales, and in so doing have pushed living systems, which exist in definite and local places, to the margins. All of nature is grist to the mill.

Well, if we have evolved technologies with global footprints, surely we should have evolved practices of care with global footprints too? But of course, no – the very cast of mind required to produce these kinds of machine is that which devalues care and other such old-fashioned inclinations. We act as if, as long as we produce enough, efficiently enough, we can outrun the need for care. We just need to keep designing new artificial components of the pyramid of human technology to replace the few remaining natural systems that are keeping us alive, as, one by one, they give up the ghost.