This is the only home for our species – there is no other. This planet Earth, the recognized home of all known life and the living systems that make life not only possible but worth living, faces unprecedented challenges. Not unprecedented in terms of impact, for from Ice Ages to meteor strikes the earth has experienced more total and systemic destruction and crisis. Rather, it is unprecedented in terms of origin, both individually and collectively, the mental, social, environmental, and humanitarian ills that are baring down upon not just our species but all species, are undeniably the actions and consequences of only one – our own.

You are not alive because your heart is beating, because your lungs are breathing. Aliveness is embodied and expressed, living is a dance of joy and relationship, of beauty and love, a celebration of existence within existence and such experiences cannot be known alone. They are the virtues of relationship to the greater community, and their profusion is proportional to the depth and diversity of these relationships. By that measure even here, the most abundant of all living places most have lost their lives. Only the shell remains.

We are the walking wounded and the wakeful dead. Absolute joy has fallen to relative happiness. Unconditional love is lost to a fearful possessiveness, a celebration of life in participation with, together, and in communion, became a celebration of achievement over, in isolation and against. Friendship is shallow and ideological, beauty is contrived and commoditized, community is collapsed to individualism, open and unconditional acts of kindness and compassion are reduced to transactional engagements in servitude to fear and loneliness, security, and ambition.

The stain of mankind on the planet today is a rampant appetite to satisfy the void that this illusion of separateness inflicts. We live lost in an ugly abstraction, bound to compete in a zero-sum game of self-defeating brinksmanship. We are sick, sad, and anxious, lonely and depressed, stacked upon one another in behemoths of urban ugliness that are themselves deserts of diversity, whose concrete foundations are the tombstones of a once living world now stamped out beneath them.

Individualism is the ascension of one in opposition to, and in conflict with, the whole. It is to toil bound within a callous and selfish disposition almost entirely bereft of what was once called humanity. In our minds eye lives an imagine and a world in which each is set against the other. Competition becomes opposition, opposition becomes conflict and conflict, whether in thought, word, or action, is an ideology of violence. Such violence has not only brought great suffering upon the earth and our own kind, but individualism is a philosophy that separated us from life, closing our hearts to others before us. Rendering us deaf to the cries of our brothers and sisters as we toil in quest for a secret tonic to abate the loneliness and meaningless that is the unique discontent of our peculiar species.

Animals and plants; intelligent and sensitive, whose right to a full and peaceful life is no greater or lesser than our own, are reduced to commodities whose value and worth is qualified only by the weight and measure of their servitude to mankind. Those whose hides and flesh are favored are born and held within systems of such barbarity that they are carefully and deliberately hidden from our eyes and conscience.

No thing is Sacred, the religions of the West have told of a transcendent God whose love for mankind is such that he has cast him in his own image; apparently anointing us gods; stewards of life and death, and what poor gods we are. We speak of restoration and conservation, applauding the tokens of pittance we offer as achievements that obscure their insignificance to an all-consuming, pillaging greed. Reverence, that reflection of the beauty and vitality of life is veiled behind the mirror of our own discontent. Destruction we cannot abate is born of a heart we cannot feel and a soul whose weeping is drowned out by a mind screaming incessantly of nonsense.

The empty eyes that stare out have lost all that once was called humanity, they see little beyond the reflection of their ideas and ideologies. True expressions of humanity, kindness and consideration, compassion and empathy have become limited within our own communities and utterly absent from our relationships with the other life and living systems with whom we share a common home and common fate.

Those who hope for salvation in technology ignore that technology is more a contributor to our blindness than a light. It was the logic and reason of the mechanistic age, beginning four hundred years ago that dissected, desacralized, objectified, and commodified our once glorious home. The minds of men are bound to create in their own image and understanding. Our technologies; extensions of ourselves, are bound within a partial worldview, limited imagination and the reflections of a self-centered ego that hungers for the very thing it denies. A collective whose actions are knowingly undermining their survival creates distractions to hasten their ignorance and demise. Such is the madness of man.

Those who point to the barren red planet and pontificate stories of salvation out there in the vastness of space, are misguided at best and deadly at worst. Whilst they envision themselves saviors of mankind (and little of it), their’s is an orientation of despair, condemning a majority of our species, and most all others, to a torturous withering upon a vine of life parched by the very systems they applaud for the power it affords them over human destiny. They have written off the crown jewel of all existence, whose abundance and diversity is collapsing under the weight of a peculiar logic and reason.
They are like a king who imagines leaving his garden kingdom for some far-flung desert. Life may be possible there, but to live is not to be alive.

No real lasting contribution to the advancement of society or the world is generated from excess consumption or the accumulation of a disproportionate amount of the earth’s bounty. No matter what they tell you, there is only one system, a single vast and interconnected system connecting rich and poor. Like the water cycle that touches every cell in every living thing, our global economic system picks the pockets of the poor to feed the rich. Remember that when the rich are telling you to chip in to save the planet. The system that built their gilded cages and un-spendable hoards rests on the shoulders of the poor.

All our great challenges are the consequences of our own actions, planet saving technologies are unnecessary if we abate the behavior that causes destruction. Charity and conservation are clearly the insincere and feeble attempts of a willfully blind society to sweep up it own detritus under the rug and ease a guilty and shameful conscience. True healing is transcendence and freedom, seeking not to abate the symptoms but to negate the cause itself.

In a way our deadness is a blessing, for to see through the mind of the eyes of the heart is to bare witness an unconscionable planetary sorrow. Objectification and commodification separate us from the voices that cry out in anguish over our insatiable greed, and numbs us to the pain and brutality that we inflict without reserve across all the living systems of this planet and the life is supports. Yet we are suffering. We are alone and we are lonely. The beauty of existence within and around has been cut to the wick, Her great light dwindles.

To be bound to a common home is to share a common interest and common fate. All life, including your own, sustains, survives, and thrives by participating in vast and sophisticated relationships. And, like the health of the planetary living systems your health and vitality is dependent on selfless reciprocity, participation, and exchange; on delivery systems capable of reaching not merely every organ in your body, but every single individual cell within every single organ, lest first the cell, then then organ and finally the whole, dies.