How Humans Became Aliens on Their Own Planet — in 600 Words

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. We are not simply witnessing the result of eons of intergenerational ecological alienation. We are looking at the disappearance of consciousness itself. Modern humans are no longer from Earth; they are the homeless pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that were lost under the couch, got chewed up by the dog, disfigured and mangled to the point where they no longer fit anywhere in this ecosystem.

For most humans today, nature is an alien world somewhere far out into the distance. These humans have little ecological conscience because all they have ever known is the tiny bubble of civilisation. They don’t know that this bubble is nested within a much bigger ecology. Ecology is bigger than capitalism, bigger than human civilization itself. Yet for most humans today ecology takes place somewhere in the sidelines of existence, or in a classroom, or a nature documentary. We fail to grasp the gravity of our ignorance of almost everything that exists. To call 10 million other species “the environment” as if it is a piece of space we walk into, is the most ignorant word. It is like walking into a room full of people and only acknowledging the chairs.

Human cities continue to expand, blindly devouring the planet like an unstoppable fungus on its way to the edge of its petri dish. Self-indoctrinated into growth, humanity is unaware that it is already finished. It is spending money it doesn’t have, on resources which no longer exist, to raise a generation of humans already fighting each other for food. As long as humans fail to acknowledge the existence of nature, almost every living organism is set to vanish. Earth’s destruction has already become our single biggest achievement thus far: beyond inventions, works of art, music, and even trips to the moon, the annihilation of climate and biosphere is the loudest legacy we leave behind us. If anything makes us “human” it is this legacy, whether we go extinct or not.

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For an introduction into the origins of human supremacy, read this essay:
→ [The False Narrative of Conflict]

For an intro to Necrocapitalism you can read:
→ [Is This Where The Human Evolution Journey Ends? How The Necroeconomy Became Our Master]