Although most species are territorial only within their specific niche, humans have taken territoriality to planetary level. The creation of the concept of entitlement – to food, territory, and even other humans - was our attempt to rewrite ecosystem etiquette by inventing yet another moral licence for aggression. By proclaiming our unlimited entitlement to resources, … Continue reading How Extinction Was Legalised
War precedes the appearance of humans on the planet and, is in fact, as ancient as Earth itself. Every species has known war, and every species has evolved the art of warfare. From human Tomahawk missiles to fungal chemical weapons, wasp attacks and viral particles taking on armies of white blood cells, the best defence … Continue reading Gaia’s Revenge: Why Humans Are The New Dinosaurs
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 … Continue reading How Humans Became Aliens on Their Own Planet — in 600 Words
How Human Exceptionalism Theories Became All the Rage, and All the Hoax When primitive humans saw that they could defeat every single predator they came across, theories of human supremacy quickly began to proliferate. These supremacy proto-theories empowered humans to further destroy the environment and drive even more species to extinction, because they provided crucial … Continue reading Were Humans Ever Intelligent?
I’ve avoided writing about this for at least half a year now, mostly because the subject matter was so emotionally charged that I couldn’t find the guts to open it up. Writing about this back then would have been like rubbing salt on an open wound: there are certain topics where writing helps you put … Continue reading Nature Always Vanishes at Night
My first job out of graduate school was also my first and only job offer. I jumped at the opportunity of becoming a manager at a fungal microbiology laboratory, specializing on indoor mold: people would bring me samples from their blackened shower wall, their carpet, or their basement, and I would analyze them. I would … Continue reading Biology Lessons In Degrowth: The Three Stages of Civilisation
The reason why there are thousands of times more small fish in the ocean compared to sharks is very simple: sharks eat a lot more, so they come at a very high resource cost to the ecosystem. Nature has designed sharks so that they have far fewer viable offspring than smaller fish, not only so … Continue reading The Real Reason Why Human Population Must, and Will, Crash
Civilisations and ecosystems are virtually indistinguishable from each other at times of existential stress: the same laws of scarcity and competition which decimate an ecosystem’s food chain are behind the collapse of a human currency chain. In any interconnected system, whether this is a human society or an ecosystem, the weight of collapse bears down … Continue reading Transformation Through Collapse: The Parable of The Burning Forest
Today I discovered that one of my Cyclamen coum plants in the upper woodland garden had produced offspring: tiny one-leaf seedlings fighting for space and light under the canopy of a 45 year-old evergreen Jasminum mesnyi that complements their intense fuchsia colour with its narcissus-yellow blooms. Both plants bloom in the middle of February, a most drab … Continue reading Patience
125 million years ago an exceptionally long, baking hot summer began to sweep through the Celestial Mountain in the Tien Shan alpine range spanning modern-day Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China. The scorching conditions on the desiccated slopes of the mountain left little room for survival for the great majority of organisms, and the freezing … Continue reading Meditative Degrowth: Sometimes The Smartest Act of Defiance Is To Stay Still
George Tsakraklides 