It was the Late Jurassic. Dinosaurs were still around. The planet was covered in very shallow, warm seas full of plant life. But the oceans were so warm that oxygen couldn’t penetrate them. Anything that died took a very long time to decompose without oxygen. As billions of algae and plankton perished and fell to … Continue reading A Future History of Oil
Solar power was never a human technology. It was prototyped 3.5 billion years ago by bacteria, upgraded a billion years later by Earth’s first terraforming civilisation of oxygen-producing microbes, and finally adopted by algae, higher plants and forests as the ecosystem’s official engine. Solar capture became the dominant energy currency on Earth because it was … Continue reading Toxic Biomimicry: How Humans Turned Sunlight into an Industry
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?
As the human world succumbs to the grip of autocracy, we are never short of examples from the natural world where nature itself successfully revolted against power. Today I bring you another story of a failed coup: the failed domestication of the hyacinth. The dominant logic of plant breeding has always been to maximize the most monetizable quality … Continue reading Genomic Autocracies: How Hyacinths Resisted Human Domestication
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
Today’s epidemic of authoritarianism is the consequence of a society that long ago embraced the values of necrocapitalist imperialism: ruthless profit, heartlessness, manipulation, and pure, unadulterated sadism toward the most vulnerable. In an increasingly remote-operated world, attributing responsibility is becoming near impossible: tyrants and oligarchs can safely hide behind layers of code, while the rest of … Continue reading How They Killed Reality
Contrary to what our impressive technological milestones suggest, we have never been in charge of our fate. Like any organism striving to maximize its chances of survival, our choices were blindly driven by expansion: economic growth, domination, population increase - whatever it took, whatever the cost to us or the planet. From our humble beginnings as monocellular life … Continue reading Designed For Extinction: Why Humans Developed the Wrong Type of Intelligence
As the climate slips further into uncharted territory, it is time climate science admitted that it is in uncharted territory itself. Climate science is quickly becoming an art of unreliable speculation: the models, theorems, assumptions and parameters it operates upon are based on a planet that no longer exists. Just as we were beginning to … Continue reading In The Age Of The Great Meteorological Uncertainty, We Need A New Type Of Climate Science
George Tsakraklides 