629
that leapt from the shores of its primordial slime into the heady ranks of large
vertebrate company. Outsiders and intruders from our very beginning, we have fast
exceeded every threshold of viability. In the horror stories that are our biological
misadventures, a through-line would seem to tell all. We have, on the condition of
our own diseased pertinacity, perpetuated the scientific, psychological, and headstrong lies of this comedy of errors, and not funny at all.
What is that betrayal? That aforementioned pathetic fallacy illegitimately linking
our self-reference to the rest of Nature? To every conceivable extent has our species’
addictions to a comprehensive falsehood empowered our mendacity, elucidating a
clear-enough cause-and-effect: How this historically addled font of self-fictions
resulted in the ousting of all those Others and the most blatant scorched-earth policy
ever mounted—this World War III whose reckoning is our autobiography; adjectives vying with superlatives for the darkness of our very presence? We are the
destroyers and our light is actually a void.
67.2 Conceptual Transitions
It gives no pleasure to parse such sad, if remorseless and recondite tidings, but they
do not exaggerate. They can only underestimate the full measure of ecocide. Yet, we
will not see or hear of it. Our perceptions miss the core as well as its peripheries.
Diameters have lost, in our guise, their equal parts. The celestial spheres that we
observe and ponder, their myriad galaxies and forces, have not dented our resolve to
implode down below, here, on the little blue planet we once thought to be a permanent homestead, full of imaginings of our own involvement; devoted to representations of our presence, which some are content to label the history of art.
The deep ethology of connections is pitted against our wanton, pathological disregard of that interdependency once hallowed as a fundament preparatory to all
birth, sustenance, and survival. At some point in our ontology—variations on a
theme of transition—we changed dramatically, from one timid, low-density being,
to a very different character study. We seem to have avoided switchbacks and gone
straight for the kill in our evolution. By the time of Terra Amata in modern-day
Nice, the behavioral suite of changes from one thing to another involved a cladistic
time-bomb of inflictions now in full swarm. There above the Mediterranean,
approximately 400,000 years ago, the butchery was blatant. “Over 12,000 animal
bones and bone fragments” have been exhumed at Terra Amata
5
(Fig. 67.2).
By 10,000 years ago, with the emergence of human-mediated crops like flax,
beans, cotton, squash, barley, millet, and numerous other herbaceous legumes, our
foraging style had evolved into mini-industrialized agriculture converging around
permanent residencies. A story told over and over again. Human conceptualization
5 See “Terra Amata (France) – Neanderthal Life on the French Riviera,” ThoughtCo., by K.Kris
Hirst, July 28, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/terra-amata-france-neanderthal-life-173001,
Accessed 8/20/2019.
67.2 Conceptual Transitions
that leapt from the shores of its primordial slime into the heady ranks of large
vertebrate company. Outsiders and intruders from our very beginning, we have fast
exceeded every threshold of viability. In the horror stories that are our biological
misadventures, a through-line would seem to tell all. We have, on the condition of
our own diseased pertinacity, perpetuated the scientific, psychological, and headstrong lies of this comedy of errors, and not funny at all.
What is that betrayal? That aforementioned pathetic fallacy illegitimately linking
our self-reference to the rest of Nature? To every conceivable extent has our species’
addictions to a comprehensive falsehood empowered our mendacity, elucidating a
clear-enough cause-and-effect: How this historically addled font of self-fictions
resulted in the ousting of all those Others and the most blatant scorched-earth policy
ever mounted—this World War III whose reckoning is our autobiography; adjectives vying with superlatives for the darkness of our very presence? We are the
destroyers and our light is actually a void.
67.2 Conceptual Transitions
It gives no pleasure to parse such sad, if remorseless and recondite tidings, but they
do not exaggerate. They can only underestimate the full measure of ecocide. Yet, we
will not see or hear of it. Our perceptions miss the core as well as its peripheries.
Diameters have lost, in our guise, their equal parts. The celestial spheres that we
observe and ponder, their myriad galaxies and forces, have not dented our resolve to
implode down below, here, on the little blue planet we once thought to be a permanent homestead, full of imaginings of our own involvement; devoted to representations of our presence, which some are content to label the history of art.
The deep ethology of connections is pitted against our wanton, pathological disregard of that interdependency once hallowed as a fundament preparatory to all
birth, sustenance, and survival. At some point in our ontology—variations on a
theme of transition—we changed dramatically, from one timid, low-density being,
to a very different character study. We seem to have avoided switchbacks and gone
straight for the kill in our evolution. By the time of Terra Amata in modern-day
Nice, the behavioral suite of changes from one thing to another involved a cladistic
time-bomb of inflictions now in full swarm. There above the Mediterranean,
approximately 400,000 years ago, the butchery was blatant. “Over 12,000 animal
bones and bone fragments” have been exhumed at Terra Amata
5
(Fig. 67.2).
By 10,000 years ago, with the emergence of human-mediated crops like flax,
beans, cotton, squash, barley, millet, and numerous other herbaceous legumes, our
foraging style had evolved into mini-industrialized agriculture converging around
permanent residencies. A story told over and over again. Human conceptualization
5 See “Terra Amata (France) – Neanderthal Life on the French Riviera,” ThoughtCo., by K.Kris
Hirst, July 28, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/terra-amata-france-neanderthal-life-173001,
Accessed 8/20/2019.
67.2 Conceptual Transitions