When insects and marine life start getting fucked that when we get permian levels of "uh-oh"

For enough people to see this as the grave warning that it is, we need a paradigm shift in how we understand ourselves and our our place in the natural world.

I think that starts with a reevaluation of what a body is. Bear with me here…

I’ve posted before about how you and I, we’re not singular, indivisible “things”. We’re towering colossi made of trillions of animals, metaphorically holding-hands and literally sharing resources -- and work. There’s a lot of work that go into running a human being, and they all have to be carried out in harmonious synchronicity for you to happen. From that work, a sense and awareness of self emerges. From trillions, to one.

“Emerge” is the key word here. One exists through the trillions – the little animals are still there, toiling together, mostly unbidden by the conscious mind that arises from them. But hey, they’re all still you, right? Just parts of you – maybe arranged differently for different tasks, but hewn from the same DNA blueprint, right?

It’s not just the progeny of the wiggler and the egg! There’s whole other species in here. A few hundred billion of them, in fact. They’re the single-celled bacteria that evolved to live in our intestines, carrying out some of the necessary work of digestion. They’re as much a part of the body as any other organ or system, even interfacing with the others to keep the ecology as a whole (ie, us) in homeostasis. We wouldn’t survive without them.

It doesn’t seem all that much of a stretch to say these “intestinal tenants” are as much a part of the whole as anything else, DNA relation or not. Most people, if you asked them, would agree their guts are a part of their body. It makes intuitive sense. They’re in you. They fill inputs required for the body – and therefore, the mind – to function.

So; we’re not ‘one thing’, we’re trillions of them. And we’re not one species, we’re an ecology. An ecology tottering around on two legs and talking to other ecologies, mind you. But an ecology nonetheless. What I’d like to propose, that “paradigm shift” I mentioned, is; why should the body end at… well, the body?

If the phenomenon of you (and I and everyone) emerges from the input of trillions of cells… well those cells couldn’t exist in a vacuum, either. They rely on plant cells converting electromagnetic radiation into chemical reactions. On multicellular animals converting that plant matter in their own chemical reactions. On other multicellular animals doing a predation of the first ones. The little ecology of the body needs the (increasingly, wildly) complex and complicated interactions of the bigger ecology it exists in. And if your cells need it, then, really, isn’t it just as much a part of the phenomenon of consciousness, part of you, as every other input?

If people are gonna move forward, gonna respond to the crisis of this century -- our century, the 21st Century – then I believe we need to instill this understanding of ourselves. As an emerging phenomena. The physical, chemical, and quantum interactions of the whole ecosystem feeding into the inputs that result in a body of cells that experiences self and awareness.

You are not just the meat before you. Consciousness is more than the body it can will to movement. It begins in the cells of wheat and barley and broccoli. In the nitrogen of the soil. In chemical composition of the atmosphere. In the sun-kissed water rolling off the ocean to fall as rain. Every sugar, every vitamin; every lungful of air; every starch, fiber, and molecule. All those inputs, across continents and creatures, moving through space and time to become woven into the the matter that makes a person happen. That bubble of mind poking through the fabric of the world and seeing.

What we see is not good. It does not bode well. But we cannot move forward without understanding that we must first move with. Consciousness has interrupted the dance that it emerged from. Consciousness… may… find the rhythm and dance a new dance, as a part of the whole...

Is this like a new level of unprecedented compared to the 35 other articles I’ve seen in the last ten years saying the level of insect deaths is unprecedented

People don't care. I've talked about this before and the responses are denial or dismissal. "Habitat destruction is the reason they're going extinct. I don't even use pesticides for my lawn when I kill them!" "There's always doomsayers out there."

Driving at night and every one cleaning their lawns fall and spring.

When I was child, there were so many fireflies on summer nights, but now... :doomer:

Conversely if we wanted to rebound insect populations it would take very little time and effort to do so. They have high birth rates and fast generation times.

Ya I was really going to town with my fly swatter last weekend :/

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