Our Ecology of Artifice

Our many contraptions are living beings. Sterile hybrids like mules, brought into this world to fulfill a humanly-dictated function. By operating the factories that produce them, we act as their surrogate mothers. We breathe life into them, guard them, wash them, feed them, and, in turn, they support our reproduction and vanity. The sprinklers, cell phones, security cameras, toasters, televisions, trains, computers, cars, cranes, big rigs, bulldozers, and bombs are our new zoology, our new biodiversity. Like any living being, their creation is destruction, their life is also death. And when we decide that their life has ended, we return them to the dust to await reincarnation. We bury them without ceremony.

Unison

What is it to destroy? In all destruction, there is creation. Thermodynamics tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changes forms. When we speak of human destruction of the Earth, of our environment, there is always the matter of reformation, of converting elements into a new existence. Prairie becomes farmland, desert becomes casinos, coal becomes electricity, mountain becomes Lincoln or ski resort. Energy and life have always been dynamic. Humans do not defy thermodynamics. We merely seek to convert all energy to our own form, our own wavelength and frequency, until, in unison, the universe screams in piercing resonance.

Beautiful Mutants

Some call humans a cancer. However, we may have an advantage over lowly cancer cells, our mutated, invasive, parasitic brethren. Perhaps, rather than blindly devouring until both our host and ourselves collapse in death, we will consume this globe in its entirety, and upon its skeleton build an entirely new creature with photosynthetic organelles, a fiberoptic nervous system, and rockets to swat at asteroids. And maybe we are communicable, and will one day consume new hosts. And then, perhaps, we can build colossal appendages upon our rotund other-worldly bodies, so that, as we orbit each other, we can give ourselves an interplanetary hi-five.