Are We Becoming Aliens?
Some mystics describe the apex of human experience simply as this: To see and be seen. To know and be known. To love and be loved. To be claimed and identified as a part of the unified whole. All of creation is the Creator incarnate, they say. All of material reality exists to love and be loved.
This is not just a romantic ideal. This is the recipe for ecological symbiosis, on which all life depends. Imagine living in a forest or savannah where each plant and animal knows you and is intimately known by you. Everything you do supports the life around you, and everything you need is freely given. This is how trees and birds live when their natural communities are in balance.
Occasionally a strange new species appears — a mammal walks in or a seed floats in on the breeze. There are hardships on both sides as the newcomer and the environment get to know each other. Each adjusts as well as it can, working to re-establish balance. The changes each party goes through may be minor and relatively quick, or what appears to be a long battle may ensue and all involved may be transformed beyond recognition. Life itself will always win, though it may have to take a form it has never taken before.
Humans developed long legs for walking great distances and we have arms to carry all kinds of things from one place to another. This is a lot of power already, never mind our big brains and hearts. We have walked all over this planet, and we’ve carried all kinds of things to places they never would have gotten to otherwise. We are the great disruptors.
It’s natural that when we leave one place we want to take with us familiar things that have helped us feel safe and comfortable. Everywhere we go we are inclined to create a ‘home away from home’ for ourselves. We’ve perfected ways to isolate ourselves from strange conditions and we’ve adapted all kinds of environments to our needs and preferences (golf courses in deserts) rather than allowing new environments to shape us.
Before our physical form stopped evolving, hundreds of thousands of years ago, our predecessors went through frequent adaptations. Quite a lot of them. That doesn’t mean we’re “highly” evolved, it just means we’ve had to adapt to a lot of different environments. Each time a species adapts to a new environment it becomes more specialized, sacrificing the ability to generally fit into a wider range of conditions. Did we stop evolving when we learned to change our environments instead?
Whatever caused us to stop evolving, the rest of nature has gone on without us. As the environments we used to call home have continued cycling through states of balance and imbalance, adapting to invasions and disruptions, they have become increasingly alien to us, and we’ve fallen from symbiosis.
The simple shelters we used to make to protect us from heat and cold have become fortresses against all kinds of perceived hostilities. But nature isn’t hostile. It’s just that the natural world doesn’t know us very well anymore. As the rest of creation has become more foreign to us, we, by relegating ourselves to our paved surfaces and air-tight structures with temperature controls, have made ourselves alien to her. The planet will find ways to incorporate the concrete and steel we abandon at our fringes and the plastic trash we throw into her oceans, but it can scarcely touch us. Will the earth once intimate with our bare feet and the plants once familiar with our hands, lips, and tongues still know how to nourish us?
What would it be like to know and be known? To love and be loved?
As much as we have changed our environments, our environments are changing us, and we don’t know all of the implications of what we’ve set in motion. Now that these changes are happening on a global scale we realize that we haven’t escaped the cycles of disruption and adaptation after all. The world as we know it is ending. If these global transformations don’t kill us they will make us different.
What to do? We can’t just wander into the forests naked, as if none of this had ever happened. What we can do now is what the rest of creation is obliged to do. Mourn what we’ve lost, celebrate what we can salvage, take a clear and loving look around, and use the tools we’ve got — our big brains and hearts, our arms and legs, our technologies and our poems, and move as graciously as we can into the unknown future.
