Calling all members of the human community!

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Our council of all Beings, made up of all living and mineral things, is coming together once again. We have noticed, within your human species, the willingness from a small, but nevertheless largely dominant group, to try to circumvent the conditions of its true nature. It is high time we reacted and helped you improve your judgement. You're busy dragging the Earth system towards both irreversible and unpredictable changes. You are, therefore, in danger of extinction and are dragging some of us into your vicious spiral. On the other hand, even if some of you want to remain in denial, the most vulnerable (amongst humans and non-humans) have already gone into survival mode. We therefore hope to reverse your evolution process, and remind you of the unbreakable bonds that unite us and influence life on our planet.

Today, Homo sapiens don’t question the fact that they’re the only human species populating the Earth. But would you find sharing the space with other hominid species conceivable? This question must seem deeply contradictory, at least for those who belong to the dominant monotheistic, creationist culture which believes in only one human line of descent, that of Adam and Eve... And yet, only 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, Homo sapiens coexisted with other human species, among them, the Neanderthals, Denisovans, Flores pygmies and Homo luzonensis. All of these other human species are now extinct.

Your perception of yourselves, humans, compared to others other non-humans has gradually evolved. In the documentary you made, Vandana Shiva talks about how you have prioritised things in your mind. In a selfishly anthropocentric way, you unsuccessfully established orders and categories where everything had to be formally split from “I, the human”. We can see how the premise of Greek philosophy has strongly influenced your culture. But its development dates back to successive scientific breakthroughs from Galileo, Newton and Descartes onwards. Since then, we have no longer been viewed as Gaia, a super-organism of which you are a part, instead, we have become something which seeks to unravel mysteries and explain how they work by cutting them into increasingly smaller pieces in order to try to assert control or, as Descartes says, make ourselves “masters and possessors of nature.”

This is where you introduced the disparaging concept of Nature, non-humans, the other, that “thing” that we can control without owing it anything in return. Satish Kumar points out that this dualism, this vain attempt at a Cartesian separation of mind and nature, is part of the root cause of what you refer to as “YOUR environmental crisis”, and what we refer to as the anthropisation of our Earth system, or the change to our living environment caused by your human activities (this idea is actually explored further in Topic 3). The first human interactions that affected us date back to the period known as the Palaeolithic, during which we saw a significant growth in the number of hominids along with the mass extinction of megafauna. Back then, at the time of your mass settlement during the Neolithic period, you became your own food producers by intensifying farming and livestock breeding. But in the end, it is only with the recent advent of global trade that your depredation excessively increased, right after your intra-species Second World War. This destruction now affects all of the Earth system's critical areas and has forced us to enter a complicated period where we’re trying to find some sort of balance with species that will manage to readapt.

Sofia Stril-Rever 5 also tries to explain that this dualistic split leads to your loss. That through your materialistic civilisation “which started in the West, then became global”, you first tried to domesticate us. And now, blinded by your thirst for financial gain, you’re even trying to dominate each other by exploiting each other, without realising that one part of your species is becoming enslaved to the other. We find that we non-humans are no longer the source of your values. Now you want to unilaterally impose your own values, based solely on the interests of your animal species (and last survivor of the genus), by enforcing the law of the strongest. But are you still aware of your place within our planetary family?

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What do we say to the family?

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Let’s put the evolution of your Homo species genus into context. Matthieu Ricard reminds us of the importance of being aware of our interdependence with everything within the Earth system. He chooses the metaphor of a rainbow to (re)-explain that something can only exist thanks to its coexistence with many other things. For example, the presence of hominids was not at all necessary on Earth. It is purely the result of a complex coexistence; break this interdependence and you’ll disappear like the rainbow. In order to properly grasp this notion, we invite you to examine your envelope of flesh. It is the result of several tens of thousands of billions of cells working together, each of which, in turn, were made up of many micro-organisms that are completely interdependent from your human species, like those that make up the essential “microbiota” of your intestines. These countless lives living in symbiosis make you a full-blown, multi-species colony. The existence of the Homo sapiens species, like those of all our other multi-cellular companions, is therefore purely conditional on the coemergence and coexistence of these intercellular bonds.

Your very concept of Nature is dismissive. Nature doesn’t exist, you’re not dissociated from it... You are Nature! Satish Kumar also tries to get that message across: “Nature and humans are not separate entities, we are not above Nature. We are Nature. And to say that we are Nature means that whatever we’re doing to it out there, we’re doing to ourselves”. He calls for us to start a revolution on the unity of life rather than a vain attempt at separation, but also to take care of each other because it’s the only way of taking care of yourself as well. In the same vein and also in your documentary, Timothy Weekers asks you to completely shift your opinion to the concept of us as a whole and to see ourselves “not as a commodity we call upon whether we want to or not, but as an essential ally to our survival”.

Some of you have recently looked for family ties with the living that have been built through what unites us rather than what divides us. For the first time, there’s a fantastically interwoven system without hierarchies, without supremacy, but instead an immensely complex connection with each and every one of us and, at the root of this sprawling “phylogenetic network”, the last universal common organism from which we all descend (which you've nicknamed LUCA).

Vandava Shiva actually reminds us that in all of your ancestral traditions, Nature is considered to be alive. She adds that your species is just one of many members of our enormous “planetary family”, just like all the others. And as a member of this family, just as you do in your households, you have the duty to look after all of us.

It is clear that some of you have preserved or rediscovered Wisdom, which we also call “the awareness of our interdependence”. The message from Claudine André 10 could serve as a conclusion: “Everything is connected on Earth. When you set foot in one fight, you enter all the other fights”. All of us are members of one big planetary family. So, instead of asking you what type of planet you want to leave for your children, it is time to ask what type of children you would like to leave for our planet...