Rob Lewis

The third thing doesn’t require dreaming, but waking up. It’s more like a property of physics, the round Earth that triangulates everything. It’s also alive, meaning it responds to our efforts and brings its own powers, processes, pathways and beneficial relationships to the project.

The State Lands Commissioner race here in Washington State, USA, is in full swing and I find myself contemplating complexity, in particularly that of the natural world.

So what does happen when a family, with four hundred acres of historically abused land on their hands, decides to let go and let the land lead the way? To find that out, you’ll have to buy the book and read it yourself, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

On this planet, life is central, as breath by breath we are reminded. So it is with Earth’s climate. Our language, our science, our conversations, our media reports, our poems, our songs, our demands should reflect that.

The point is, the physical science basis is a term intended for science, and it makes most sense within those boundaries where its meaning and limitations are understood. It’s when it crosses the border to society that things get weird, where you suddenly you wake up to discover everything from forests to farms to whales have been reduced to carbon quantities, and life itself is being financialized.

When we speak of saving the climate, it’s really the Holocene climate we are trying to save, and the biological richness holding it up.