Prehistory Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Flora-Persona: “We are all related”

Artist Michael Gresalfi shares new artworks using leaves, seeds and other natural materials to produce zoomorphic or anthropomorphic masks and sculptures that echo our early ancestors and an approach to the world that recognises, “We are all related.”

1,560 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes

I am excited by an artistic theme I have been pursuing these past months. I have named the series ‘Flora-Persona.’

Using only natural materials, including plants, trees and associated leaves and seeds, and avoiding the use of any manmade materials during the creative process (such as paints, adhesives, and dyes), I purposefully manipulate plants and other flora in a zoomorphic or anthropomorphic manner.

Relying solely on Nature’s bounty is an artistic departure for me in some ways, yet a continuum of my focus on addressing the rising environmental damage, including climate-related disruptions, which our industrialized world has wrought.

Inspired by my research in support of my painting entitled ‘Wood-Wide Web’ (which I previously presented on ClimateCultures in my post with Eva Strautmann), I became acutely aware of the ability of various tree and plant species, along with fungi, to communicate and share resources with one another in a symbiotic manner.

Showing ‘Wood-Wide Web’: 24″ x 30”, mixed media on used, repurposed canvas – oils, acrylics and melted wax. Artist: Michael Gresalfi © 2025 — ‘Wood-Wide Web’: 24″ x 30”, mixed media on used, repurposed canvas – oils, acrylics and melted wax. Artist: Michael Gresalfi © 2025

‘Wood-Wide Web’ portrays a forest, field, or meadow not merely as a collection of competing individuals in a shared location, but rather as an interconnected community where resource sharing and communication play a significant role in the health and resilience of the entire ecosystem.

Mitakuye Oyasin: we are all related

My research led me to read about the Mother Tree Project. This large-scale, decade-long research effort led by Dr. Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia, revealed that neighboring trees and plants are in communication with one another via an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in our brains.

I was astonished to learn that in one study, Simard documented that a Douglas fir tree that was injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a Ponderosa pine tree growing nearby. The pine tree then produced enzymes to protect itself against the nearby insect invasion.

To me, a form of collective consciousness was in play within the web of life, across at least two Kingdoms. In biological taxonomy, life forms are organized into hierarchical groups: Kingdoms are at the top, with phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species being progressively lower tiers. Fungi are in a separate Kingdom from trees and plants, yet they support one another in a mutually beneficial way.

Not so with respect to humanity, the alpha species in the Kingdom of Animalia. I began to see more clearly that we don’t support the interconnected web of life, and in fact we continue to disrupt the very symbiotic fabric that the wood-wide web illustrates.

During my daily walk in the woods behind my home, I began to consider more thoughtfully how alienated we all are from the natural world, and I began to ponder how a conscious wood-wide web of interconnected life that surrounds me might view humankind. Yes, not a comforting thought.

We are all related. Showing leaf art by Michael Gresalfi, 2026. — Art: Michael Gresalfi © 2026. A note on captions: I really hadn’t thought of specific captions for images of these works, seeing them more like an anthropological or archaeological ‘find’, where present-day humans have to surmise the intention of long-ago peoples when assessing disjointed remains of their social and cultural mores and beliefs.

The artistic concept of ‘Flora Persona’ formed slowly. My evolving viewpoint was also informed by a Lakota phrase, “Mitakuye Oyasin” (“We are all related”). The phrase expresses the idea that every living entity shares the same divine origin and life force, and that humanity is part of a complex reciprocal web of existence, rather than separate from, or superior to, nature.

My artistic interest was thus stimulated by both non-Western and ancient beliefs concerning the shared web of life and by my newfound understanding that plants and trees have some form of elementary consciousness, as demonstrated by their ability to communicate across species, genus, families, and all the way up the hierarchical groups, to include across the two noted Kingdoms.

Reaching back to our roots in art

Both climate and human culture, including artistic expression, have intersected in many ways throughout our species’ course of time. In this evolving series, I delve deeply into our ancient past for artistic inspiration. I suggest that we have been creating art across the various climate epochs we have inhabited, since times immemorial. I believe that both the flora and fauna available in long-ago times provided source materials used to create art, back into earlier hominin eras.

It is reasonable to assume that humans have been making art from biodegradable materials, including masks, figurines, and sculptures, for more than one hundred thousand years.

Masks and sculptures have been my primary focus to date. My artistic goal is to present man-manipulated natural elements in a manner that harkens back to our early ancestors.

With respect to cave paintings, the earliest known artistic expressions for both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, consisting of non-figurative symbolic markings, are more than 70,000 years old. They are still in existence today, due to their isolation and protection from the weathering elements. Other art, made from natural materials and not contained within caves, clearly has not been preserved.

One of my flora-persona series interests is using burdock (Arctium lappa) seed heads to create extinct local animals that were plentiful in my region of Maryland, USA during the Woodland and Archaic Periods — such as the wooly mammoth and the cave bear. It is my contention that such natural materials were used to create art by these ancient native ancestors, and indeed perhaps as far back as our early hominin ancestors.

Burdock plant and collected seed heads, as well as a few examples of my ‘Burr Art ‘, are presented below:

Collected burdock seed heads. Photograph: Michael Gresalfi © 2026

We are all related. Showing burr art by Michael Gresalfi, 2026. — All art: Michael Gresalfi © 2026. See note above on captions.

Plant masks: viewing how our relatives might see us

With respect to making human-like faces from plant leaves, I was inspired to begin this Flora-Persona series when pondering the wood-wide web and, particularly, the nascent consciousness documented via chemical communication networks formed between fungi, plants, and trees.

These leaf masks are not necessarily made to be worn. Rather, they are meant to present these wonders of nature as a member of our distant family, aligned with the Lakota phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin”: we are all related.

I continue to experiment with different plants, seeds, leaves, and tree bark, all picked up along my daily walks in my neighboring Black Hill Park. I find myself drawn to creating leaf masks that present the viewer with an unsettled view of how we humans might be viewed by our distant plant relatives, such as displaying sorrow, shock, disappointment, and anger. These sentiments seem very proper to me, considering the continuing harm we cause to the interconnected web of life.

Below are three photos. The first shows how I applied juice to several of my leaf masks, a natural dye from ripe purple pokeweed berries that I had gathered.

American pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) is natively established in Maryland, and its berry juice served as a primary source of makeshift ink during the American Civil War. Art: Michael Gresalfi © 2026

The next is a photo of one of my framed leaf masks:

All art: Michael Gresalfi © 2026. See note above on captions

The final photos show a large 36” x 36” canvas I painted and then displayed, with four of my leaf masks within its four quadrants, followed by close-ups of the masks.

We are all related: Showing a36” x 36” canvas with four leaf masks. Art by Michael Gresalfi, 2026 — 36” x 36” canvas with four leaf masks. All art: Michael Gresalfi © 2026. See note above on captions.

Find more

From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

Michael — “I used Gemini AI as a background search tool — looking for other examples of both my ‘burr art’ and ‘leaf art.’ Frankly, not much out there — at least from my initial research.”

***

Michael adds: “A young friend from Scotland, after looking at my burr art, brought to my attention the annual ancient event called the ‘Burryman,’ which happened to occur mid-August. The Burryman is a centuries-old Scottish folk tradition where a local man is covered head-to-toe in thousands of sticky burdock burrs and paraded through the area.” Find more at Wikipedia.

You can see Michael’s work with fellow ClimateCultures member, artist Eva Strautmann, in their post The Wood Wide Web – Fruitful Collaboration, which features both artists’ paintings on the topic.

This piece for the Ecological Disciple by Lenore Three Stars, The Way Forward: Mitakuye Oyasi — A Worldview (11/6/26) explores the value of an approach to our shared world that starts from the position that “We are all related” (Mitakuye Oyasi can also mean “All my relations.”)

More on the Mother Tree Project, founded by Dr. Suzanne Simard, can be found at The Mother Tree Project & Program, a research and outreach initiative housed in UBC’s Faculty of Forestry & Environmental Stewardship, rooted in the idea that forests are deeply interconnected systems, not just collections of individual trees.

Michael Gresalfi

An artist who seeks to incorporate art with climate change data, and whose work in encaustic medium, glass paint, oils and acrylics includes 'Our Changing Planet'.

A Personal Anthropocene History #14: Bronze Bell, Sea-bed Oak, Wayang Kulit Shadow Puppet

Researcher and writer Jules Pretty presents objects with personal stories of resonance in the Anthropocene, where the common theme of ‘story’ itself is a powerful mark of individual and cultural agency for change and hope in uncertain times.

2,550 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes

The challenge: the Anthropocene — the suggested Age of Human that our species has initiated — has a complex past, present and future, and there are many versions. What three objects evoke the unfolding of human-caused environmental and climate change for you? View other contributions at A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.

***

I present here three objects and three themes for the Anthropocene: traditional markets, and how they for thousands of years were places for storytelling; how traditions worldwide spoke of flood events, and how one was missed in the loss of lands and homes to sea level rise in the middle of the current North Sea; and how forms of story are embedded in culture, here the Wayang Kulit shadow puppets. These speak to a great contemporary hope: that story will help create the agency to address contemporary climate and nature crises. Story says this: go through the door.

Bronze bell of the Saharan story singer

Anthropocene object: showing a bronze bell, from Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, made in the 1950s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024 — Bronze bell, from Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, made in the 1950s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

This bronze bell from the 1950s was fired and fashioned by a blacksmith at one of the greatest markets of the Sahara desert, on the outskirts of Maiduguri in northern Nigeria.

It was a squarish hub, this market a mile in length along each side.

By the pale glow of dawn, the muezzin inside the city gates stirred sleepers from far and wide. Before long, laden donkeys were trotting on converging paths, bullocks carried men with plaited hair, the fields were high with ripening millet. Women balanced baskets on their heads, paused to share news beneath the many roadside baobab.

In the shaded avenues, on the paths and ways, hawker and seller already sat at stalls, each woodworker sharpened chisel, there was money-changer and basket-maker, all the smithy men of iron and bronze in one district, their bellows made from goat-skin, they were firing up the charcoal. There was brightly-patterned saddlecloth, and all kinds of rein and bridle ornament, carpenters busy with rough blocks, turning them to hoe and handle. Some carved holy plaques, spade-shaped and then inked sacred characters, by bamboo pen dipped in ash and gum.

There was the smell of the rotting fish and acrid woodsmoke, a calabash of rancid butter was all a greasy mess of flies, in the air a taste of pepper and perfume from clove and herb, and wholesome onions, and the sour smell of civet cat, and dung trodden in the sand.

In the west the avenues were crowded with women wearing heavy anklets, their teeth stained red. And in the east, herder women slender and tall were wrapped in fabric of blue; all over men in turbans wore flowing cotton robes of white.

In was a market, so of course you could buy or trade pink kola nuts, potash slabs from the great lake, much shrunken even then, dry dates and scarlet pepper, long gourds, polished and carved, each with ornamental stripes and snakes. There were boxes of matches, bangles from the east, paper money from the north.

To this market came a boy troubadour.

He sang in the north, he sang in the south.

The lad named Mid-e-Mid, he had green eyes and tangled hair, his songs hailed from far hills rising sharp and purple from the desert playa.

He was famed on the plains of camel grass, at the small oases where bright birds sang in the shade of palms, so each tune soared far, and after days alone he would ache at dusk for a campfire, to hum a little while millet boiled in soot-black cauldrons.

He was the one, he could charm a gift precisely from a person’s pocket.

He walked from the north, he walked to the south. He sang to the setting sun, to the velvet sand. He sang to the wild wind.

I am walking well, walking. I am walking, he sang.

This was one of the ancient trails, in those days carrying salt and gold, dried dates and books to the desert libraries. He walked past abandoned caravanserai, whale fossils and forty-foot crocodile engravings on wadi walls, painted rock art of long-horned cattle and their herders, leaping men with bows, giraffe and elephant, red and ochre figures in a cave of swimmers, women with the heads of birds and men as leopards. In remote canyons were tall figures and their war chariots, and running ostriches.

He walked to this market by the dry desert, where no rain had fallen for seven whole years. He rang his bronze bell.

The boy Mid-e-Mid sang a song, in his strongest voice, and a herder came forward, he passed sweet tea in a chipped glass. Mid-e-Mid sang of the cold desert, the night fire, people dancing in the warm light to drum and flute. He sang of the mud-brick military depot long abandoned, and how his home oasis was now hemmed by oval hills of piled and pounded sand. There had been a cool oasis garden, date palm over shaded tomato beds and beans, a grove of lemon trees. But these too were lost under sand.

Then he chanted of a dead camel on the trail, a vulture on one mimosa branch. How once there were ten thousand birds, duck and stork and ibis, crested crane and guinea fowl, all on the great green shimmering inland sea. And how these feathered birds had been forced away, as the world had dried and water fled.
He was just a boy, he said, yet he could only just remember what rain was like.
These are my songs, he said, which I have related, if they are sweet or not so sweet, take them elsewhere, let some come back to me one day.

Sea-bed oak of Doggerland tales

Doggerland story: Showing a piece of sea-ded oak, dredged from the North Sea in the 1960s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024 — Sea-Bed Oak, dredged from the North Sea in the 1960s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

Between 7500-6200 BCE, the dry plains of Doggerland were drowned by rising waters, and the shallow North Sea was formed. By 5000 BCE, the 300 km by 100 km Dogger Isle remained in the new sea, with a host of smaller islands. It soon would sink, and we would forget there had ever been land there.

The item here is a piece of oak, dredged up in the 1960s off the Suffolk coast by a fisherman friend. In those days, the accepted truth was that wood and bones and amber must have been moved by sea current and tide. Now we know different.

Many a culture has a flood creation myth.

The oldest written saga was found on tablets of clay, the Epic of Gilgamesh telling of cities of dust, and of the discontent of gods. The prince Gilgamesh wished to tame the wilds, cut down cedar trees, so Enlil brought a flood. Perhaps his traders had learned how a wide dry land had been flooded by the sea; how ancient gods had been displeased, how so they wished we humans lived in different ways.

Not many people get to name a country, and archaeologist Bryony Coles had a brilliant insight. There had been erratic finds, so curious none could place them, moorlog and flint found in fishnets, sunken forests at the coast, called Noah’s Forests a century ago by geologist Clement Reid. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that thus originated source of stories of the deluge?”

By the end of the 1990s, the evidence was clear. The sea had risen after melting of the ice sheets, it drowned parkland and tunnel valley, took woods of birch and oak, displaced the grazers, turned freshwater marsh to salt and sea. Bryony called it Doggerland, after fish-famed Dogger Bank. That country had been dry, then drowned. People lived there, then were forced to leave.

For until eight thousand years ago, nomadic hunter-gatherers roamed the prairies, searched for mammoth and giant elk, broad-browed auroch and great bison herds. On hunting hill and grassy plain, they camped at salty marsh and wide lagoon. At the still point of their world was Yggdrasil, the one tree that held up sky. Serpent circled the distant sea, guarded all their ground. They shaped their land, sowed fruit and seed harboured from the wild, fished and fixed to spear barbs of antler bone. You can imagine, they could not hope for any better place.

Yet as eagles planed serene, there was a creeping shift, icebergs severed free, the waters rising up. They sensed a warp of salt and sea. The air was life, as it is today for people of the plains, a wealth of sun and rain. And while gannets screamed, a storm was beating at their border.

Now the waves rose fast, the height of you or me in half a hundred years.

So in that distant time, the people carried in and up their camps, dug up a hundred holy graves, buried bones once more. Still the surge poured in, league on league not letting up. They would have called on gods, desist and stop the sea. But they could not tame the tempest, all their shamans tried. One watery dawn, came a shocking sight. The sun-star rose from sea, later dipped into their western waves.

Had they eaten fish forbidden, had a snake whispered from a tree, no one could recall. And so every hide of land and fire pit was drowned, each vale and fell seized by rising flood. They lashed boats of auroch-skin, flexed oars, lay their infants on the furs, and came upon the cliffs of higher land.

Did they meet a friendly king and queen; did these forest people rush down the beach and help the migrants from the brine?

What do you say when a whole landscape disappears, what words for sinking, when cultures go and sea village too? What hope is there, at all, when loved ones die?

This is the first verse from ‘The Drowning of Doggerland’, from my book, Sea Sagas of the North (2022):

It is said the Sky People, once were numerous,
But they had drowned, and every dark hide,
Of land and fire pit, each vale and fell had been seized,
By the rising flood, the swell of sea had beaten down defence,
So they launched their boats, lashed and loaded auroch-skin,
And flexed the oars, among the furs and flutes,
Were sobbing infants, fastened tight to strakes of birch,
At last ahead appeared a strip of land, they saw a hall upon the cliff.

Wayang Kulit shadow puppet of long story tradition

Story tradition: Showing a Wayang Kulit shadow puppet, Java, used in the 1980s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024 — Wayang Kulit shadow puppet, Java, used in the 1980s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

The object here is a Wayang kulit leather puppet from Java. It was used in a night performance of shadow puppets in the mid-1980s close to Borobudur in southern Java. Performances are lit by candles, and accompanied by gamelan music. The whole audience was captivated as the tales were told. The night was hot, the tradition at least a couple of thousand years long.

Story is a device common to every human culture. It has some 50,000 years of history, yet has often come to be both misunderstood and misused in the modern era.

Put simply, the patterns of good story match the shapes of our lives.

Story was once tales told at every flickering fireside, the children’s faces upturned and wide-eyed. Now it is expressed in many forms of art and culture, in business and activism.

In cultures worldwide, storytellers acquired special status, for they had something to say about how the world worked. They took, in the telling, the audience temporarily away from the concerns and worries of their days.

The storytellers were called scald and poet, shaman and jester, enchanter and soothsayer, cunning women and men, cantor and conteuse, pied piper and every kind of trickster. You would find story being told by blind bard and bhat, barefoot friar and mendicant, the wayang kulit puppet master, snake-charmer with a rope and khöömei throat-singers from the steppe, dzikr trance-spinners all in white and the oak-leaved rhymer of the green lanes. And in recent times, pilgrim and ranger, barber-shop quartet, city busker and balladeer, podcaster and versemonger, novelist and stand-up comedian.

Their magic is always this: the more the storytellers talk, the more people want to listen. Their themes are simple: to bring people together, to tell them something new, to reveal patterns and emotions that we the audience recognise as our own.

Story is about the sequences of crossings to a new state, about transformation itself. This was once called alchemy. Ovid wrote 250 myths about transformations in the Metamorphoses poems 2,000 years ago. Children were transformed into trees and animals, people into spirits. You sprinkle your face with water, and sprout antlers.

The famed Navajo-Diné storyteller, Yellowman, said to Barre Toelken in the late 1960s:

“If children hear stories, they will grow up to be good people;
If adults hear stories, they will know what to do.”

Good story can lead to tipping points and phase transitions, where transformations can be as sudden as those we experience in life. A butterfly flaps its wings, and whole systems change.

A challenge, then: can we create stories so vivid, so astounding and so colourful, that they will be remembered for a thousand years?

There is sneaky logic in old tales, story being a form of medicine. Clarissa Estés, an estadora keeper of the stories, wrote, “When a fairy tale is told, it becomes right.”

The telling of tales, she said, causes a starry sky and a white moon to creep over the earth.

In Franz Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, the supplicant sits by the door for days, for months, for years, waiting for the call, for the door to open. When old and dying, he whispers to the doorkeeper about the unfairness of it all. The doorkeeper says, “Oh, this was your door, you could have gone through it at any moment.”

Story says this: go through the door.

For in story, everything is at stake.

Find more

Jules Pretty‘s book Sea Sagas of the North (2022) is published by Hawthorn and you can find details of this and his other writing at his website.

You can read Jules’ previous ClimateCultures post The Next Dawn of Everything — Stories of Human Cultures, where he reviews The Dawn of Everything, exploring stories that reveal how human cultures don’t converge on one ‘advanced’ model, as our current views of history assume, finding rich accounts of diversity, freedom and hope.

Do explore the other contributions to our A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects series; each features a set of three objects and their contexts whose personal stories speak to the universal through the unique. Artefact or artwork, utilitarian or iconic, real or imagined, the 42 objects we’ve gathered so far illuminate the relationships between people, place, period and planet and the legacy of our species’ manipulation of our material environment. Since the launch of our series, of course, we’ve also welcomed to ClimateCultures the Museum of the Anthropocene — an online home for 18 object-based essays from students on Martin Mahony‘s ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ course at the University of East Anglia.

Jules Pretty

A researcher and writer on environment and society, including ‘The Climate Chronicles’, and is author of several books on climate, nature and the stories we tell.

The Next Dawn of Everything — Stories of Human Cultures

Writer and researcher Jules Pretty explores stories that reveal how human cultures don’t converge on one ‘advanced’ model, as our current views of history assume, finding in The Dawn of Everything rich accounts of diversity, freedom and hope.

2,750 words: estimated reading time = 11 minutes

These days, we find ourselves in the midst of world-spanning crises of climate, nature and social inequality. All three have the same proximate causes: a type of economy that promotes too much material consumption and a dangerous reliance on fossil fuels. Something is about to change. Yet we have never been here before. We are in the dark forest, at our darkest hour, and we are not sure if we can choose a new path.

We often don’t know what to do when great moments of transformation in life appear: the rites of passage from small to big school, a first date, your first day in a new job, a baby in the family, a friend’s death, your own advancing mortality. We have no plan for what happens next. There is no rehearsal – apart from stories that tell how others have crossed their own thresholds. We are going to need ways to open up the world ahead, where fear could still be one of our greatest emotions.
Most of life is inconceivable. Living without fossil fuels seems so, for many people. Living without air pollution from cars, also seems inconceivable.

The Red Queen said to Alice, “Why sometimes I’ve believed, as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
– Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass (1872)

Should we think of a new diet, perhaps less meat and more oat milk; should we buy an electric car now or later, fly less and cycle more; insulate our home or install solar panels, listen to the birds, have coffee with a friend? Well, one of these, then maybe another one, soon after.

The point is this: we have choices. We just may not realise this yet.

There emerges a need for new forms of story-telling, combined with a language of kindness and generosity. Kindness is both our common state and best response to threat. It is selfishness that is the outlier.

What kinds of language and values might we use to find our ways out of these deep woods? Berthold Brecht wrote in 1939:

“In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”

We find ourselves now in need of stories with hope, and then to explore how to use these to create more effective agency to address the great crises of these times. Fast transitions, regime shifts and positive tipping points are beginning to occur, showing that new ways of living can be just and fair.

Calling time on ideas of linear evolution of human cultures

This is where a brilliant, clear, refreshing and fabulous synthesis of a book comes in. It is called The Dawn of Everything, and draws on recent archaeological evidence and anthropological insight to say highly salient things about human history.

The authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, say: most accounts of pre-modern human history “simply aren’t true, they have dire political implications, and make the past dull.”

This is interesting, not least because this book is also about the future.

Storie of human cultures: Showing the cover of 'The New Dawn of Everything', by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

The authors are willing to call out many contemporary commentators who believe in linear evolution of human ideas and cultures (the ecological determinists and evolutionary psychologists, for example), and who say that modern life must be superior to all that has gone before. Graeber and Wengrow call these “dismal conclusions”, and “prejudices dressed up as facts.”

For this book is about freedoms, not the “weird arguments” made by many in support of modern and high-consumption ways of living and organizing. We are neither at the top nor the end of a process of betterment. What has gone before was more diverse, egalitarian and astonishing than many would think.

Human cultures of the past have always diverged; they have not converged on one model perceived as more advanced or even perfect.

This book also overturns ideas about the assumed superiority of agriculture over foraging-hunting-gathering, and of city civilisations over agrarian. It also suggests that large-scale public engagement leads to innovative and diverse futures. People have always valued the things they do and places they live as extensions of identity, and so have often and explicitly refused to adopt practices and ideas from other people and places.

This cultural refusal is a key finding (it is not rejection on the grounds of being better; it is about something just being for other people and not for us).

Cultures can also get stuck, becoming less innovative. Many cultures and cities were abandoned after hundreds of years of continuity when people just walked away. They got stuck, and decided to seek something new. They sought the next dawn of everything.

Story-tellers for ‘stuck’ times

Stories of human cultures: showing Mayan masks from Guatemala — Mayan masks from Guatemala. Photograph © Jules Pretty

There are numerous valuable findings from this wonderful book.

First, humans are not inevitably nasty and selfish. More often than not, cultures and cities have been egalitarian.

Human cultures are projects of self- and co-creation. They emerge from engagement, participation, story and sense-making.

Human cultures do not converge on one model, and one model does not follow another (e.g. agriculture after foraging). All cultures diverge in space and over time. Wherever and whenever we look, there is endless human diversity. No single system is preferred, and evolutionary stages do not exist, where one model of life inevitably follows another.

Evidence from all the world over shows the enormous long-distance interactions between people and cultures. We have always lived in a small world politically and culturally connected. People travelled and journeyed to see and learn from other places. Recent DNA testing of skeletons shows much higher rates of interaction. Human cultures have never been isolated or biologically “pure.”

At times, cultures do get stuck, thinking they know or have it all. The modern era of neoliberalism and planetary nature and climate crises is an example of being stuck. We are living now in the latest of “stuck times.”

All human cultures engage in refusal. They know what others are doing, but in order to remain true to their own identities, they commonly refuse to adopt certain other technologies and ideas. Some foragers lived alongside agriculture for 3,000 years, and refused to adopt it. Some city states knew all about metal and the wheel, and again refused to use them.

Of course, non-conformists exist in every culture. What differs is how each culture reacts to them. Many cultures in history valued non-conformists (such as tricksters, jesters, story-tellers, shamans, and the physically and mentally diverse), seeing them contributing to diversity and divergence.

Agriculturalists and forager-hunter-gatherers lived side-by-side for thousands of years. In many places, cultures used different modes of living during different seasons; some foraged and took up agriculture; some farmed for hundreds of years and adopted foraging.

Foragers-hunters-gatherers established many cities and monumental cultures, and engaged in small-scale gardening and domestication of what we now call weedy species.

There was also oscillation within years and across seasons: within years some people foraged-hunted-gathered for certain seasons, and then farmed in others; some peoples developed different social structures and even personal names in different seasons of the year (a ruler in one season, people’s assemblies in another). Seasonality of values and identity is still with us – we behave differently during Christmas and Ramadan, during long holidays (the French grand vacances). People set aside work, for a bit, and affirm values in community, family, giving and resting.

Many city states and cultures had no kings, queens or rulers, no palaces or temples. People governed through assemblies, councils (as often women-led as by men). Some cities built public baths, others huge social housing projects. Many created co-housing units larger than for single families (long-houses). The traditions of long-houses for co-living continued to Norse-Icelandic culture, the Pacific North-West, and in rainforest forager cultures worldwide.

After a time, many cultures simply hit a wall. They stop. They are abandoned. It seems people in them choose to go and create something different. Most were not conquered or beaten by war.

Active choices and human futures

Showing wheat from Suffolk. — Wheat from Suffolk. Photograph © Jules Pretty

Catalhöyük was long thought of as one of the first agricultural sites and cities. But the people are now known to have preferred and celebrated wild aurochs over domesticated cattle. They knew about the latter for 1,000 years, yet never used them. Elsewhere in Mesopotamia, there are many examples of refusal: cities that knew about agriculture for 3,000 years, yet never adopted it. Such refusals were not irrational or silly: they were on the grounds of choices about practices that defined others who were not them. People want to stay as themselves.

The first organised city cultures in the world were not in Mesopotamia, but at the mega-sites and mammoth houses of current Ukraine-Moldova (4100-3300 BCE), each with huge central assembly places for exchange, sharing and decision-making. Individual cities were 300 hectares in size, contained co-living houses, and reached populations of 10,000 people.

In today’s California, the dozens of cultures and language groups centred on only foraging-hunting-gathering are sometimes described as existing because agriculture failed to reach them. Yet there was interaction with agricultural communities of the greater south-west. They also knew about agriculture, and refused to use it.

Poverty Point in Louisiana of today contains some of the largest mounds in the Americas. These cities were built around 1400 BCE by forager-hunter-gatherers. In Japan, the Jomon culture comprised 14,000 years of (pre-rice) forager culture, producing cycles of settlement, craft, storage, and traditions of building things and breaking them down again (traditions that continue to today in Shinto and Buddhist culture).

Teotihuacan in central America was a city culture on eight square miles of land. It had no central ruler, nor did it adopt the ball courts, kings and palaces of nearby Tikal and Calikmal. Teotihuacan was egalitarian, with stone social housing containing plumbing and sanitation, each finely decorated with art and images (much psychedelic). After 500 years, Teotihuacan was abandoned. Again, we today do not know exactly why.

The largest city culture in the Americas before modern times was Cahokia (in current Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi). The city had a population of 15,000, and flourished for 300 years between 1050-1350 CE. The people were forager-hunter-gatherers, supplemented with gardens with domesticated sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed and mayweed. Cahokia and all the surrounding river valleys were depopulated at the same time, creating a long-lasting “empty quarter” that no other peoples entered.

There was public engagement and assembly for culture-making, where individual and collective agency leads to divergence of choice.

There was refusal of what appear to be more efficient or productive options. Identity was more important.

There was explicit adoption of egalitarian structures and social support.

Showing prayer flags, Tuva. — Prayer flags, Tuva. Photograph © Jules Pretty

Cultures have lived alongside other differing cultures for thousands of years. They knew about other ways of living, and decided not to adopt. There was no perfect economic system of living waiting to be revealed.

There was long-distance travel, journeying and staying, leading to biological mixing inside stable cultures.

There was sudden abandonment of modes of living, when people decided they had become stuck and needed to do something different.

We know that fossil fuels will have to be almost entirely eliminated from all economies worldwide (excepting perhaps communities living at high latitudes that are dark and cold for long periods of the year), and thus the spread of adoption of renewable energy generation is central to preventing climate catastrophe. The overarching aim is to electrify everything, with a particular focus on wind, water, solar and battery storage.

Most countries are now committed to 100% renewables for their electricity supply at some time in the future. Some have made dramatic advances in implementation, others have been slow (see Table 1).

Many poorer countries are predicted to save money by these investments, as many spent up to half of national export earnings on importing oil, and now increasingly have the resources to invest in other social priorities. Countries highly dependent on the income from oil will find transitions hardest, even though some have large sovereign wealth funds. Qatar styles itself a “hydrocarbon-enabled economy.” It has the highest carbon emissions worldwide at 55 tonnes C per year per person, and to date has effectively zero contribution from renewables for its electricity supply.

Table 1. Proportion of domestic electricity supplied by renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass), 2022

Proportion of domestic electricity consumption supplied by renewables	Countries
98%-100%	Albania, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Iceland, Norway, Paraguay, Uruguay
90%-95%	Ethiopia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Namibia, Zambia, Tajikistan
60%-80%	Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden
40%-50%	Ireland, Spain, UK
20%	China, India, Japan, Morocco, USA
Less than 0.2%	Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia

Note: World 28%; Europe 35%; Low-income countries 66%; Upper-income countries 30%. Some of these high percentages are in countries with low total energy consumption and low access to affordable electricity. They will need to consume more to escape poverty, and there will be a need to generate more renewable energy than today. Sources: International Energy Agency (2023) (www.iea.org); Our World in Data (www.ourworldindata.org).

Choices by governments matter. In the UK in 2023, the government chose to invest in a new nuclear plant (to produce 3 GW per year); in Denmark, the government has chosen wind power on two new energy islands in the North and Baltic Seas (total of 6 GW capacity). These islands will be the largest infrastructure in Denmark’s history, and will be generating electricity by 2030. Nuclear in the UK will take 10-15 years longer to be commissioned, costs will be twice as great, and there will still be a need to pay for costly nuclear waste disposal. Such nuclear developments will therefore be delivered too late to influence the meeting of 2050 net zero targets. China and South Korea are planning 1-6 GW of floating offshore wind parks for installation in 2025-2030.

Globally, the International Energy Agency believes strong growth in clean energy means the world can deliver fossil fuel emission cuts of 35% by 2030. The IEA also say we have the tools to go much faster, and that there is now a need for “a fierce urgency of the now.”

These advances towards 100% renewables are the start of a new dawn of everything. It is instructive to see which countries are taking the lead, and how cost benefits nationally will accrue.

Cultural connections for transformations

Showing plastic from Iceland Arctic Sea beach. — Plastic from Iceland Arctic Sea beach. Photograph © Jules Pretty

In my 2022 book, Sea Sagas of the North, I visited and wrote about 160 ports, villages and coastal places culturally facing inward to the North Sea and eastern North Atlantic (in Iceland, Norway, Finland, England, Scotland and the Faroe Isles). I talked to an 80-year-old famed skipper of the trawlers and drifters, and he said, “You know we were more tolerant and kind in the days of fishing, when we travelled to other places and came back with gifts and stories.” Fisher communities on the coast of the east of England felt greater closeness and affinity with people 1,100 miles away in Iceland and Norway than communities 10 miles inland.

The ecological collapse of fisheries led directly to social and cultural change on the coasts, and people lost their friendships with others across the North Sea and eastern North Atlantic.

For my 2014 book, The Edge of Extinction, I visited and stayed with place-based and indigenous cultures in Aotearoa, Australia, Tuva, Finland, Labrador, Louisiana and California. A Finish ice-fisherman friend stood up in the audience at a conference at the American Museum of Natural History, and demanded: “Where is the escape route for our culture and people to leave your modern world? Will you give us one?” The title’s play on words was intended to suggest it was modern societies and economies that were on the edge of extinction, not indigenous ones. The book should probably have been called ‘The Edge of Our Extinction’.

My 2023 book, The Low-Carbon Good Life, centres on the diverse ways of living and public engagement we need to create to solve the nature, climate and social inequality crises facing the planet. We will be needing divergence of practice, choice and behaviours rather than convergence.

Above all, we will need good stories that lead to agency and transformation.

Find out more

Jules Pretty’s new series The Climate Chronicles is posted at his website, where you can also find details of his books, including The Low-Carbon Good Life (2023) and Sea Sagas of the North (2022). Jules is part of the project team behind the Hope Tales events and chapbooks, with fellow ClimateCultures member Nicky Saunter. See Nicky’s post, Hope Tales — Stories for Change.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2022) is published by Penguin.

Jules Pretty

A researcher and writer on environment and society, including ‘The Climate Chronicles’, and is author of several books on climate, nature and the stories we tell.

The End of the World? Let’s Be Honest

Writer Philip Webb Gregg embraces our Environmental Keywords theme on Transitions with an urgent call to abandon our language of endings for one of beginnings, where we embrace the deepest change: a radical transition to more honest stories.

1,720 words: estimated reading time = 6.5 minutes

Alright, I have a confession, and I’m aware this is an uncool thing to say, but I no longer believe in the end of the world.

Shocking, I know. Especially coming from me. I’m exactly the kind of person you’d expect would think the apocalypse was just around the corner. After all, I’m a second-generation activist (my mother baked bread at Greenham Common). I’ve done all the usual things; camped at the capital, given out endless leaflets, hurled abuse at the gates of Parliament with the best of them. Moreover, I’m a white, straight(ish) man with long hair, stick-and-poke tattoos on my forearms and a steady yoga practice. Of course I should believe in the imminent end of the world. Except I don’t. Not anymore.

I used to. I grew up in an alternative anarchist community on the southernmost tip of Europe. In some ways, it was a happy and unremarkable childhood, but in others I have learned it was quite unique. For instance, we took for granted that the world was ending. It didn’t matter how. Could be nuclear, could be another world war. The point was, I and all my friends — and all our parents — were basically futureless.

We made no five-year goals. There was never a whisper of career paths or pension plans, or even what we’d do next week. Instead, we had fun. We used the minimum effort possible to make us as happy as possible for as long as possible, until it all fell inevitably apart. In some ways, this is good for the soul. It has certainly given me an appreciation for the honesty of the present moment –- more on that later. But it also means I grew up in a world and a community that had doom on its lips.

The end of the world, as we know it

So believe me when I say I understand what so many of us are going through. Call it apocalypse-anxiety, or climate-anxiety, what it amounts to is fear, dread; the empty, heavy feeling in your stomach when you see the world changing around you. When you read the science, watch the news, walk across the dead grass.

I have spent three decades speaking with the language of endings. But it’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that there are other tongues out there. It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world [1]. There is a language of beginnings and a language for whatever comes in between.

Honest stories; Showing Philip Webb Gregg with a burning flower — Also a beginning… Photograph: Philip Webb Gregg © 2022

It is too easy to be seduced into the ‘last days of Rome’ metaphor. That we are Troy before the horse, Atlantis before the flood, Pompeii before the fire; living on a cliff edge with hyper-luxury behind us and the apocalypse ahead. All of this is very poetic and compelling, but ultimately inaccurate and unhelpful.

Because, like it or not, tomorrow is coming. And it will not be the end of the world. It will just be a day, in many ways much like any other.

As I write this, I can hear the voices of my family and friends gesturing frantically to their browser screens, their Facebook shares, the dry heat in the stale air. Yes, mass-disaster, societal collapse and global meltdown are already happening. Riots and starvation and power-outage are very likely in many parts of the world very soon. In other parts, they are already underway. And they are awful and inhuman and entirely avoidable. But these are symptoms of drastic (and reversible) change, not the apocalypse. And that knowledge changes everything.

The point of all of the above is simply this: believing the end is nigh is a forgivable form of cowardice. It excuses you from the hard work of tomorrow in favour of the pleasure, or the despair, of today. Instead I have a radical proposition worthy of the anarchist roots that bred me. I propose we embrace change, on all fronts and at all costs.

Because despite everything I have said, we are in the deepest trouble, and we need the deepest change.

An honest change

Some of this change may involve stepping forward, into what feels like an abyss. Some of it will likely feel like a step back into the past — the way things were in the ‘good ol’ days’. Most of it, I hope, will be more of a step sideways. Neither demonising the future, nor glorifying the past, but simply being more present, honest now. Why do I use the word ‘honest’? Because I think that’s at the root of the change we need.

Imagine, for a moment, that you were alive a thousand, or two thousand years ago. I think it is unlikely that you cared about ‘the planet’. Almost certainly you cared about the weather. And the soil. And, in some form, the wild. Most likely you spent your days hacking away at it, fencing it, herding it, milking it, eating it, and your nights hoping it wouldn’t eat you or your loved ones.

Give or take, that’s been the case for all of human existence. Throughout our entire collective evolutionary journey, we have not had to worry about overwhelming or choking our ecosystem in the way we do now (this is one of the reasons it is so goddamn hard to get your head around the idea of the Anthropocene). But there is another staggering change that goes hand in hand with that transition. That of honesty. Truthiness. Verisimilitude. Call it what you like, we’ve lost it.

Sometime in the last few millennia, I believe we have learned to lie to ourselves about nature, and the nature of ourselves. Perhaps it happened the moment we overstepped our place in the food chain; began looking at the natural world as a thing separate, and beneath us. Maybe it started with the invention of fiction — that most essential and deadly of human tools — and the creation of the written word. Who knows?

All I know is that these days I see it everywhere. And the reason that these times — our times — feel like the ‘end-times’ is because they are the apex of this dishonesty.

For me this is the core of the crisis we face, and the hinge on which our change must turn. I do not point to technology or colonialism or capitalism, though those are certainly factors, I point instead to the myths we tell ourselves. The stories, if you like, that we have built our lives upon; our cities, our skyscrapers. Stories of eternal progress, of the singularity and the isolation of the individual. We have grown so accustomed to deception we no longer see the bullshit we swim through every day. These things take us away from what we are, and have become the cause, either directly or indirectly, of the climate and ecological crisis we are facing today.

Honest stories: showing a man holding a burning newspaper — Photo by akın akdağ from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-shot-of-a-person-holding-a-burning-newspaper-10176291/

Because really, that’s all that nature is: an honest thing. Nature is not flowers, rivers and butterflies. Sure, those things are an aspect of the natural world, but so are carnivores, rotting flesh and landslides. My point is the natural world is not a pretty or easy thing — most of it is uncomfortable, harsh and dangerous. The very opposite of our lives now. But it doesn’t lie to you. It cannot; it simply is.

And really, so are we. When we strip away all the lies we clothe ourselves with, we are still the same scrabbling figures we were two thousand years ago, except that now the weather and the soil and the wild are all going missing and we’re left wondering what on earth is next.

Well, truthfully, I have no idea. But that’s what we’re here to find out.

If the gift of my upbringing taught me anything, it’s how to call bullshit on a world that just wants you to shut up and buy stuff. I think we need to stop being passive members of a society that’s actively slipping into chaos. We must make an effort to step away from the language of disasters and step instead toward the language of new beginnings.

I think we need to speak, and speak honestly, and tell new stories, honest stories; not just to each other, but to ourselves. And yes, in some non-hippy way, to the world as well.

Find out more

[1] The phrase Philip uses, “the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world”, is an adapted quote from The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009), written by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine: “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.” For its founders, the manifesto “marked a first attempt to put into words the ideas and feelings which led to Dark Mountain. Think of it as a flag raised so that we can find one another. A point of departure, rather than a party line. An invitation to a larger conversation that continues to take us down unexpected paths.”

Philip is an editor for the Dark Mountain Project, working on several of its volumes — including the forthcoming Issue 22: ARK, which is published this October.

You can read Deconstructing our Dominion Stories in a Time of Unravelling, the recent review by Joan Sullivan of two new books by the current co-editors of the Dark Mountain project, Nick Hunt and Charlotte Du Cann, and the project’s themes have also come up in several other posts, for example Conversations with Work That Connects, featuring six ClimateCultures members in wide-ranging conversations on their creativity in dark times.

Philip’s previous ClimateCultures posts include Rewilding – Slantways: an original poem exploring rewilding as a sideways step into a stranger world, resisting simplifications of ‘progress’ and the gains and losses of our current model, even as we seek to change it.

Scroll down for Comments on this post — and add your own!

Philip Webb Gregg

A writer of ephemeral things for beautiful places, exploring the disconnect between human nature and nature nature, and grappling with themes of faith, folklore and narratology.

A Personal Anthropocene History #12: Carrier Bag, Coffee, Search Engine

Writer Philip Webb Gregg explores being human in the Anthropocene, using three objects that offer to carry, fuel or guide our search for experience and meaning, but whose less subtle qualities have great power to lead us astray.

1,670 words: estimated reading time = 6.5 minutes

***

Necessary baggage

A sling made from dry grass. A basket, woven from cut saplings. A sack, sewn from the skin of a caught animal. A pair of cupped hands. A leaf a shell a gourd a pot. A womb. A story.

Showing a basket as a universal carrier — Universal carrier
Photograph: เอกลักษณ์ มะลิซ้อน (Pixabay)

In her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin explores the idea of the bag being the oldest human tool. In doing so, she is able to show how the stories we’ve been told our entire lives have deceived and misled us.

You know the stories I mean, the ones stuffed end-to-end with guns, knives, sharp-hard-phallic things and blood. The ones that sell well in the box-office. The ones with a handsome hero and an ugly, linear plot. Begin at point A, then proceed straight and with maximum force to point B. WHAM. Somewhere in there there will be conflict, and inevitably, death. But what if there was another way? What if we could cradle our narratives? Not slashing or throwing, but holding.

Le Guin writes that “before the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and axe; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger (…) with or before we made the tool that forces energy outward, we made a tool to bring energy home.” That ‘bringing home’ is something I’m intensely interested in, both from a storytelling and a human sapiens perspective. I find myself coming back, again and again, to the idea of necessary baggage.

Bags surround and shape our lives and society. Without them we would be a very different species, for better or worse. They have carried us, both physically and metaphorically, out of the empty-handed dark and into the world we now inhabit. A world of boxes within boxes. And sometimes these boxes look like progress and sometimes they just look like a cage.

Recently I was moving house. And part-way through I became increasingly aware of the things I was moving. With arms full of bags — full of books — I reflected that books were just bags full of words, and words were just further containers for narrative. And that perhaps the ideas and lessons held within these narratives were just another kind of vessel for holding perspectives on an existence that is too huge to ever be properly perceived from any angle? And would we be better without any bags at all? Maybe the spirit is the only thing that can never be bagged? But then, what is the body if not a bag full guts and bones, possibly accompanied by a soul?

My point, I think, is that necessary baggage is something we need to accept and embrace if we wish to remain human and sane. Whether it’s pent-up ideology, miss-spent emotion or simply too many possessions, we must all learn the subtle art of holding.

Perfect coffee pettiness

It began with goats — so the story goes — who ate the little red cherries and danced in the trees in the hills of Ethiopia, over a thousand years ago.

Showing coffee beans and cup - search for perfection — Perfect beans
Photograph: S. Hermann & F. Richter (Pixabay)

The shepherd took these seeds to his local holy man, who chastised him and threw the seeds in the fire. Before long both shepherd and holy man noticed a particularly delicious aroma coming from the embers and decided to investigate.

Thus, coffee was born.

Another story tells that coffee came from a Sufi mystic who, while travelling through Ethiopia, observed the energetic behaviour of birds after feasting from a certain bush. A third story tells of an exiled Yemeni healer, who chewed the raw berries while in a state of starvation and desperation.

Whatever origin myth you choose to believe, coffee has been around for a long time, and has played an interesting part in the development and progression of human history. From the Middle Eastern qahveh khaneh or ‘schools of the wise’, where coffee (quahwa) would be consumed and venerated amid poetry, performance and passionate conversation, to the first European coffee houses in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, which helped to steer and fuel the Age of Enlightenment. However, it all pales to the shade of a weak flat white when you compare it to the role of coffee today.

A lot has changed since the days of the dancing goats. The narrative of coffee in the modern world is one of the most telling cues of the capitalist system. We fill ourselves with fuel to achieve as much as possible in the shortest span of time. We sacrifice sleep while in the worship and pursuit of our dreams.

This fuel is bitter and strong, or sweet and smooth. It comes in dozens of different styles and countless combinations. Crafted, blend, single-origin, filter, espresso, Java, Arabica, etc, etc. It’s a poison that’s been analysed and romanticised to such a degree that it now exists as a status symbol for the millennial generation.

For me it sits atop a trifactor of emblematic substances, together with hummus and avocados, that mark the pettiness of the Anthropocene generation. It has become the addiction of the 21^st century, except that junkies have never before obsessed about the perfect pattern of a fern leaf in the smoke of their crack pipes. And that’s what gets to me. Somehow, there is a snobbery here which tastes bitterly of middle-class elitism and pretentiousness.

I wonder, in the world that is to come, when seas are rising and jungles burning, will we still care about the nominal difference between a macchiato and a manchado?

Search engine unconsciousness

We live in curious times. That much is certain. With Covid-19 making immense and frightening changes to all our lives and behaviours, it seems like a good time to talk about internet use and dependence. Apparently before the pandemic hit, in a seven-day period we would spend an average of 24 hours online. That’s a whole day every week looking at screens, clicking, typing and scrolling; existing in a space that is neither physical nor abstract, where attention spans are ephemeral, all knowledge seems available and very little wisdom is on offer.

Showing question marks in our search for truth — Search?
Photograph: Arek Socha (Pixabay).

There is a reason all cultures throughout history have a tradition of venerating their elders. Someone who has lived and survived longer than you, whether they be your relative or not, deserves your implicit respect because they retain the influence of wisdom.

Sure, you might be faster, stronger or healthier. But they can tell you which direction to run, which berries to pick; which fungus gets you close to the sky and which sends you deep into the earth. In the days when we were a tribe, our elders had something that was stronger than any human muscle. They had stories. Stories that would be told at important moments, ceremonies and rites of passage. Narratives that could guide us through life, and even a few that could guide us through death.

These days, we have search engines. Grandfather Google.

Most of us are blissfully unaware of the power that search engines have over our experience of the internet (and thus our experience of modern life). Usually, we think that they are one and the same. This is a mistake. They are very much not the same.

Let’s try this with a metaphor. If the internet is a safari park, crammed to the brim with ferocious animals, exotic plant life and all manner of interesting biodiversity, then your search engine is the little guy in a jeep driving you through the savanna, pointing your binoculars in the right direction and deciding which paths are unsafe to go down.

It’s a role not unlike the one once held by our elders. Except that it is inhuman, dominated by capitalism and driven by a specific set of data targets and an agenda. We all know that the same search made on two different computers will bring up very different results. Like everything these days, our search engines are highly customised to our experience.

In this, they function a little bit like the unconscious, and the whole internet itself can be compared to Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious — a worldwide conversation. A massive, never-ending, semi-incoherent, often very important but usually very banal, conversation between one box of data and the next. There is certainly poetry in that, and great terror also.

For me, there’s a beautiful irony in the way we use the internet these days. In one sense it’s the repository of all human knowledge, art and experience — and has the very real potential to elevate anyone with a wifi connection to near-demigod status. But of course, we squander it on cat videos and pornography.

It’s a sad and wonderfully human reality. And I for one am curious, terrified and a little bit hopeful for whatever the future holds for us bag-wielding, poison drinking, unconscious apes.

Find out More

Ursula Le Guin’s essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, is published by Ignota Books (2019) with an introduction by Donna Haraway. And you can read this article from August 2019, where Siobhan Leddy argues convincingly that We should all be reading more Ursula Le Guin.

You can explore coffee’s mysterious origins in this 2010 piece for The Atlantic by Giorgio Milos. And dip your toes into the more accessible waters of the collective unconscious via the collective consciousness that is Wikipiedia. Searchenginehistory.com has this … history of search engines (from 1945 to just before tomorrow).

Philip Webb Gregg

A writer of ephemeral things for beautiful places, exploring the disconnect between human nature and nature nature, and grappling with themes of faith, folklore and narratology.