what if we regarded insecticide, herbicide, pesticide through the ethical lens we apply to homicide? everything we need to know is in the name. i won’t touch here but for a moment on the suggestion that we already tolerate a level of femicide that ought to be absolutely unacceptable, and that this alone illustrates the hierarchies of our dominant culture. in a moment when biodiversity loss is as much an existential threat as its flashier cousin, carbon emissions, part of our paradigm shift into a life-affirming, reciprocal, needs-based economy and all that that affects throughout the biome, is to recognise in our very language and laws, in the small work of living in a place, where we are committing crimes against life.
if this sounds extreme, perhaps it is because the shift that must happen is once again deeply patterned in viewing our ecologies and economies as necessarily competitive, not collaborative. if, for a plant, a body, to be healthy it must have beaten away competition until it is alone and all there is, a monoculture, then success is indeed murder.
we see this thinking in antibiotic overuse, in mono-crops for miles, in fear of contamination and infection. yet if we see instead that none of us is one but that each of us hold billions within us, living cultures living within living cultures, microbially balancing all the time, in infinite exchange, well.
if we see that life on our skin and in our gut and on our leaves and in our soil and drunk up, inhaled, exhaled on the wind, it is all an enormous collaboration of life-giving communities and processes, well.
then our diversity is our resilience.
then like my body the garden is a neighbourhood, a community. our response to crisis need not be anti-biotic but pro-biotic. imbibing not poisons but wild fermentations, fermenting change.
then it is resistance, reinvention, to trust in the resilience of a system we are but a part of. to pause the impulse to kill off what threatens the houseplant, the garden bed, the farm crop, and instead to observe what the system needs. if our needs are met, does our well-being thrive? it seems like that is a pattern we could live by.
in our thriving we need not cause the destruction of all else. it is in mutual thriving that we reculture a world that we can all live in.
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thank you to the letters patrons for supporting this writing. this piece i read aloud to fellow thrutopian writers, this morning, as we share our work and talk about how we can write our way to a future we want to live in. if you’d like to learn more about thrutopian ideas you might like to look up manda scott’s ‘accidental gods’ podcast and site. the writers suggested i ‘perform’ this one on film…i’m not sure what that would look like and i welcome everyone’s thoughts, so i’m sharing it with all the radio, film and letters patrons. i hope it finds resonance with you.