Our species' harnessing of concentrated energy and the creative and destructive powers associated with that may look organized and systematic to our point of view, being that we are the ones controlling such things, but these powers can also appear quite capricious and unpredictable to the nonhuman world.
Think of anything from the insects bewildered and trapped by our architecture and artificial lighting for example, to the game terrorized and baffled by modern firearm power. How do you as a deer for instance do anything when suddenly something far away claps like thunder and inexplicably strikes your chest with no warning? The best you can do is give such things a wide berth, taking cues from your pack, if you are able to discern them at all.
The wielders of such power can become bewildered themselves when such powers are turned against them, such as in total war. And this principle is becoming more and more apparent as one watches the increasingly volatile climate issue.
The weather is getting stranger worldwide and more difficult to predict, with the fumbling forecasts themselves adding to the growing sense of unease. A growing frequency of unpredictable extreme weather events are emerging to bewilder and terrorize everyone caught in them.
There was a deeper, elemental dynamic here that I wanted to get at. The climate, and the general environment itself, is steadily beginning to mirror the violent capriciousness that one experiences on the receiving side of the application of concentrated energy, a side that much of the nonhuman world and the general environment, and for that matter, the non-imperial world, has been experiencing for some time. For centuries we've been concentrating and expending energy into the general environment, all the while polluting it more and more and tearing apart and scrambling up and setting free whatever parts of it that we haven't been organizing and freezing into place for the benefit of ourselves, and that redirected energy and increasing chaos has been steadily building up over time.
To take boiling a pot of water, we see that holding a point of heightened excitement - an open flame or a heated coil for example - to a body of water steadily begins to excite the water progressively until the whole body is excited and there is a state change. In the same way, we've been concentrating energy and seizing upon the natural world and reordering it for so long and increasing energy usage with growing speed and scale, that the whole of the environment we're ensconced in is beginning to take on that excited state, bringing the receiving end of that energy back to us and mirrored back to us.
And to divide and tear something apart is to accelerate that transformation and deepen that feedback. The state of a log or a chunk of ice is much more stable before it begins to break down, each of its breaking off parts combusting or melting with less effort, and adding fuel to the transformative process set against it.
There is so much wisdom to treating the natural world as extensions of ourselves, non-selfishly of course, more as like kin. And treating it like a thing to be exploited, well, you only get that mirrored back just as faithfully, though the mirror image of that is you on the receiving end.
