Now comes Eileen Crist, whose writings we consider of paramount importance during these times of environmental polycrisis, with “life’s incalculable extravaganza” crushed beneath the iron boot of human supremacism. Excerpts from a recent post on Earth Tongues:
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To begin our 2025 voyage, we bend an ear to the lucid vibrancy of ecological citizen Eileen Crist, with excerpts from a recent essay posted on Earth Tongues, titled The Secret Garden:
Later in the essay, we underlined this crucial passage:
The entire piece is worth careful consideration.
The entanglement of the twin dyings is well underway,
and will soon become irreversible.
Onward we stumble, into the gathering storms.
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Here at DP, we are often accused of being Late Adopters. Not true; we are Early Rejecters!
For example, every member of the editorial staff at our vast mountainside scriptorium proudly carries an ancient flip phone and writes picture postcards to our global network of correspondents. Thus we shouted our collective affirmation upon reading a recent Earth Tongues posting by fellow Early Rejecter Eileen Crist, regarding use of AI.
The entire (concise & lucid) essay is worthy of close consideration; a brief excerpt below, with DP editorial emphasis in bold.
“The technosphere, defined as the total mass of all things manmade, now weighs more than all living things. It has taken over the face of the Earth and remains tenacious in its colonizing march. The technosphere has subjugated land, seas, and animals. It has smashed the atom, disassembled life, and projected itself into outer space. Now, the technosphere wants to take over, to replace, our thinking and our creative expressions; it so innocently offers to “assist in the content creation process.”
Methinks, NO. I do not want to know what AI “thinks.” I especially do not want AI to think or write for me. Additionally, I decide not to consider its input. This position is not motivated by prejudice against machines and by attachment to my cherished human distinction from them. Rather, in a world so slavish and reckless in every regard toward technology, with no evidenced capacity for either restraint or free choice, it behooves us to draw personal boundaries mindfully decided.”
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As Eileen Crist brilliantly documented back in 2019, deep-sea mining is not only a grim prospect for the future; it is a reality in the present via exploratory permits and temporary leases, perversely spun as essential for the fabrication of “green tech.” Crist writes:
In case you have never heard the term “hungry ghosts,” they are archetypal beings with extremely narrow throats and obese bellies, so that no matter how much they eat they never get enough. Never enough. Forever hungry. “Always encroaching,” in the words of Native American Shawnee Chief Tecumseh.
To refer to the vast oceans on Mother Earth as “the common heritage of humankind” in the midst of an accelerating extinction event, together with a deepening climate emergency, represents human supremacism at its most omnicidal extreme. In that same essay, Crist goes on to write:
HUNGRY GHOSTS DEVOUR THEIR LAST MEAL
We stand with the Deep-Sea Conservation Coalition and others who say NO to the terminal meal of the Hungry Ghosts.
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Now comes author, deep ecologist and philosopher Eileen Crist with excerpts from a recent blog post, affiliated with her excellent journal, The Ecological Citizen.
Images are relayed from the website of artist Peter Hill, “a visual artist, a musician, a builder, a permaculture gardener, father of five fantastic children and captain of the local bush fire brigade.”
CONVERSATION BETWEEN A HOUSE AND A TREE
HEAD STACK
BOUND TOGETHER
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We stay with The Ecological Citizen this week, with a plea from editor Eileen Crist to stop tying ourselves up in identity knots and stand solidly on the hard reality (and responsibility) of shared common ground. Image added by DP.
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In an editorial opening the recent “animals” issue of The Ecological Citizen, Eileen Crist underscores the heavy price we pay when we obscure our animal selves, and abuse our animal kin. We cannot address climate emergency without confronting the dominant ethos of human supremacism, and its dense understory of “petty mind-games.” Excerpts below, with images added by DP.
One of the key tidal observations throughout our DP voyages has been, simply put, that we cannot change what we do not truthfully understand.
For example: reconciliation regarding the historical experience of American slavery is impossible without coming to grips with how that history lives on in the present through densely interwoven manifestations of white supremacy, with the carceral state at its center.
Now comes the ever-lucid Eileen Crist, with thoughts on a different though related variant of subjugation, not within a single species but rather between one particularly invasive species (homo sapiens) and the rest of life on Mother Earth.
Excerpts from a recent interview below, with images relayed from the website of Joseph Wheelwright.
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Note: The entire excellent interview from within the pages of The Sun Magazine (not the tabloid, mind!) is worthy of close consideration. The magazine has generously dropped its pay wall during Covidzeit, yet relies entirely on reader support. We highly recommend trial perusal, and then subscription.
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We are grateful to our colleagues at Rewilding Earth for publishing an excellent, detailed report on the threat of extensive deep-sea mining, written by Abundant Earth author Eileen Crist. The article includes an extensive bibliography, as well as the outlines of a non-extractive alternative way of connecting with seaborne earthlings and their magnificent habitat.
Brief excerpts below, together with a few images of hungry ghost maw-machines relayed from the website of a “pioneering” sea-mining corporation. They communicate the dark, indiscriminate and savage sort of supremacist violence that has become the signature of an extractive capitalism gone berserk, through an “always encroaching’ (see below) greed for plunder and profit.
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We are grateful to a longtime DP reader for steering us to a lucid interview with Eileen Crist, following the publication of her book Abundant Earth. A few excerpts below, interwoven with revolting images of clearcutting in four California counties, relayed from stopclearcuttingca.org.
She closes with a cautionary critique of reliance upon “hope”:
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In the category of revulsion in search of revolution, let us close with the below transcript from a recent press conference where the American style of environmentally catastrophic human supremacism was brazenly promoted to the rest of the planet.
MR. MULVANEY:
The focus of the event will be global growth and challenges to the global economy, specifically dealing with things like rejuvenating incentives for growth and prosperity; rolling back prosperity-killing regulations; ending trade barriers; and re-opening energy markets. So, taking a lot of what we have been doing here domestically with such success and trying to encourage the rest of the world to get onboard as we sit here and our economy does so well. You look all across the world right now, and the rest of the world is either at or near recession. And we really do think that we have hit on a formula that works not only here but that would work overseas, where we take the G7 as the opportunity to try and convince other nations that they can have the same successes by following the same model.
Then during the Q & A, that mostly centered on how holding the G7 at a Trump-branded resort was not a naked conflict of interest:
MR. MULVANEY: Okay. Anybody else on G7?
Q I got one more. Is there any precedent in your studying of the G7 of a G7 Summit being held at a property owned by the President or a President?
And my second question is: As you’re looking at the content of what you want to do next year, it’s probably going to be hot in Florida in June. Will climate change be one of the issues that you discuss?
MR. MULVANEY: The first question is, no. I don’t know if another President has ever done it. I don’t know if another President has owned a property that was even considered for G7. So, no, we haven’t — I don’t know the answer to that question.
Climate change will not be on the agenda.
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Message to Mr. Mulvaney and the Circle of Death for which he is a mouthpiece:
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Desperado Philosophy 