There are many reasons I use wildlife as my main measure of environmental health and ecological sustainability, not least of which because they demonstrate an underlying principle that everyone needs to grasp but no one grasps

But first we have to talk about the substrate of life, carbon

There used to be this thing called the carbon cycle which the modern era human project has completely destroyed, but a carbon flow still remains

We all know that carbon is the backbone of life but the salient and clear idea of this is that carbon builds bodies of all living things on earth. That is what carbon does and it has been doing it every second for a few billion years

(Digression: the idea that viruses aren’t alive and serve no function/ “purpose” in the ecosystem belies a fundamental misunderstanding of Life)

Back to carbon: the earth essentially got its entire allotment (except for carbon 14, which is formed from atmospheric nitrogen and is a tiny fraction of total C) billions of years ago

Thinking about the carbon cycle the way we think about cycles, one big clockwise arrow, doesn’t fully describe this process which is better understood as a cyclical self reinforcing and interdependent fractal moving across time.

We can think of it as a plinko board in which every node in the board has a smaller plinko board:

As carbon makes its way through the cycle it has various, but limited amount of places it can go:

into the soft bodies of living creatures, into the hard bodies of living creatures, into different layers of soil, into different layers of oceans, into minerals, into fossilized fuels, among other places

These avenues the carbon untold across multiple connected temporalities: it takes orders of magnitude less time for a soft body to accumulate than a skeleton and orders of magnitude less time for for the carbon to rejoin the active part of the carbon cycle.

Carbon is always moving between these pathways as well as through them: carbon in the atmosphere becoming plants becoming coal becoming emissions is the typical way to think about this but there is more to it, fractally

A fraction of each petroleum-eating bacterium becomes part of the skeleton of whatever eats it, in this example you have the millions of years carbon cycle magnitude moving to the tens of days magnitude

All that is to say across the temporal plinko board all the carbon is moving everywhere at all times though at any given timescale probably in a given section of the board (a unit of coal carbon is more likely to be surrounded by coal carbon than a unit of live plant carbon)

This process ensures enough carbon flows at the right Intensities and timescales to build and grow and feed life (long term storage and breakdown in minerals, short term in annual plants, etc)

Life, the fruit of carbon, is the go between between these temporal flows - the life cycle of a plant, taking carbon as it grows, emitting it as it dies; a frog eating an earthworm; bacteria eating a rock, etc

This cycle works perfectly for three billion years or so until humans start discovering things.

Our true novelty and what separates from other species is that we figured out how to permanently take things out of their natural cycles. This I think is the key reason I think big h humans are no longer a part of the natural world.

Burning fossil fuels and plastic are discovered, among other industrial and chemical processes which supersede the natural cycle: carbon from all timescales can now be removed permanently (petroleum becomes plastic or emissions which can no longer be cycled through by life)

(And now I promise you we’re getting close to my point)

The carbon flow plinko is also superseded when the process of an animal decaying, which takes place across multiple temporalities in the natural world:

It’s flesh becoming flesh and skeletons of various lifespanned beings; it’s bones slowly becoming soil and minerals eventually becoming rock and atmospheric carbon, etc

Ever-growing populations of humans, long lived and increasingly relatively large bodied compared to the animals we’ve left on earth have discovered a way to turn the carbon from all levels of this part of the carbon cycle into human and livestock carbon biomass

Animal bones cooked into stock or ground into feed or fertilizer for things that will be eventually turned into human carbon biomass. Human skeletons are out of the active part of the carbon cycle for much longer and much more intractably than a rabbit skeleton.

And for the most part we and our pets are either cremated or our bones locked away from the earth, both of these unnaturally removing carbon from the cycle

At a given time there is only so much carbon available that can be used to build life and as modernity’s entropy cult has grown, two things have happened:

1) the amount and share of carbon that can be used to build life has fallen and its drop is accelerating over time (atmospheric co2 ppm, amount of plastic released into the environment)

And here good people we have finally reached my point:

2) A larger share of life-building carbon, also accelerating over time, is used by humans to build increasingly larger and increasingly more numerous human bodies

We can think of wildlife and their habitats disappearing and becoming ghosts but the reality is their bodies and their habitats and their life force has all been converted to literal human bodies.