Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

Yet, as we shall see, there are in fact many ways of doing intelligence, because intelligence is an active process, not just a mental capacity. By rethinking intelligence, and the forms in which it appears in other beings, we will begin to break down some of the barriers and false hierarchies that separate us from other species and the world. In do

and their planthood, their subjecthood, their beinghood. It’s about allowing them to be themselves, while working with them to structure the world for the benefit of all of us. We must think not on the scale of laboratories and courtrooms, but on the scale of forests, mountain ranges, tundra, oceans and continents

When we speak, we take in the atmosphere and expel it again; we ingest the world and make it resonate. By speaking, we partake in the world, and the world partakes of us. This is true, also, of other forms of speech: the cry of birds, the scratching of crickets, the wind in the trees, the rumble of stone. Speech exists between bodies and beings; it

To declare solidarity with the more-than-human world means to acknowledge the radical differences which exist between ourselves and other beings, while insisting on the possibility of mutual aid, care and growth. We share a world, and we imagine better worlds, together.

‘Una apis, nulla apis’ – ‘one bee is no bee’.

The name given to this new view of life, which extends far beyond the operation of HGT, is symbiosis. In opposition to the violent and competitive account of life’s emergence given by Darwinian evolution, symbiosis proposes that we are instead the product of cooperation, interaction and mutual dependence. This vision of life is profoundly ecologica

We are anthropos, and we have no other means of addressing these worlds than through our own. But if we can consciously bear in mind the fact of our difference, if we can recognize our own limited perspective while not enforcing it upon others, these things need not be a barrier to accessing and acting on the basis of shared interests and intention

To decentralize, in this context, means to empower and grant agency equally to every actor and assemblage in the more-than-human world, so that none may have dominion over any other. To be unknowing means to acknowledge that – like Socrates before the Oracle – neither we nor anybody else knows exactly what is going on; and to be humbled and at peac

The achievement of The Overstory is to make these revelations meaningful at human scale, building the connections between us and the trees around us. Powers uses the scale of arboreal life – its extent in time, as well as its size – to tell a new kind of epic story: multi-generational, planetary-scale and ecological, in the sense of deeply intertwi

And this is our problem. We humans live in such a narrow slice of time and space that we are incapable of thinking of, or thinking at, the pace and scale of the world, the changes we have wrought in it, and the changes we will have to make to survive them. Our given minds are insufficient to the task – but we do have tools to hand, technology among