A, B, C

7

*7 Because the situations are so different — situations which always entail a worldscape with conditions unique to it — that individuals, pairs, smaller or larger communities of living creatures, find ourselves moving through or settling down in, it is not particularly efficient to wire in one set of responses to all situations. But it has been efficient since before the advent of language to wire in the ability to learn to adjust to different conditions, both by establishing habits and habit-systems and through more thoughtful responses; both always involve actions and inactions. To the extent these are always patterns, they are what rhetoric cuts the world up into and discourses stabilize, but have had very little to do — at least up until recently (say, since the development of writing) — with our understanding how the “process” works. Today, in the context of our hugely expanded world population, even over the last five hundred years — as the plurality of our cultures increasingly becomes the condition within which we must negotiate — our survival would appear to hinge more and more on understanding the process. Pollution is rampant. The climate has changed and not for the better. Because, as part of our cultures, we have already made such changes, along with our population expansion, in our so-varied worldscapes — the atmosphere, the ocean, the mined hills and fishable rivers, the arable lands and the slashed-back rain forests — it is imperative we do something about it or as a species we will suffer far worse consequences than we have already started to. Types of bees, certain species of starfish, as well as tigers and wolves — and dozens of fish, birds, and butterflies — have become endangered species over the last three decades. Our own human population numbers are out of hand and the inequities among us controlled by stupidity or mistaken for reason are only going to do us and the planet in. We need to bring the population down, slowly, over generations, and with consent, though genocides, direct and indirect — both of which seed our own destruction — become more and more prevalent.