Sara Imari Walker

I think part of the challenge is actually thinking about like the levels of organization that biology has.

So what I mean is like

you know, individuals are not actually the problem, what you're describing, it would be like human societies are the problem.

And humans have because we have societies and, you know, organization that enable us to do these things, like we're able to, you know, take over all these environments and things.

But I like the way I think about life is much more at the planetary scale.

So for me,

Going all the way back to the origin of life, life doesn't happen just in one environment.

It happens in all environments.

And it's really like a planetary scale transition, like something happened on our planet with enough geochemical environments mixing to mediate this global transition.

And when you look at the evolution of life.

you get these kind of hierarchies where like cells evolved and then multicellular organisms like cephalopods and plants and fungi and us.

And then we get things that build societies like ant colonies or human societies and

It just seems to me it's like it's a natural progression of the evolutionary process to build more complex systems at larger collective scales that are having more impact on the planet and restructuring more of it.

And if life wants to get off this planet, it has to go through something like us.

So I think we can look at it from the couple hundred year time scale and say these things are terribly negative and predator, prey, this, that, and the other thing.

But if you look at it over the billions years time scale, there's a really different picture that emerges about what we are and what we're doing.

Yeah, I think that's a problem, but I don't know that that's one that can be solved.

So this issue of, you know, trying to treat every living entity, you know, in sort of a...

Like, I don't actually think it's possible.

No, but you can't even like you have to eat something.