ONLY HUMANS CREATE DEAD THINGS part 1 ‘You had a dream?’ Megan teased. ‘Yeah. But that’s not the point. A thought came up in this half-dream-half-awake state where the dream still rolls on, but you’re aware of waking up.’ ‘Any chance of telling us what that thought is?’ Jason teased. ‘Sure. But it’s still kind of thoughts in progress—’ ‘Alice, spit it out,’ Ethan laughed. ‘OK. See, the body is constantly digesting. Take food. Food goes in, poo comes out. Take skin cells, bogies, spots, hair, blood. All of it is constantly in a process. Constantly transforming, constantly renewing, constantly in motion. Not everything digest, but if you think of spots as a way of digesting all the excess fat and sugar, that holds. Hair doesn’t seem to digest, but it does something when it gets greasy. And hair is replaced frequently. Skin cells die, they get thrown off the body once they did whatever it is they do. But the point I’m getting at is—’ Alice stopped, countering the amused expressions on the screen with a lopsided smile. ‘Look, you really have to let this sink in and think about it. Digesting. Sit yourself down and look at how your body works, and never stops changing, never stops digesting, or cleaning the blood, or fighting some infection, pumping liquid through the system, or whatever else it does. And here’s the thing that struck me.

ONLY HUMANS CREATE DEAD THINGS, part 2 The body, and nature in general, is in constant motion. Nature works because it constantly digests, renews. It’s alive. It even recycles. No better, it constantly makes new life possible by dying because a fallen leaf serves as nutrient for new life. And that’s where humans get things wrong. We don’t produce or build that way. We produce and set up so many things that aren’t alive.That’s how we’re killing our planet. Our planet can only live if it constantly digests, and we block the system with our products, buildings, streets. And we don’t think in terms of digesting, renewing, not even in terms of being alive.’ ‘Well—’ Jason started, frowning. ‘Think about it. We don’t build or live in a way that digests. Hell, I don’t know how to put it better. You have to really think about your body. How it constantly grows, burns energy, digests, dies. That’s sustainable. But nothing we do is motivated by working with a living system. Funny enough our approach is all about fighting living organisms. We use plastic because nothing can get through. We use chemicals to kill bacteria not even asking what these bacteria might be good for. We use concrete because it puts a barrier between the natural forces and our settlements. We cover living land in dead tar to have straight surfaces. We even cover up rivers. We block the natural flow of things and kill living organisms out of some need for control or for being oh-so-clean.

ONLY HUMANS CREATE DEAD THINGS, part 3 And on top of that, we accumulate and hoard things instead of putting them back into the cycle. So we drain and block. We are like a great constipation for this planet. I’m sorry for not being more precise. It’s just something that hit me this morning, and I don’t know what to make of it. But it seems to be important. And it’s still very sketchy.’ ‘You might be right,’ Megan said thoughtfully. ‘We’re the only creatures on this planet who build dead things. And we fill the planet with dead materials adding blockage after blockage.’ ‘Yes,’ Alice said with a gleam in her eyes. ‘Humans are the only organisms who constantly create things that neither regenerate nor digest or live. It’s as if we make the planet swallow plastic balls. No one can survive swallowing plastic balls, not even once. Look, I don’t know where this might lead, or whether there’s anything in it we can use with regard to the way we build, produce or live. But think about it.’ ‘You’re looking for another key?’ Ethan said. ‘Like with the sex talk?’ ‘Yes.’ Ethan nodded slowly. ‘You’re not wrong. We have made our world into an artificial world. It’s not properly alive any more.’ ‘And we keep adding dead things, suffocating our planet and ourselves.’

ONLY HUMANS CREATE DEAD THINGS

'Nature works because it constantly digests, renews. It’s alive. It even recycles. No better, it constantly makes new life possible by dying because a fallen leaf serves as nutrient for new life.' (book 2/1, travelling)

The end of crude oil collection #mihsENDOIL

THE BEACH A dragonfly passes above my head. The sun is about to set. There are still people about at this beach bar. I see their shadows reflected on the back of a pastel-green plastic chair. The shadow of the tip of my pen is there, too. A group of people leave, probably going to the next beach bar. It’s beautiful here — if you block out a few things: the huge tanker with fracking gas, and smaller tankers all queuing to get into the harbour, the spot where a company erected an oil rig last winter and dismantled it after a few months. Test drilling. An insect climbs on my finger. I watch it. I guess it’s some kind of fly. It seems curious and a little puzzled. I sit here at the beach, the sea just eight or nine yards away, and wonder how it can be done, how we got here, why we do it, who we are. What we have done to this planet, to ourselves, to each other makes no sense at all. Oh, yes, I know the stories. But those are stories. Invented. Unreal. We chose to give them reality. Or our ancestors did. The small fly sits on my sleeve now, maybe taking a nap and I tell it: ‘We will figure this out. It’s all stories. Stories can be changed. We don’t have to destroy you, ourselves or our planet.’ The fly sits so quietly, I wonder whether it thinks. Does it see me? Does it see us? Does it wonder why we have to destroy — when we don’t?

THE BEACH

'An insect climbs on my finger. I watch it. I guess it’s some kind of fly. It seems curious and a little puzzled.'

The end of crude oil collection #mihsENDOIL

THE STORYTELLERS planet 428, part 1 We are an extraordinary planet, the planets of the universe alliance keep saying to us. And they urged us to tell you about our people. There isn’t really much to tell. We never fought any wars. We never disconnected from nature, from each other or ourselves. We never exploited each other or the resources of our planet. We never competed with each other. We were never interested in dominance. We are a people made up of individuals and groups. We go in and out of each other’s spheres. We are always curious, always explorers. And we love to laugh and dance. What is unique about our planet, according to the universe alliance, is one of the most natural parts of us: our storytellers. Having heard the accounts of the people of many other planets, we now know that it is our storytellers who have kept us safe and who continue to keep us safe.

THE STORYTELLERS, part 2 We hear that the people of planet Earth leave storytelling to corporations, politicians and religions. In all fairness, we have never tried that. But our stories tell us convincingly that stories invented by those with personal objectives don’t serve the people. Even if those organisations wanted to serve, their interests are in the way of open-minded, adaptive, serving storytelling. Our storytellers are the most revered people on our planet. Seven percent of our population undertake this important task of finding the stories which serve us, and of finding the stories which warn us of the follies sapient creatures seem to be drawn to occasionally. ‘Reality,’ said one of our storytellers, ‘reality needs stories to exist in. Reality doesn’t check whether a story is good. It takes what it finds. That’s why it’s so important to always check and adjust the stories that make our world.’

THE STORYTELLERS, part 3 Some of our earliest storytellers established the TEST OF THREE. Three questions to test whether a story, an idea or a narrative are useful. ‘With any given story ask yourself this: ‘What is the record of this story? Does this story serve you? Is there a better alternative?’ Stories, we learn from our elders from an early age on, stories are the most powerful creators of reality. That is why we don’t leave storytelling to those who seek to dominate, manipulate, exploit or cage others. We are indeed fortunate that our storytellers only have one goal: to serve the people of our planet, to serve all creatures and plants, and to make sure that all things and people are in balance or regain balance when changes, which always happen, require adjustments.

THE STORYTELLERS
testimony, planet 428

'We are an extraordinary planet, the planets of the universe alliance keep saying to us. And they urged us to tell you about our people.'

The end of crude oil collection #mihsENDOIL

GLASSES planet 444, part 1 On our planet, it all started with glasses. There was Timbol, one of our middlers (people aged 35-65). He was a transman with a plastic allergy. At that point of our planet’s pastory, plastic pollution was worse than air and water pollution from burned fossil fuels and oil spills. Plastic was everywhere, even in our blood — and as we found out far too late in the air. By the time it was detectable in the air, we were already breathing plastic. I’m sorry. My thoughts are jumping around all over the place. All of this still upsets me so much, though we are luckily out of the worst. Where was I? Ah, yes, Timbol, such a beautiful man. His eyesight deteriorated and when he tried on glasses, his skin reacted to the plastic frames with rashes. At the time, everything was made of plastic. Why? Because the few families who used to own our planet’s petroleum deposits wanted to continue to make money.

GLASSES, part 2 I was there with Timbol, in the shop, watching him, as I often did, drawn to his beauty and his generous, playful spirit. Timbol saw the rashes in the mirror — and frowned. He took off the glasses, looked at them — and frowned. He lifted the glasses — and looked through them from a distance — and frowned. ‘Glasses,’ he said to me. ‘That’s what we need!’ Now, I frowned, and he looked at me with his enchanting eyes. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘we will start our transformation with glasses because it’s time that we see. I read about bamboo. It still grows in some places and it grows fast. We can harvest it and fashion frames for glasses from it, adding some metal for weight, maybe. And then we will use our new glasses to campaign. We will encourage people to put on glasses so that we all see that we are being poisoned every day only because a few people are so lost that they need palaces stuffed with gold and diamonds.’

GLASSES, part 3 I sigh, remembering my friend’s words. But this was our beginning. Not a new beginning. We had no memories of ever truly beginning, ever truly starting or starting over. But this was a true beginning. Ours. What surprised me was how fast things changed. We had been told for centuries that the powerful would never let us change anything. No one had reminded us that we are the majority and that we can change everything. No one reminded us that the rich, too, want to live and not suffocate. No one wants to die of poisoning, no one wants a dead planet. But we needed the new glasses to see. Once we saw, we acted like our lives depended on it. Well, they did. It was the glasses that opened the door for us to escape our planet’s downward spiral. Mind you, don’t let things get as bad as we did. We have made leaps in a short time, but the scars we inflicted on our planet still need a lot of healing. My friend died early, too early to see that we would make it. But he never gave up hope in us.

GLASSES
testimony, planet 444

'Plastic was everywhere, even in our blood — and as we found out far too late in the air. By the time it was detectable in the air, we were already breathing plastic.'

The end of crude oil collection #mihsENDOIL

YOU CAN’T STOP OIL ‘You can’t do it! You can’t just stop oil!’ ‘We have to!’ Shannen snorted. ‘Has that ever worked for you? Insisting that there is something we HAVE TO do?’ Shaun sagged his shoulders. ‘But we have to. We’re killing our planet and ourselves.’ Shannen softened a little. ‘I know. But nothing will change if all we have to offer is our insistence.’ ‘Offer …’ Shaun whispered to himself, frowning. ‘Offer— What can we offer?’ ‘Everything!’ Shannen laughed as an idea suddenly popped up in her mind. ‘And I’m not even exaggerating,’ she said, twirling. ‘Humans simply lack imagination. Or maybe we’re afraid to use it. The thing is, you are right, my friend: We have everything to lose if we stick with crude oil. And we have everything to win if we leave it all in the ground.’ ‘And how can we make that happen?’ Shannen got her notebook from her study, calling: ‘By being thorough and having fun with it.’ Some minutes later, Shanen returned to the kitchen table, pen at the ready. ‘First we need a list of everything that uses crude oil or a component of it. Then we use our imagination and our playfulness to come up with the replacements — one item at the time.’

YOU CAN’T STOP OIL

‘You can’t do it! You can’t just stop oil!’
‘We have to!’
Shannen snorted. ‘Has that ever worked for you? Insisting that there is something we HAVE TO do?’

The end of crude oil collection #mihsENDOIL

JI & JO JUMPED ‘It stinks!’ Jo, the green pixie with the red feather, exclaimed. ‘But it glitters and looks very smooth,’ Ji, the blue pixie with the black shell as hat, returned. ‘It reminds me of that brown lake, you remember? What them humans call cho-co-la-te. It was delicious! I’ll never forget how we swam in it.’ ‘And got ladled out of it.’ Jo chuckled. It had been fun to climb onto the rim of the ladle and letting their feet dangle while dripping with that delicious brown stuff. Ji was right, that had been something. ‘Do you think this could be delicious, too?’ Jo asked doubtfully, pointing at the black mass. Ji shrugged. ‘I’m thinking, it’s hiding something. Why else would it stink this much? Take my hand?’ Jo took a deep breath and smiled. He loved adventures with Ji. Jo took Ji’s hand, they laughed and jumped into an open barrel of crude oil. And that was that. Only it wasn’t quite.

JI & JO GET EVERYWHERE Jo and Ji laughed, flew through the air, hand in hand, and landed with a big splash in the middle of a barrel of crude oil. There was still laughter on their pixie faces when the black mass swallowed them. ‘Oops!’ were their last exclamations, and they died several deaths. Drowning, poisoning, heart failure and shock all claimed their lives. But nothing dies in absolute terms. The pixie souls moved on, true. But every single cell of and in the pixies’ bodies, well, those went on millions of journeys. Because, just like the remains of plants, animals and humans, the pixies’ remains became part of this black mass — and Ji’s soul wondered whether it stank so much as a warning that crude oil is not only a bringer of death but also a grave of the dead — NOT TO BE DISTURBED. Well, to track down the stories of every cell of Ji’s and Jo’s pixie bodies would take a storyteller’s lifetime, at the very least. Maybe other storytellers will recount the story of the toenail cells on Ji’s pinki toe, or the story of that one blood cell in Jo’s heart, or the story of that one cell that used to be part of that bit of snot still in Ji’s nose when they sprang. I will follow the trace of two particular cells which held on to each other from the moment the pixies’ hands had touched.

JOJI ON A NEW JOURNEY I call these two inseparable cells JoJi. Of course, at first JoJi was still part of the clasping hands as the dead bodies of the pixies Ji & Jo drifted back to the black surface in the crude oil. Just then a lit was dropped on the barrel. It was quite a long and bumpy journey to the oil refinery, and on the way the bodies of the pixies got fully absorbed by the fossil mass, thanks to some of the remaining pixie dust. Towards the end of this drive, JoJi was separated from what used to be two fully grown wee pixies. Later that week, JoJi became part of a gasoline delivery to a big city and was burned in the engines of a red car. Travelling on in the exhaust fume, JoJi landed in the lungs of a fifty-something man called Luke. He was in love and smiling. Some weeks passed until Luke died of asthma. Not because of JoJi. He had just lived in the big city for too long and inhaled too much of the polluted air. JoJi was buried with Luke’s body in a cemetery in Luke’s hometown. And this is it for me because I am not keen on telling the story of worms who ate their way through this lovely man, one of them carrying JoJi to new realms, and probably dying from digesting Luke’s black lungs.

JI & JO JUMPED, GOT EVERYWHERE & WENT ON A NEW JOURNEY

‘It stinks!’ Jo, the green pixie with the red feather, exclaimed.
‘But it glitters and looks very smooth,’ Ji, the blue pixie with the black shell as hat, returned.

The end of crude oil collection #mihsENDOIL

TOPIC HASHTAGS - use only for edited contributions after marathons + later additions.

#mihsENDWARS – for THE END OF ALL WARS

#mihsFAILINGGOVS – for THE END OF FAILING GOVERNMENTS

#mihsENDOIL – for THE END OF CRUDE OIL

#mihsRESTOREPLANET – for THE BEGINNINGS OF A RESTORED PLANET