Out Of Scale Living

Used to be called 'evolution'
by the humans who thought themselves
the peak of sentience in the history of the universe,
'I am the best. I am the measurer of everything,
the grader of all that is lesser than me around me'
thought Francis Galton, the author of the phrase
'survival of the fittest', that reduced evolution
to a competition where surviving by being second,
or lower in the scale of co-creative living,
was made to seem to be an unattractive option.

Fast forward to 2025 and the race for finite resources
is now reset around the search for rare earth minerals
with which to build new technologies, minerals-
scandium, cerium, promethium, yttrium, dysprosium,
thulium, lutetuim, holmuim, europium, praseodium,
terbium, gadolinium, neodynium, lanthanum -
are materials that occur in many places, but remain hidden
in the beauty of nature, where now, to preserve the planet
we must destroy the beauty that gives it a value well beyond
the reckoning of the species with the least sense of proportion
relative to its intelligence that the planet has ever had to endure.