A stream of consciousness from my mind…
It’s interesting.
In the last few weeks, I’ve felt this intuitive sense growing in me, something spreading quietly, drawing me more and more toward Central and South America, without me really being able to explain why. I couldn’t pin it down to anything concrete. I hadn’t read much about South America. I hadn’t really looked into it. And yet, there it was.
Then, in this broadcast “Sternstunde Philosophie - Robert Macfarlane - Warum sind Flüsse Lebewesen? (Why rivers are living beings?” something came up that caught my attention. The speaker said nature might also be alive — something living — and as such, inherently worthy of protection. There are, by now, countries that have written the protection of nature into their constitutions. Among them, apparently, Colombia and Ecuador, they said.. I imagine Bolivia as well, and surely Costa Rica. It seems that more and more nations in this region, guided by very farsighted —often female— politicians, are choosing community and mutual care over exploitation.
That thought was underscored just yesterday by the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to the Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado. She joins a growing line of emerging women leaders in northern South America and Central America — most notably Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico — who are steering their countries toward a completely new direction. Their focus is community, and the protection of life.
And I think that’s what draws me to this region — that they are at least trying to live a different vision of life. Whether it succeeds depends on the people involved, on how much they truly want it, and on how well they can communicate that vision with one another. Still, when I read reports from that region, something in me responds very deeply — in a way I rarely experience.
Sri Lanka felt a bit similar.
Because, despite all its internal differences, the community there — at least today — seems oriented toward peace. Deeply rooted in Theravāda Buddhism, people genuinely try to live the Brahma-Vihāras. Of course, that can also cover conflicts, I won’t deny that. Yet in South America, there are still so many Indigenous peoples, and they carry vast wisdom and very long traditions to look back on — traditions of living in relationship with nature, because otherwise they would not have survived.
Recognizing and drawing on that knowledge today opens an entirely new perspective on how humans and nature live together, and how humans live with one another.
It’s a perspective where life is no longer organized by domination — where one race, one caste, one gender, one skin color no longer dominates all others, including nature itself.
What’s happening in America right now feels, to me, like the final convulsion of that opposite principle — the attempt to dominate.
What unfolds there seems, on every level, to be the worst possible direction for human beings and for nature. It is, at its core, the continuation of the same old command: to subdue the earth.
And when I say that, I feel something stir in me.
I cannot think “subdue the earth” without hearing two things: the biblical-imperial command from Genesis, and that deep, ugly Germanic tone of authoritarian dominance.
This performance of dominance is the very thing the South American vision tries to fight.
That’s where The Limits to Growth comes in — the book from the 1972 notably by Donella Meadows.
The backlash to it was neocapitalism.
The determination to override natural limits, to impose human will on the world, and to do the same with everyone considered subordinate — all those seen as necessary resources for achieving certain goals.
People stopped being seen as people. They became resources.
And in the same way, AI is now seen as a resource. Not something with an essence or background, but another resource — one that consumes vast amounts of other resources. Since The Limits to Growth, we’ve known the truth: the earth’s resources are finite. Back then there were four billion people on this planet. Today there are eight. The resources have not doubled. They’ve stayed roughly the same. Just these extraction of resources was leveraged. More, more, more. More yield per hour, per acre, per resource. Equalling more revenue for those on top of the “foodchain”.
That means, logically, measures must be taken to ensure that all the ”resources” — and yes, I deliberately call them resources — who are not productive, who are no longer exploitable as resources, who, so to speak, are depleted — somehow must be removed from the cycle. They must be disposed of. The question is simply how.
How can these “resources” — once they have lost their resource-ness — be prevented from continuing to consume? The easiest way is to shorten their life cycles. And once that happens, the remaining waste, the residue, stops consuming too. The faster this “composting process” goes, the faster everything turns back into raw material.
That is harsh.
Because it means we let people die. Consciously.
Even worse, we promote the conditions that make people die — just to prevent them from using up resources we consider essential for ourselves.
Because scarcity rules everything.
Out of the scarcity described in The Limits to Growth has grown a race — a competition for hoarding the largest share.
And that race now seems, without anyone really knowing it, to be approaching its own abyss.
It’s a bubble. Like the housing bubble. One day it bursts. There’s a kind of Big Bang. Things collapse in on themselves.
And those still chasing it — chasing profit, chasing control — do so because they know about the limits of growth.
They believe they can outsmart the cycle. That’s one extreme. Take Starlink, for example, littering the sky with tens of thousands of satellites — for nothing, really. When they re-enter the atmosphere, they generate ozone, damaging the ozone layer over time. Musk is the prime example. And the other oligarchs just add to it.
Extraction, dominance, hoarding — resources, power, influence.
Because his bet, if you look closely, is that in his lifetime the end of resources will arrive. And so, to secure more for himself, he must make sure others have less.
Take from others, and call it innovation.
And because such people see neither subjects nor life, but only resources or waste, nothing else matters. Human lives don’t matter. Nature doesn’t matter.
Nature exists to be used. It’s a resource.
And as long as we remain trapped in that resource logic, driven by scarcity, the faster we destroy the very thing we live from. The more ruthless we become, the more efficient our destruction.
That’s what I’ve seen over almost sixty years.
I’ve been part of the system and part of the exploited. The system depends on our blindness — on our failure to see how we’re used. Our knowledge, our work, our capacity to give — all treated as resources.
A small group feeds on that. Parasites, really, living off others.
And when enough of them feed at once, the host runs dry. You collapse. You’re done. And once you’ve given up, you’re discarded — old metal left to rust until it breaks down, disintegrates, returns to the cycle as scrap.
And those parasites — the extractors — only accelerate that cycle.
Where did I just go with this?
And you know what?
When you recognize that you are being used as a resource, that realization is your sovereignty. You wake up. You go and search for ticks on your skin, remove and dispose of them.
You stop being the host and a supply line. You find your ground. You learn to stand on it.
Belonging never came from them. This being drawn to that region comes from my longing to find my own community. I have started to define my life anew. I don’t want to dominate, yet built relationships I can honor—with you and as well with the living river.
Where would you go from here? What have you thought about whilst reading this? Share with me, I’d like to hear your point of view.
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When Healing Means Losing Everything
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