Environment

Environmental politics, as generally practiced, is a subset of human politics. Like in politics, humans are solipsistic. That's like a so 500 years ago way of thinking. On a galactic-level all things must be considered on a similar level, not because we are all one or some woo woo wish, but because none of us know what a suped up plant's gonna look like after a few millenia of us going to town, and we can't write off anything that's around right now.

Freyja's environment is broader: the conditions that allow any holobiont to persist and develop over time. That includes Earth's biosphere. It also includes the electromagnetic conditions of the solar system, the gravitational dynamics that keep our orbits stable, the cosmic radiation environment, and the principles of advancing systems that apply at every scale.

The most urgent version of these questions is terrestrial. But the framework for answering them is not. There're a lot of weird things out there, and we need to get ahead of the game rather than choking on our own fumes.

Earth is, as far as we currently know, the only planet with a biosphere (I mean it's pretty clear there're a bunch more out there, but I'll humor current limits to human knowledge). It's the only place where a self-renewing web of biological processes has organized itself into the conditions for complex life. It took approximately four billion years to build.

The current rate of change of atmospheric composition, ocean chemistry, biodiversity loss, and land use is orders of magnitude faster than any prior transition in the geological record short of mass extinction events. This is not a policy disagreement. It is a measurement.

A species that cannot advance alongside its home planet cannot advance alongside anything else. Environment, at the immediate scale, is the prerequisite for all of the other Es.

Zoom out far enough and you see that the biosphere's stability depends on systems operating at scales it cannot control: the sun's output, the gravitational dynamics of the solar system, the position of Earth's magnetic field. Our environment is nested inside other environments, all the way up.

What makes any of these holobionts persist? What makes them degrade? These are not purely biological questions. They are questions about how complex, holobionts maintain conditions for their own continuation...or fail to.

Ostrom's work on the commons is, in this frame, also an environmental question. So is the design of economic systems, the structure of educational institutions, the conditions under which cultures advance themselves. Environment, at the largest scale, is the question of what it takes not just to survive, but to advance into the unknown (the toddler's into Frozen right now).

There are two things everyone needs more than money: a planet to live on, and a mother. Both are historically undervalued in the systems humans have built.

Freyja doesn't play favorites, but Environment is the collection. We've gotten down a path of spitting at tree huggers, and have forgotten the beauty of Monet's haystacks, or that food provides the largest economic opportunity pretty much at all times on our planet.

The work here begins on Earth, and it has already started in so many more places, by so many more people than any of us appreciate. We just need to learn to recognize the Freyjans amongst us.