The true protagonists of the forest are not those reaching for the sky, but the fallen—those who have returned to the earth, nourishing the next generation. In this endless cycle, the boundary between life and death dissolves, and the entire forest moves forward with a shared will. ——Michio Hoshino
To witness the clash between human ambition and nature’s force is to observe a battle for sovereignty. Yet, I hesitate to call this “war” an act of malice. It arises from humanity’s boundless sentimentality, its hubris, and its relentless sense of responsibility—a yearning to carve out a more habitable world. And so, we build, we take, we defend, believing we are safeguarding the fragile “home” we have crafted.
But in this pursuit, we wound the very nature that sustains us, only to seek ways to mend, to sustain, to protect. We forget, time and again, that we are not separate from nature—we are of it. Our strength was never meant to defy it. Anthropocentrism is the offspring of arrogance, blind to the truth that humanity is but a fleeting ripple in the vast cosmic tide, a momentary spark in the transformation of chaos into order.
To truly grasp the Anthropocene, we must move beyond the role of spectators and return to the embrace of the natural world. Through the wisdom of First Nations, we may rediscover the sacred threads of symbiosis that weave us back into the fabric of life itself.