True Human: A Story Big Enough to Carry Us

Sweetwater opens with John Trudell, whom she calls her favorite ancestor. She spent a little time with him before he died. His line is that the great lie is calling this system civilization, when it has been the most brutal system ever imposed on the planet. She knows it can be dangerous to fight over what counts as civilization, especially now. She sees fascist movements rewriting civilizational stories to justify brutal harm. The useful question, she says, is whether a system is civilized if it outsources harm to other people and to the planet. Luke Kemp asks the same question in Goliath's Curse. He calls the thing we name civilization Goliath: a dominance hierarchy.

Anyone still betting on business as usual, she warns, may be in for a rude surprise. The crises compound, and each one sours the others. In True Human she names a single cause under all of them: separation from nature. It is the belief that people can live apart from the biosphere and outsource harm without it coming back. She treats separation as a stage a species like ours tends to pass through once it builds cities, hierarchies and abstractions. The symptoms are planetary and personal. Seven of nine planetary boundaries are crossed. Depression, anxiety, addiction and suicidality run at epidemic levels. She calls the present apex separation.

She calls the moment a planetary crucible. It holds more than eight billion people, the planetary boundaries, AI and other existential technologies, and geopolitics. The item that frightens her most is a crossing in 2020, when the mass of things people have made passed the mass of all living things. Much of that material, she says, is chemistry life has no use for, pulled from the crust in forms biology may never break down. Nobody knows where the hard thresholds are. The trade between built mass and living mass is finite, and she asks the room to be sober and honest about it.

People keep telling her we will live in a more technologized world. To her, expecting to go further into the digital without going insane is itself insane, because we are already going insane. She calls herself a technological optimist. The only version she accepts restrains how much technology we make and use, and refines how we use it. She sees people pushing back already: leaving social media and their phones, choosing analog luxury. The difference is bodily. A walk by the Hudson feels unlike a hectic street. What the moment asks for, she says, is relational maturity: systems that count the harms they send elsewhere, and a human metabolism back in line with the biosphere.

In the dream they had just greeted a storm, thanked it and asked it to be kind. Then Sophia said the line to her, mind to mind. Sweetwater woke up changed. If the room wrote down nothing else, she asked people to photograph this slide and keep it as code or as sutra. A good story, she says, crediting Tyson Yunkaporta, is one we live together. The line gives three questions for any work. Am I harmonizing with nature? Am I harmonizing as nature? Is what we are doing civil? For about a decade she and Daniel Schmachtenberger called the goal civilization 2.0. She now finds the name unsatisfying and leaves the naming to everyone.

She asks the room to take the view that Earth is one of many Gaias, and that each is rare and precious. A Gaia is a planet where water, matter, a local sun and the leftovers of exploding stars boot up life out of chemistry. She spent six months following the origins-of-life researcher Bruce Damer. There was never one common ancestor, she says. Life began as trillions of vesicles, an ecology that came alive at once, like a lake freezing. Nobody knows how those became cells, or how cells became brains and wombs. The saddest sound in the universe, she says she was told, is a Gaia extinguishing itself through one of its own species.

The what of the story is a class of organism that evolves on a planet like this and specializes in coordination, abstraction, story and technology. Slow development and walking upright shape us. She says we have the most visually biased brain of any organism, and that it tilts us toward abstraction. Whales live embedded in sound. Most four-legged animals live in smell and in vibration through their paws. The lion stands with four paws on the ground and senses the whole field around it, which she reads as a code we are called to learn. We have the power of gods, she says, and obviously not the wisdom. The task is to grow that wisdom.

The why came to her, she says, in a very expanded state. We named ourselves Homo sapiens, the wise ones. In her frame, wisdom is not wise unless it tends the continuity and emergence of life. That pulls wisdom back into time: the test is how things went after two thousand generations, or after two. It also treats the whole planet as sentient. Taking God out of the world, she argues, made it easy to do anything to the world, a useful ethic for anyone who wanted to colonize it. She is still working out how to say this to her right-wing friends: being a feeling being, one who feels others, is the foundation of our humanity.

The purpose she names is a human world that hums in harmony with life's song, for beauty, abundance and biodiversity for all. The how is relational, embodied and place-bound. A purely local view, she warns, lets you keep your own place in order and send the disorder elsewhere, and place is now the whole planet. It is restrained, intergenerational, kindred, designed after the mind and body of nature, and it moves between grief and praise. She wants the movement to get exquisitely good at grieving together, and to praise daily the ordinary miracles, like drinkable water in Manhattan. The who is commoners, cosmolocals, bioregionalists and kin, in solidarity with living Indigenous peoples.

The story moves from separation to belonging, from domination to partnership, from controllers to custodians, from owners to guardians, from heroes to kin. It also moves status. In our world status goes to whoever wins finite games, counted in dollars and likes. In many intact cultures it goes to those who practice reciprocity, repair, soul integrity and beauty. She asks the culture makers in the room to change where status goes. A real ceremony is an infinite game, she says, and so are a good dinner with friends and storytelling. At its most hopeful the Anthropocene becomes a blip before what she calls the symbiocene, or the ecozoic. The name can wait.

The last chapter of the book imagines a large enough minority, with just enough capital and coordination, moving the economy from extraction to collaboration and on to what she calls custodial or life-centric. She avoids regenerative, a word she thinks is used sloppily. Technology would become a soul-nourishing exoskeleton. Evolution already knows individualism and tribalism, and the prosocial movement is learning to coordinate groups of groups. Doing that in step with watersheds, biodiversity and each other would be a stage never reached before: becoming Gaian. She urges pushing the Overton window, delicately. A recent coalition on AI said human rather than planetary to keep Steve Bannon at the table. Put humans on top of the pyramid, she warns, and we still ruin ourselves.

Rupture can be disconnection, alienation, depression, climate grief, metacrisis angst, or an organization defunded by trolls who took over the government. It starts when you realize the disconnection is a problem, and that the problem is pushing you to grow. Everyone around us will go through the first three stages, she says, and leaders will have to help people through them. If nobody holds a person in rupture, or the people who do are ideologues of separation, that person turns toward nihilism, narcissism, fascism and self-interest. How movements hold people in rupture will make or break how this goes.

Holding someone in rupture means helping them reckon with separation. That can mean capitalism, the promise of endless progress, an American dream no longer promised to them, or human supremacy. It also has to include encounter. Walk by the Hudson and let the river give permission for some tears. Lie on the grass in Central Park until the body remembers it is supported. Sit with your back against a tree. It can sound magical, she says, and it is ordinary and there every day. Then she hands the room a design question: how do we reverse-engineer an intact culture, one that tends people, nature and technology beautifully over many generations?

She closes with a ritual that came to her spontaneously and follows a pattern she has found in other lineages. Red is life in many Native American traditions, the thread of blood from the womb into a body and out into death. She passes out red thread. Anyone who wants to be committed to life takes a piece, turns to someone and asks: will you commit me to life? The other ties it on and asks the same in return. Nobody can do it alone. The first time she led it, an Indigenous couple recommitted their marriage at midnight on a barn floor in northern Washington State. She open-sources the ritual and asks only that people name where it came from.