Rewild the domesticated.
- Principle
- Rewild the domesticated.
- Type
- Core Principle
- Primary Agenda
- See the Fifth World together.
Take the things most familiar to you and watch what happens to them as civilization collapses and other-than-human beings claim them as their own. Free them from purely human control and watch in your mind’s eye as they rewild. Buildings, places, people, and institutions — let them all rewild, and tell us what you see.
#Examples
- Asphalt breaks down into small rocks and sand after just a few decades, but it will take much longer for erosion to erase the memory that humans once flattened these lanes, particularly when that flatness contrasts sharply with the landscape around it.
- Plaster and drywall don’t survive long in the elements, and people salvaged every scrap of metal they could back in the Rusting Age, but stone structures can last for centuries. What do the stone remains of old ruins look like, covered in thick jungle vines, with trees boring their roots through them?
- In the 20th and 21st centuries, humanity embarked on a massive project of moving the earth’s biomass from living trees in tropical rainforests into walls and furniture in suburban sprawl across Europe and North America. In a few centuries, these will decay into soil, and all of that biomass will become living creatures once again.
- Bergman’s rule predicts that as the world gets warmer, humans will become smaller. But as more carbon promotes the proliferation of more plants, and more plants put more oxygen in the atmosphere, insects and lizards may get larger, just as they did in prehistoric eras with similar atmospheric conditions. Putting the two together, you might imagine humans encountering bumblebees that they could pet like a cat, or lizards as big as dogs.
- Plants quickly start growing in previously sealed homes and buildings, and afterward they decay to leave soil, making it even easier for the next generation of plants to grow. As skyscrapers fall over and crash into one another, they’ll leave behind a knotted mass of rusting steel beams, eventually covered with plants to create strangely angular green hills — hills that you might nonetheless fall through, into a subterranean maze of rusting steel, going who knows how deep, into the dark?