Hold fast to your agency. Grow up. Help bring about the better story — the story of who we might yet become, as true humans.

I think a lot these days about AI and whether it is rendering the act – and the effort – of writing pointless.

It was a thought that re-surfaced as I was reading Samantha Sweetwater’s book, TRUE HUMAN: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World, to review it for Meander Magazine.

The starting point for Samantha Sweetwater’s book True Human is that things are pretty whack here on Spaceship Earth and the humans are a problem. But we don’t have to be.

Born in 1972, she’s sensed since childhood how incongruous the human project is, to be striving so hard to win at life by literally shitting all over Life. Wherein the victory?

Her book’s call to adventure starts with this question: “What does it mean to be a human when our way of being is unravelling the biosphere we depend on?” She asks a variation of this question, again and again, calling it the great initiation of our time. 

Sweetwater frames humanity in 2026 as something like an adolescent creator species — newly separated from its planetary mother, newly powerful, and not yet mature enough to wield that power wisely. We’ve built global technologies and economies, learned to harvest vast amounts of energy and materials, and scaled ourselves across the planet. Now we’re entering the stage where we must either learn to coordinate our intelligence and tools in alignment with the living systems that sustain us… or collapse both civilization and the biosphere in the attempt.

More pointedly: will we destroy our mother and trash our home because we don’t want to grow up?

As the mother of a 13 year old, I am fascinated by Sweetwater’s insight that our planet’s evolution is at its adolescent moment.

Separation from the mother is necessary; individuation is part of growing up. The development of an “I” — distinct, capable, creative — is essential. When that process is held well, it leads to maturity: taking one’s place in the wider community of life as a collaborator rather than a conqueror.

Get it wrong, and the consequences are catastrophic.

And the sound, says Sweetwater, of a complex planet collapsing before its time, is the saddest sound in the universe. 

We can be part of a different soundtrack.

Along the way, the book intersects in surprising ways with my own creative conundrum about writing in the age of AI. Sweetwater keeps circling back to a deeper question: what does it mean to be a creative, complex, intelligent being at this moment in the planet’s trajectory? If we possess the power to destroy the life systems we depend on, what should we be doing with that creative capacity instead?

For Sweetwater, the roots of our current civilizational polycrisis lie in a domination mindset — a worldview based on power-over, separation, and the story that we are alone and apart from the rest of life.

This idea that has never really made sense to her in all her years and fields of seeking, And a seeker Sweetwater has been, in cultural niches as varied as yoga, permaculture, dance, meditation, and systems thinking, dogged everywhere by a pervasive agnosticism that kept Mystery at arms length. 

It’s hard when God has been co-opted as a tool for the Power Over/dominator cultures that are perpetrators of the polycrisis, to point us back to God, but Sweetwater insists that we can’t meet this moment without some sense of the sacred. 

The trouble with the way the sacred has been presented to us—enlightenment—is as a path of transcendence, of rising up and above, away from the mundane, messy matters of the human body and the Earth-bound. Her insistence is that the answer is in the muck, in the material, the body, the relationship, in kinship and context.

This perspective will feel familiar to anyone drawn to earth-centered or non-dual traditions — Indigenous cosmologies, herbalism, Tantra, paganism, Gnosticism, and other “heretical” streams that have long treated the material world not as something to escape, but as something holy.

But her earth-honouring is curiously cosmic in scope. She writes that our planet is not the only Gaia planet in the galaxy, and this felt like the truly energizing insight in her work. While much of the intellectual scaffolding for Sweetwater’s thesis comes from a host of thinkers – from Joanna Macy to Daniel Schmachtenberger to James Lovelock and Ken Wilber, it’s her imagined galactic travel that intrigued me, and felt like a new and original contribution to how we might approach the polycrisis.

The Fermi Paradox asks why, given the abundance of Sun-like stars in the Milky Way, and the probability of intelligent life on other planets, we haven’t seen evidence of it. Where are the others? One response proposed by Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum in 2010, is that a truly advanced civilization, capable of inter-stellar travel, either destroys itself in the effort, or chooses not to develop the technology. A truly advanced civilization would choose planetary balance over interstellar colonization. 

And it might come down to our relationship with technology and making…

When an idea moves through your body, via your mind and out your hand or your mouth, it is no small thing. It gains a charge, an energy, a kind of traction in this realm of matter, that enables it to not just materialize but to actually matter. It might once have been thought of as magic, spell-casting, this putting words to things, naming, anointing.

We’re surrendering this agency, this magic, in spades, because the polycrisis is so alarming… but Sweetwater keeps pointing us back: creating is embodied work, and embodiment is all we have to work with in this moment. It makes sense that a dancer would point us in this direction. 

In the end, True Human is as much an invitation as it is a diagnosis – an invitation to co-create and embody the world we want — one that centres life rather than power. In the long game, maturity is understanding that what matters most are the seeds we plant now, even if we never see their fruit.

This moment, Sweetwater suggests, is the mother of all initiations.

Volume 3 of Meander magazine is available at https://www.meandermagazine.earth/product/volume-three-wildness