There is at least one redeeming quality about Play Airlines, the low-cost carrier I’m flying from Reykjavik to Boston. The planes are equipped with cameras that cast a live birds eye view onto screens in the cabin as they fly. Apparently some PJs have this too… I wouldn’t know. 

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I’m flying over northern Nova Scotia and it occurs to me that the dimples, craters, and striations of the earth's surface resemble the skin of a living creature. For this particularly ancient and unbothered patch of earth, the dermis resembles that of an elephant. 

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As someone who embraces the earth’s existence as a living breathing organism, this realisation is both interesting and confirmatory. 

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Thinking of mother earth as a mortal being reframed the role of humans on the planet. In this context we are no longer the centre of the universe, but a colony of minuscule, microbial, organisms. Bacteria, or fungus. 

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What kind of fungus do you want to be? Penicillium the root of Penicillin, a compound that helps its host fight off deathly disease? Psilocybin, which provides its host with a more enlightened and cooperative community? Or black mold, slowly and quietly rotting its host away from the inside? 

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Up to you. 

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In the meantime, let’s try to be in symbiosis with this old elephant of a planet, shall we?

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