Abstract
Our human project of living on earth seems to have reached a crisis point, one which may entail the collapse of large parts of the planet's ecosystem. Although we as a civilisation probably know how to avert this collapse, there is very little likelihood—although still some hope—that we are going to do so. We know how to do it technically speaking; but we don't seem to know how to mobilise our social energy in order to take the necessary steps. This illuminates the sense in which, from another point of view, our project has always already been in crisis: we have never known a good human way to live on earth. As Rilke says in the First Duino Elegy (my own translation).
Even the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.