Performed by ecologies: How Homo sapiens could subvert present-day futures

There is little doubt that humankind faces an environmental crisis in which the dinosaurs’ extinction will look like a children’s tea party staged by drunken clowns. But still the vast majority – at least in so-called developed countries – behave as if that prospect is a chimera. Globally such denial is now ecologically systemic, and so I call that behaviour ‘performance compulsion’. This conundrum is explored below through an elementary conceit. While humans assume that they possess agencies unique among the species, we are fundamentally performed by Earth’s ecologies. Hence, the only hope of averting our extinction is to perform more responsively and ethically with those ecologies.