(PhD “Rivering” by me, extract from Chapter Shine).

River LiFE in-sees, and it is symial. Look again at gold to read how bacteria and river sediments commune. Or just feel the diatom-slip, your bare feet on silica-films under the water, films coating the bed of a healthy river. 

Diatoms— I love them—despite their smell turning my stomach. They are spectacular bionts, kwelical frustule forms of silica life. They only last a few days, yet they are just a little older than Homo as a family; a living array of opal-quartz jewels, minute glassy beings in a plethora of single-cell shapes around a nucleus, asexually reproducing every damn day. They eat the sun (photosynthetic beings converting energy to sugars)—and busily account for 40% of the oceans’ primary productivity. And they are busy fixing atmospheric nitrogen too—the kind of nitrogen that a lightning strike generates out of thin air. And they have a urea cycle like animals not plants! They are abundant in all water and watery places, but they love brightness, as do I. Some diatoms have become dinotoms, temporary or more permanent endosymbionts within other little beings called flagellates. They are so new to this symbiosis that they have retained their vital genetic character, although their silica skeleton has been gifted to their holobionts.

Continents constantly weather, silica falling through LiFE expressed in bones, connective tissue, in cascades of forms washed through deltas and estuaries, flushing off—or shaken off—continental shelves, and into the pelagic deeps to form a siliceous ooze. Trillions of diatom skeletons form layers of diatomaceous earth (we use it for cat litter and toothpaste), pressurised again to form diatomite, quartz and shimmering opal, ready to be sub-ducted into magma and ejected back up to form new volcanic continental crust. All is connected. What is time? Ha! Silica-rich igneous rocks become the mountains once more, via orogenesis and its vast, slow collision of continents. Exposed to the night stars after millions of years in hiding, silica is raw again to the elements, and down comes the snow and the rain…we walk upon moments, swim amongst fractions. Silica is the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust after oxygen, and cyclically bio-essential. We would not be here if it were not for the rivers that carry it.

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If ever there were more a complex and dynamic system to present before a one-brain judge, or even an AI system of some future AI-driven court room design, it would be River. Offer rivers new and relevant names, even deities made of silica. Personify and perceive ancestral spirit. Relay stories, as we have, always. But in an adversarial human court of law—rivers, river life, river halos of water and life, aquifers, mountains, forests, species, farmed animals, humans, parasites, bacteria…viruses…the silica-carbon geochemical cycle, geology, magnetism, gravity, the Sun, the Moon, relatedness, process, love: nature? Right against Right, where do we find room for all the lawyers? Who dares to separate again, and then speak on behalf of the separated? Courts are human constructs. Do we really need more of those battle lines? Anthropocene could do with its own kind of weathering, eventually to be sub-ducted under more meaningful crusts, melted into magma.

There will be always be problems and resolutions, flow and resistance, between multiple forces of nature. They are natural. Please don’t get me wrong. Between humans, Rights are a legitimate route to criminal justice from a place of severe injustice—sometimes the only route. That is, at least until extreme individualism, hierarchies, and pathocracies are slung into the distant past, and Ethics of Care become the norm. Humans are able to express their own pasts, but also the present and futures. At the same time, they can find commonality among diversity, given the will. Empathy for quieter, stymied voices should mean amplification, and we can take care to really listen, especially in defining and preventing pain and suffering. 

All clans require rules, and criminality is real (diatoms help to forensically track it). But criminality is so often charged by cycles of unnecessary trauma, especially in early childhood. The current inequitable fugue of detachment, fuelling such trauma and planetary destruction helps no-one in the end. Even so, Universal Rights—concrete Rights descended on all like ash from the fires of the powerful—cannot surely articulate uniqueness of relatedness and experience. This is where my deep sense of soul finds justice, in the minutiae/grandeur of relatedness, the silica-enriched connective tissue, and why Ethics of Care (Gilligan) rings so true for me. They mean diverse sensitive responses to diverse experiences of diverse beings and kinships (nurture or nature). They mean circles, not polar opposites.

This means case by case. 

This means panels of advisors, thoughtful and considerate of childhoods, relationships, places and times; yet guilt, nor rehabilitating forms of punishment, are not forgotten.

Perhaps a less arguable legal declaration is one that ensures all humans have access to those Ethics of Care, learning and sharing the real wisdom of relationship, living place, and safe place in an ever moving world. Call them Ethights. Roundtable Ethights. We don’t need adversarial systems. Even against increasing forces of destruction, I ask we be less aggressive about our responses. We don’t need the culture of testosterone fuelled warring terms like “battle,” or a “fight” in court, or even the assertion of enforcement before the utterance of kinship, mentorship, and responsibility. Look instead to the symbiotic ways of nature, and the silica cycle, of which we are all part – those ethights.  

It won’t be easy. Nothing good comes easy, not even love. But in this way, like the removal of river-damming concrete (also silica-derived), conflict tends to give way to connection. Read the sedimentary varves, the layers upon layers in the swirls of a beautiful river pebble, to glimpse seasonal pasts and otherwise volatile futures. Look at the bone beds of catastrophe, or slick anoxic mudstones made under pressure, black without bioturbation, without LiFE. I think we can do better. 

ETHIGHTS ~ eeth-ites, or ˈiːθaɪt (IPA transcription) ~ legal declarations that ensure access to Ethics of Care (Gilligan) as a route to justice from human actions, for both organic and inorganic causes.

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