When we allow economic forces to dictate access to ownerless necessities, who then are the owners? When a municipality sells the rights of an underground spring to a corporation and then buys that bottled water to distribute to its residents after a disaster, have the true owners of this commodity been compensated? Were the owners of this water ever the municipality? Did the corporation ever own a thing? What happens when we allow investors to speculate on the future price of any commodity? Can a transient resource be owned? What if the spring did exist, but only a small group of people lacking socioeconomic power knew about it? Would they own it? If we could reimagine this as a chemical equation instead of an economic one, are the reactant and product sides balanced?

Invasive species have been invading megafauna spaces causing conservationists to take action. While some are working to restore species or build back ecologies, the rest of us are just scrambling to survive, or are standing in lines in the hope of being allowed to purchase certain fashionable luxury goods. The question remains return back to what? Our version of ecological history is only as expansive as our limited perception bound to a narrow event horizon that repeatedly falls into its own gravity. Should we be working towards an ecosystem that is pre-human, early-human, agrarian, or a claymation moral drama that would run on all networks with pizza rich plotlines?

Borders were artificial agreements of control before the United Nations was ever created to sanction them. Pol Pot viewed Cambodia as having lost its glory and thought of the people within its borders as mere implements for the harvest of crops and working in the countryside, misused tools of an agrarian culture from what felt like a recent and misrepresented past. Projecting the possible force and trajectory of the parabola that would lob the country backward a few hundred years and knowing that too much knowledge broadly distributed was a threat to his power, he set about an erasure. In trying to eliminate any traces of the modern world he aptly embodied it with his destruction of people and culture.

A few years before this, Buckminster Fuller remarked on the scarcity of planes in his youth in comparison to his grandchild growing up in a tall building in New York City. This rate of change is rising exponentially in observable ways, and has compounding momentum in ways that power and capital do. Humanity is the invasive species preventing the return of anything before it. Recognition amongst all persons, those present and those of possible futures, to ensure the continuation of the planet and our species, must center on the question of whether the equation of power and wealth can ever be directed toward higher returns for the collective whole. This is to say that the modern world has been long established and the results are in.