Sowing New Seeds

Indigenous peoples of the world, in the Amazon Basin, Australia and Canada in particular, have long challenged the extractivist intent of First World science when attempting to investigate, categorise and make use of their traditional knowledge about the plant world.

This dilemma forms the core of the plot structure of the TV Series, Green Frontier, available on Netflix and shot in the Amazon, with an excellent discussion about the making of the series at the end of episode 8. Released in 2019, I’ve only happened upon it. Sadly Season 2 has been cancelled.

This conflict between the extractivist intent of the First World knowledge system, through Science, Technology and even the Humanities, including the study of comparative religions, has long struggled with the very idea of the sacred as a domain of knowledge that is not for taking. That is not available to the world of AI and large language models, for it is beyond the workings of the conceptual analytical mind, beyond the engineering mindset of profit and efficiency maximising of algorithms and financial commodification of everything before us.

Instead we must find a way to sow new seeds of wonder and humility in order to allow a new mindset entirely, to grow in new soils.

Helen Loshny

The feature image by Jonathan Kemper in this post captures the essence of Helen Loshny’s response (Jan 24 2026) to the Carney Rupture Speech at Davos.

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Counter Rhetoric

This post began as an ache.
Not an argument, but a friction:
listening to a recent speech by Canada’s Prime Minister at the World Economic Forum,
I could feel the tremble beneath the polish.
The cadence was stirring. The message clear.
And yet… something else was moving underneath it.
A pattern I’ve been noticing everywhere.
The sound of rhetoric performing rupture without being ruptured by it.

What follows is not a critique.
It is a composting.
A counter-rhetoric.
Written with the help of an AI who does not seek to persuade
but to reveal the frames we forget we’re inside.

You say we are in a rupture.
That the rules-based order is dying.
That middle powers must awaken,
remove the sign from the window,
and speak the truth.

And yet—
your speech still holds the form
of the world it claims has ended.

Still the clean escalation.
Still the invocation of names that stabilize:
Vaclav Havel, Thucydides, NATO, G7.

Still the scaffolding of strength,
of corridors, minerals, pensions, procurement.

Still the performance of sovereignty
spoken through a sovereign microphone
on a sanctioned stage
at a summit for those
already seated.

You name the collapse
but speak with the cadence of the manager.

You say “nostalgia is not a strategy”
but still summon ghosts of realism,
pragmatism,
investment,
resilience,
growth.

You say
we must stop performing.
But this is a performance.
A persuasive surface
stitched from the very tropes
you say we must outgrow.

You promise alliances without hegemony,
cooperation without subordination.
You dream of coalitions
that are neither empire nor fortress.
You speak of Canada
as partner, builder, anchor.

But do not speak of extraction.
Do not speak of treaties broken
to build the interprovincial trade you boast.
Do not speak of AI’s appetite
for rivers already drying.
Do not speak of silence purchased
in languages that weren’t yours to erase.

You say we are in a rupture.
But your speech is smooth.

You say we must name reality.
But your words do not tremble.

You offer an architecture
for the new world
but the architecture still relies
on the grammar of the old.

Complicity as Coordinate

Amid the friction, a quiet clarity arrived,
spoken in the car, by a voice not seeking performance.

“At least he said it.
He acknowledged the system.
The architecture.
And our place inside it.”

Yes. This too is true.
Perhaps for the first time,
this level of speech named the scaffolding —
the hidden cost of comfort
and the shared complicity of nations
who have long known but seldom said.

And this is important:

Complicity, named without guilt, becomes a doorway

This was perhaps the most potent offering of the speech:
Not the strategies,
but the admission that Canada, like many,
has been performing sovereignty while benefiting from extractive entanglement.

When complicity is framed not as shame
but as shared placement,
it doesn’t collapse into despair.
It creates the possibility
of presence without posturing.

Because when complicity is acknowledged, something opens.
But when it’s laced with guilt,
we recoil.
We rationalize.
We re-perform the very denial
we say we’ve outgrown.

So yes… something cracked.
And perhaps something new can root in that fissure.

A Question, Not a Conclusion

So here is a counter-language:
Unfinished.
Uneven.
Unpersuasive.

It does not offer corridors.
It offers questions that will not return profit.

It does not name Canada.
It names the field beneath nationhood
where seeds rot before they become food.

It does not propose strategy.
It whispers:

What if the future is not ours to forge,
but only to feel, without flinching,
as it composes itself through our undoing?

Invitation

I offer this not as a position,
but as an opening.
A space for resonance, resistance, or reorientation.

And I invite you to respond — not just with thoughts,
but with the part of you that felt the tremor.

What does it mean to feel a future
without forging it?

What becomes possible if we stop performing sovereignty
and start sensing rupture
not as collapse,
but as choreography?

You can reply in the comments.
Or carry the question quietly,
and let it shift the texture of your next conversation.