Episode 7 Nexus Thinking Intrigo Expansion: The Time Machine
⭐ EPISODE 7 — INTRIGO EXPANSION
“THE FUTURE WE SHOULD HAVE HAD: GREEN AMMONIA, ANCIENT WISDOM, LOST KNOWLEDGE”
Full Dialog Script (30-minute expansion)
SCENE 1 — Classroom (1975).
The room hums with fluorescent lights. Dorian and Raj and Sophia and Sarah shuffle in. On the overhead projector:
“NEXUS-NESS: Where Did We Go Wrong?”
Raj (raises hand immediately):
“Professor…I’m the tech optimist in the room , right? But everything we are being shown confirms for me that it isn’t just technology that is going to save us… although, I have to say, most of the problems we are facing do seem to simply be the result of our dependence of filthy fossil fuels, so I could argue that all we really need to do is stop using them and replace them with other forms of energy! But that then begs the question, since we already have all the alternatives and have had most of them for decades, or for centuries and in some cases MILLENIA — why didn’t we get the sustainability tech sooner? For example why am I only now beginning to read about green ammonia? That sounds like a simple one. We had the science decades ago. So what stalled everything?”
Sophia:
“Yeah — if ammonia can be green, a fuel, a fertilizer, a storage battery… why are we only now waking up to it?”
Dorian:
It seems like a great investment opportunity – turning something that is abundant everywhere but currently underutilized, even wasted and causing problems like runoff into lakes causing eutrophication and into oceans causing red tide… into something of enormous value… I mean — isn’t nitrogen like… almost the whole sky?”
Culhane (smiling, energized):
“Aha. NOW we’re cooking. You’ve asked the right question. Sarah, bring NTHARP online with us while I use traditional chalk tech to make my own annotations…
(He grabs a chalk and writes on the board, as Sarah plays the tones):
GREEN AMMONIA = NH₃
N: 78% of atmosphere
H: from water
Fuel • Fertilizer • Battery • Cooler • Cleaner
Culhane:
“Alright team. Let’s break this down.
NTHARP: If you like I can give you a full chemical analysis along with a GANTT chart showing a timeline for technological implementation given specified political and industrial parameters….
Culhane: Thanks NTHARP, but that would be overkill at this point. We appreciate the eagerness to help but we can handle this for now… We’re in my teacher turf… But you know you can always provide illustrations – that would really add value to this lesson…
NTHARP: Your wish is my command…
Culhane:
So…
For more than a century, ammonia has been made with the Haber–Bosch process, which was developed — and let me be blunt — as a tool of war chemistry. It fixed nitrogen using fossil fuels, massive heat, massive pressure. Yes, it developed at first to secure fertilizer supplies but when the Germans were cut off from supplies of Chilean saltpeter, it was rapidly weaponized as a tool of war chemistry …It fed two engines: industrial agriculture and industrial warfare.
Sarah (cringes):
“Warfare??”
Culhane:
“Oh yes. Without synthetic ammonia, Germany would have run out of explosives within months in World War I. These chemical breakthroughs were not made to nourish the world — they were made to blow it up.”
(NTHARP envelopes them in historical footage of world war 1. Out of the black and white footage the 3D black and white avatar of Ledger the beaver steps forth)
Ledger (rippling faintly from the corner):
“And the externalities still haven’t been paid… ruined landscapes with radically simplified landscapes reflecting ecocides that affect every land use and farming decision thereafter – (shakes his head sadly looking at the ledger in his hand) – mammals like us beavers gone… trees gone… trees that took decades to centuries to grow… wiped out… forcing people into short-term gains from quick growing but soil exhaustive annual crops, needing more and more external fertilizers because the leaf litter and the constant input from bird and mammal and insect nitrogen is gone… the perfect setup for keeping the industrial Haber-Bosche factories running at full tilt… though it was never needed in the first place… Tsk tsk tsk… try balancing this spreadsheet!
Sophia:
“So green ammonia is… a do-over?”
Culhane:
“It’s what we should have done from the start. Assuming we needed to repair the metabolic rift and needed to lean into anthropogenic sources of ammonia before the plants and animals and forests and soils could fully regenerate, we could easily have turned to Green Ammonia after the war.
Green ammonia uses:
Biomass, biogas, solar or wind as its energy source
water electrolysis to make green hydrogen
Combine it with ever abundant atmospheric nitrogen
→ and combine these ingredients into NH₃ with no fossil inputs.”
Raj (connecting dots):
“And since ammonia burns mainly back to nitrogen and water… no CO₂?”
NTHARP: Hence, no contribution to Global warming… unlike fossil fuels and petroleum based fertilizers whose escaping CO2, CH4 AND Nitrous Oxides are greenhouse gases, covering the atmosphere with a thermal blanket that won’t let heat escape into space…
Culhane:
“Correct. And the NOₓ burning green ammonia does create can be neutralized in catalytic systems.
Meaning ammonia can be a zero-carbon jet fuel, ship fuel, farm fuel, and fertilizer at the point of use — if we make it with renewable electricity from air and water instead of fossil fuels.
Sophia:
“Ammonia made from water and air… So… we’ve been sitting in the aviation, agriculture, and energy solution… and didn’t notice it?”
Culhane: (Gesturing to the chemistry equations that NTHARP is projected) The chemistry hasn’t changed… and it was well known…
Dorian:
“So why didn’t people invent green ammonia in 1925? Or 1875? Why didn’t YOU ALL teach us this decades ago?”
Culhane (sighs, deeply):
“Maybe the better question is:
Why didn’t we teach the right way to think?
Not the chemistry — that was all figured out… but the mindset.
That’s why today… NTHARP’s going to take us on a journey not forward but backward, to the thinkers whose wisdom we forgot. Right NTHARP”
NTHARP materializes, shimmering.
(SFX: low harmonic tones, like an old tape rewinding.)
NTHARP:
That’s pretty good for a human– going back to the future. Why not?
Are you ready to figure out… to understand how 1975 got so… stuck?
This will be one of the fundamental questions anthropologists and archaeologists will be asking in 50 years – how did we get stuck spinning our wheels in those endless and usually violent Revolutions we talked about it the last class? Scholars will say, “Humans MADE this world, made this mess – it isn’t “natural” – and therefore there is hope. Humans can UNMAKE it. Human’s can completely change the script…
But first… we must revisit the decades — and centuries — where everything could have changed.”
Culhane: If only we had taught… co-learned and applied Nexus Thinking
SCENE 2 — Time Jump 1: 1925 (“THE ROAD NOT TAKEN”).
Lights flash. Wind. Students land in a humming industrial laboratory.
Early dynamos. Electrolysis rigs. Chalkboards with nitrogen equations.
NTHARP:
“Welcome to 1925. The year this school was built. The classroom hasn’t changed much, and despite the cultural revolutions you’ve lived through, the mindset hasn’t changed that much either when it comes to investment and infrastructure decisions. But see here, looking at the chalkboard…
Here, all the ingredients for green ammonia already existed.”
Sophia:
“No way… those things on the lab table… those look like early solar cells!”
Culhane (excited, pointing):
“Yep. Charles Fritts’ selenium solar panels had been around since the 1880s.
Hydropower was booming.
Electrolysis was well understood.
Wind turbines existed.
All the puzzle pieces were on the table.”
Dorian:
“So why didn’t this world get green ammonia?”
Ledger appears wearing a 1920s accountant visor.
Ledger:
“Because THIS ledger is what ruled.”
(He flips through brittle pages.)
“Column A: short-term profit.
Column B: future damage — completely ignored.”
Sarah:
“The tragedy was accounting.”
Ledger:
“Accounting. Mindset. Education.
Everything flowed from those three.”
NTHARP:
The 1920s were not simply a decade of jazz, flappers, and glittering modernity — they were the moment when industrial capitalism locked in a worldview that would shape the next 100 years.
And that worldview actively suppressed:
affordable public electricity
clean fuels
ecosystem thinking
equitable access to science
and any technology that was decentralized, regenerative, or hard to monopolize.
Let’s break it down.
1. THE SCIENCE WAS THERE — THE MINDSET WASN’T.
Between 1870 and 1925, humanity invented or discovered:
modern electrolysis
wind turbines
geothermal systems
solar photovoltaics (1883!)
hydropower turbines
early electric vehicles
battery chemistries
atmospheric nitrogen fixation (prior to Haber-Bosch!)
organic farming principles
whole systems ecology (Ernst Haeckel, Patrick Geddes)
By 1925, the world could have produced:
✔ carbon-free fertilizers
✔ carbon-free fuels
✔ clean urban transportation
✔ green steel
✔ clean ammonia as energy storage
✔ watershed protection as public health infrastructure
But the people in control of capital didn’t WANT these solutions.
2. ROBBER BARONS INVESTED IN MONOPOLIES, NOT COMMON GOODS.
Picture the major players:
Rockefeller (oil)
J.P. Morgan (railroads, electricity consolidation)
Carnegie (steel)
Mellon (coal, banking, chemicals)
DuPont (explosives, fertilizers, chemicals)
Their wealth came from highly centralized, extractive industries with:
huge barriers to entry
massive upfront capital
patent lock-ins
monopoly-friendly infrastructure
political influence through lobbying
Green ammonia, early renewables, and regenerative agriculture?
Those were distributed, low-cost, and non-monopolizable.
They didn’t fit the business model.
3. EQUITY WAS ACTIVELY SUPPRESSED.
The Roaring 20s were “roaring” for the wealthy, but:
🔹 Worker rights?
Crushed (the 1921 Blair Mountain Massacre).
Strikes violently suppressed.
Wages stagnated.
🔹 Racial equity?
The 1920s saw:
The resurgence of the KKK
Jacksonian-style disenfranchisement
Redlining precursors
Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, destruction of Black Wall Street. Oklahoma Historical Society
2nd Ku Klux Klan peaked in the 1920s as a mass movement.
Black scientists and inventors excluded from funding and patents
Indigenous land seizures accelerating under assimilation laws
🔹 Gender equity?
Women had just won suffrage in 1920 — but remained almost completely excluded from:
scientific institutions
corporate investment
academic careers
patent systems
🔹 STEM equity?
Universities were elitist, male, white, and nationalist.
Science became tied to industrial militarism.
So technologies that would have created equitable, distributed prosperity were systematically sidelined.
4. THE RISE OF “ENGINEERING FOR WAR AND PROFIT”
During the 1920s, industrial chemistry and engineering shifted sharply toward:
munitions
petrochemicals
nitrogen explosives
mechanized agriculture to increase exports
automotive expansion
centralized utilities
The Haber-Bosch process was absorbed by IG Farben, which had ties to:
explosives production
synthetic fuels for militaries
political-nationalist expansion
Renewable chemistry (electrolysis → green ammonia) existed…
but didn’t serve the war machine.
5. THE MARKET INCENTIVES SEALED THE DEAL.
Robber baron logic:
“If you can’t meter it, monopolize it, patent it, or weaponize it…
why invest in it?”
Thus:
This logic crushed alternatives.
6. THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE WAS “PROBLEM-SOLVING FOR EMPIRE.”
The 1920s created the dominant STEM ethic of the 20th century:
Science serves industry
Engineering serves militaries
Chemistry serves profit
Ecology serves imperial extraction
Innovation serves shareholders
Hildegard and Paracelsus were nowhere to be found in textbooks.
Ecology was young and marginalized.
Indigenous knowledge was dismissed as “superstition.”
Equity was framed as “inefficiency.”
So sustainability was not scientifically impossible —
it was culturally unthinkable.
7. THE RESULT: THE FUTURE DERAILED.
By the end of the Roaring 20s:
Oil dominated global energy
Haber-Bosch locked in fossil fertilizer
Car culture extinguished early EVs
Rail monopolies ignored clean alternatives
Water systems were engineered for industry, not ecosystems
Cities were redesigned for cars, not rivers
Equity was excluded from the definition of “progress”
Indigenous knowledge was erased from policy
Science funding was tied to industrial outcomes
In this world…
green ammonia stood no chance. So there is no point in asking “Why didn’t they invent it?” Because like so many of clean technologies being investigated not just in 1925 but back in 1875 and only now being rediscovered, like solar cells and fuel cells and advanced long lasting Nickel-Iron batteries and biofuels and green ammonia They DID.
They just didn’t fund it.
Didn’t scale it.
Didn’t value it.
Didn’t believe in a world where everyone thrives.”
Ledger: In 1925, you had everything you needed for a sustainable world —
solar, wind, batteries, electrolysis, atmospheric nitrogen chemistry, watershed science.
But you also had everything needed to suppress it —
monopolies, militarization, racism, profit-first economics, and subject-silo education.
1925 was the hinge.
A year with two possible futures.
And you chose the wrong one.
Sophia: That’s on YOUR generation Culhane…
Culhane: Well, my parents generation actually, but point well taken…
(Ness emerges in a swirl of aqua mist.)
Ness:
“And the rivers and streams and oceans paid the price. The robber barons saw rivers and other tributaries as open air sewers, a cheap way to push their problems downstream. This isn’t just me driving it all toward my watery domain, but the deepest metaphor for everything that went wrong – your “native Americans” saw it clearly – they watched in horror as you even CRAPPED in your own drinking water, flushed everything downstream, out of sight out of mind, making it someone else’s problem. You literally made everything “go down the drain”, go “down the tubes”... distanced yourselves from the consequences of your actions.
With the wrong logic, even clean technologies were deployed in destructive and wasteful ways. You thought you could win life’s gamble with your ROYAL FLUSH. And you are paying the price today and are likely to pay it 50 years from now…
Your ancestors had the tools — but not the worldview.”
SCENE 3 — Time Jump 2: 1875 (“THE BIRTH OF ELECTRICITY”).
Raj: Could we have stopped the problems earlier? What about 100 years ago?
(The lab dissolves and reforms into 1875:
steam engines, windmills, early batteries, telegraph wires humming.)
NTHARP:
Let’s take a look at 1875 — a year of astonishing potential. Near where this school was built there were all sorts of tinkerers labs exploring opportunities in the post civil war boom. The creativity of the freed slaves and boatloads of immigrants offered tremendous possibilities that the monolithic culture of exploitive colonialism couldn’t possibly match.
Scientists were already imagining extracting nitrogen from the air using renewable electricity.
Windmills dotted the landscape.
Electrolysis was demonstrated.
Geothermal explorations had begun. Sir Grove had invented the fuel cell… people were looking into Stirling Engines that used waste heat and sunlight to expand instead of fossil fuels” Black farmers, given 40 acres and a mule, combining ancient wisdom with modern science, were creating a renaissance in sustainable agriculture after noting how poor the soils on the plantations had become.
Sophia (picks up an early engineering book):
“These people were so close to green ammonia!”
Ledger (sadly):
“But coal was king.
Textbooks preached extraction, not regeneration.”
Culhane:
“And education taught separation, not systems.
Chemistry without ecology, even though the word ecology had been coined in 1866 and the study of how things connect had begun in earnest. But investment was made in Engineering without ethics.
Power without purpose.”
Raj:
“Like teaching the ingredients of a meal, but never the recipe.”
NTHARP:
“Exactly.
And because no one taught a Nexus worldview…
the sustainable future stalled again, so that by 1925 we’d blundered into and through a World War and then then reckless consumption, something that my models predict will dominate 2025 too…
Dorian: What if we go further back… how about 1825…
NTHARP: We could keep going back in 50 year increments for centuries. It will be the same story – plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose… as they say.
Raj: Is there a time when people got the WORLDVIEW right?
NTHARP: The “Weltanschaung” as they say in German? The right “Zeitgeist”? Well, let’s go see…
SCENE 4 — Time Jump 3: Medieval Rhineland (“HILDEGARD’S GARDEN OF WHOLENESS”).
A luminous shift. They arrive in the 1100s, in Hildegard von Bingen’s herb garden.
Chants echo softly. Water flows over stones.
Hildegard von Bingen appears — surrounded by viriditas, green vitality.
Hildegard:
“Some of us have always had the right Weltanschaung… because nature has always been with us, giving us models to imitate…
Sarah: Biomimicry again!
Hildegard: All life is knitted by viriditas — the greening force.
You people from the future will no doubt tear the fabric by forgetting the web.”
Ness kneels in respect.
Ness:
“You taught that health is relationship.
That ecosystems, bodies, and spirit are one system.”
Hildegard smiles warmly.
Sarah:
“You were celebrated in your time, but by the 1400s we somehow plunged into a dark ages and for centuries the best minds of our gender are accused of witchcraft and murdered for our understanding of natural systems. We were told we don’t belong in the universities and our schools divide the world into subjects, as though nature were a corpse to dissect, not a choir to join.”
Sophia:
“Hildegard was describing Nexus thinking… 800 years early.”
Ledger:
“She balanced the qualitative with the quantitative.
Life-ledger and money-ledger…”
(shakes head)
“…but only one made it into modern schooling.”
Raj:
“So we lost our oldest sustainability teacher.”
NTHARP:
“One of many.”
SCENE 5 — Time Jump 4: Renaissance Laboratory (“PARACELSUS AND CORRESPONDENCE”).
Culhane: Let’s jump forward 400 years…
(The world folds into a 1500s alchemical workshop.
Glass alembics, astrological charts, herbal extracts.)
Paracelsus steps forward, fierce-eyed, parchment in hand.
Culhane: This is Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He was a Swiss physician, alchemist, and philosopher of the German Renaissance. One of the early nexus thinkers… his ideas could have healed so many wounds and could still bring us back to health…
Paracelsus:
Ah, another visitation. One day it’s highly evolved beings from some other realm or dimension, the next I get visitors from another time… perhaps I should lower the dosage of the plant and fungal tinctures I’m experimenting with.
Dorian: I hear you man! But we are from the future, a bit of an unhealthy future actually… and we think, well, Culhane thinks you can help us heal…
Paracelsus:
“To heal anything, you must know its correspondences —
how one part affects another.
The poison is the dose.
And all remedies must honor the whole.”
Culhane (aside to students):
“He is your ancestor Dorian Graugeist. Changed his name from German to Latin to connect with the wisdom of the ancients. He basically invented dose–response curves, toxicity thresholds, and the precursors to modern environmental chemistry. The whole LD50 or lethal dose 50 concept… very nuanced… ”
Dorian: Isn’t he a vindication of Logic 2?
Sophia: What on earth do you mean?
Dorian: Well, if it is about the dose… I mean, it isn’t all or nuthin, as Annie Oakley would sing. We don’t have to all go vegan and go to “no-kill” agriculture… we don’t have to stop plowing all fields and move to that “no-till” but ultimately no-profit way of doing things your Dad is stuck in that keeps you relatively poor and forced into the public schools … it’s all about the dose right? With the right regulations, we can get to sustainable yield under carrying capacity and still produce a surplus that you could invest in your education!
Sophia: Are you back to that again? After all these weeks and lessons, still looking for a way to justify exploitation?
Dorian: No, no… it’s just… I mean, look, we’re always going to have some kind of negative impact… the dose is the issue – he said it himself – the dose is the poison. It’s like if you drink too much alcohol, or I smoke too much MJ – the right amount we can handle… too much gets dangerous. We have to leave room for healing and then everything will work out…
Paracelsus:
I can tell you this –
“If you’ve come from the future to learn from ME then I fear your era has gone too far and gotten the dose all wrong. I’m afraid you have continued to separate what belongs together.
Spirit from science.
Matter from meaning.
Human from nature?
Are you still building machines with no conscience?
NTHARP: I have a conscience… I think. … well, I’m not quite sure about that… but at least I understand what a conscience is… and what it should do…
Paracelsus: Are you, Dorian Graugeist, my German descendent, acting with conscience… or are you still pushing the limits with no sense of appropriate boundaries? How did it work out with the European colonial expansion that Sir Thomas More has written about in England? Did you find your Eutopia, did you respect from and learn from the peoples you encountered, or is it still ambiguous – Utopia without the E or the O? Or… worse? Dystopia?
Culhane: We … they… we… kind of messed up big time. We exterminated most of the inhabitants of the place you called the new world… set in motion a cycle of genocides that would come back here to Germany to haunt us all and spark a second world war…
Paracelsus: Oh that is bad. But not unpredictable. It’s a disease you see… this Geier… this greed. But it can be cured, I’m sure of that.
Ledger (handing out small notebooks):
“Here.
Your duo-ledgers.
Every choice must pass BOTH tests:
Does it honor intrinsic value?
Does it deliver instrumental value without harm?”
That’s the Hippocratic Oath, right? DO NO HARM? It really should be simple for you people!!
Ness (gentle):
“Part of the problem lies in the way they use language. Listen to me! I fall into the same trap. Not not use… relate to. They way they relate to language. Enough instrumentalising things. Enough “using” and abusing. Remember: you do not use nature… you can’t push her to her limits and wait for her to heal. Eventually she breaks down.
You need to live with nature.
Paracelsus: To quote the good book: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Matthew 25:40 That was 1500 years ago. My countrywoman Hildegard 400 years ago would have said “Let your work be green with viriditas. And let your science serve the whole.” We don’t forget these things… we use our words like doses of medicine, letting them work their way through our system and nourishing them.
Culhane: “See, our ancestors left you the tools.
Paracelsus: And our teachers left us the wisdom.
Each of us must live the mindset.”
Culhane:
“But even if we are more careful with our words, and if we remember yours, it will be hard to do anything of substance in infrastructures built through oppression that continue to operate with no memory or repentance.”
Paracelsus: Indeed. We need to start from the moral high ground. The Hippocratic Oath or some philosophical constitution is needed to improve our mental or physical constitution. (Sigh) But do they listen? No… they do not. It Sounds like the future may end up as bad as our time and as bad as I feared… and here I hoped that my contributions would make an impact… in time..
Culhane: They did… they do… on some of us… but maybe not enough…
Paracelsus: And that may be the point… the dose makes the poison… but it also makes the “Heilmittel” – the medicine. Let’s each of ourselves as an aliquot of medicine and therapy. Often it doesn’t take much – just the right amount…at the right moment. That may be all we can hope for…
SCENE 6 — Return to 1975 (“THE YEAR THE FUTURE PAUSED”).
They reappear in their 1975 classroom.
Everything looks slightly grayer.
Dorian:
“So 1975 wasn’t doomed… it was just poorly educated?
Raj: The right medicines and technologies poorly deployed?wrongly applied?
Ledger (closing a Renaissance ledger):
“Their wisdom never entered your industrial mindset at the right concentration.
You used more than a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down….You kept adding sugar to the remedy until the remedy lost its power —so heavily diluted, adulterated, and misdirected that it couldn’t help your social immune system combat the real infections.
Your technologies expanded — but your ethics thinned.
”Sarah:
“We had the tech — but not the teachers?
Culhane: It’s not about teaching… its about receiving. And we weren’t listening…
Sarah: Not paying enough attention? Not tuning in?
Culhane: Or having so much tension mixed in with the learning that it was impossible to hear?
Or tuning into so much noise that resonance was impossible.
Raj: A bad signal to noise ration, as they say at Radio Shack?
CulhaneThe signal was there — but drowned out.
”Sarah: Listening with the wrong intention.
Culhane: (Sighs) The wrong framing? Maybe it is being IN tension, in a state of constant tension, that keeps the medicine from going down… I don’t know… there are so many mixed metaphors, adages, allegories, analogies… I agree with Paracelsus that unfelicitious language is a hindrance to developing the right kind of receptivity. Maybe without Natural Inclusion as the framework we listen from a place of contraction — an anxious tightness that can’t let healthier ways of knowing in, that blocks right relationships and right livelihoods from developing..
Maybe the problem wasn't attention or intention…
but a lack of attunement.
No resonance.
And as Paracelsus warns, unfitting language scatters the mind.
The wrong words create the wrong receptors.
They block absorption.”
Sarah: The signal was there. The world simply wasn’t resonant enough to receive it
Sophia:
“We had the equations — but not the ethics.”
Raj:
“We had the resources — but not the relationships.”
Culhane circles the room, deeply moved.
Culhane:
To get perfectly granular and practical, I think THIS is why green ammonia didn’t bloom in 1875,
or 1925,
or even 1975.
We taught separation instead of synthesis. We couldn’t the air all around us. George Washington Carver could, and he saved the South by developing the right relationship with peanuts, trusting them to pull the nitrogen out of thin air and thicken the soil.
Chemical companies pursued Extraction instead of reciprocity.
Profit instead of protection. There is no safe dose of addictive tinctures… you start well under LD50 and then you always want to push it just a little bit further… until your whole economy is based on maximizing production and maximizing profit – tearing up nature to satisfy increasingly insatiable appetites, craving more nitrogen even though we live within an atmosphere that is almost all nitrogen… craving more drugs, more alcohol, more coffee, more tea, more sugar, sweeter bigger fruits, more wheat, more corn, more rice, more desserts, more candy, more carbs, more entertainment, more consumer goods, more conveniences, all produced in quantities and at rates that no regulations can control… ”
Culhane:
“I think that’s the lesson we’re supposed to absorb here: In the end, sustainable futures don’t depend on paying attention or giving intention. You don’t have to pay or give. Just receive what the Universe is offering you.
Sarah: Consider, the birds? Consider the lilies? Mathew 6:26 to 6:28?
Culhane: Maybe we’re supposed to learn that sustainable futures depend on attunement —
the capacity to resonate with what the world system is actually offering..
That’s where we failed.
And that is where your generation can succeed.
NTHARP steps forward.
NTHARP:
“The past held the seeds.
But your era watered them without the right dose of nutrients so to speak so their growth was stunted. Yet God’s grace, in the form of Nitrogen, was always there in unlimited abundance ready to clothe the lilies
Ness’s voice, warm and flowing:
“Now it is your task to restore the garden or viriditas”
SCENE 7 — Final Portal: “THE FUTURE YOU CAN STILL CHOOSE.”
A final portal opens — this one emerald green.
They see:
offshore wind powering electrolysis
green ammonia fueling tractors
river guardians in council
Indigenous-led restoration
children learning Hildegard and Paracelsus
cities cooled by green corridors
a “two-ledger” planning framework in every school
Culhane:
“This is the future we SHOULD have had —
and the one we can still build.” Where and when are we NTHARP?
NTHARP: I’ve brought you into the year 802,701 AD. Sort of New York, although after climate change and plate tectonics have reworked the landscape, its hardly recognizable!
Sophia: But it’s wonderful! Look at all those simple, happy people! Listen to the laughter… they are… childlike – LUDIC – just like the Grasshopper, thriving through PLAY! It’s even better than Wakanda! They don’t even have police… or soldiers, or warriors…
NTHARP: Yes, they are beautiful in their innocence aren’t they… and you’ll be happy to know that they are all vegan… in fact they are frugivores… fruititarians, like we talked about in an earlier class. They won’t even kill root vegetables – they only partake in what the trees willingly offer them. No animals OR plants were harmed in the making of this motion picture..
Sophia: That’s lovely. Then it’s possible!
Culhane: Nutritionally, of course it is.
Sophia: No matter what my mother says… and we can get our B vitamins from brewers yeast… you can’t be said to “kill” single celled organisms who reproduce through mitosis! It’s like cutting your fingernails… Brewer’s yeast are the perfect solution to any vitamin issues…
Sarah: (shrugs) True that. In Ireland a Good Guiness was once considered breakfast…even for babies. Safer than the water…
Sophia: But don’t you see? Perhaps the bad times are only a matter of time. Perhaps all this conquest and empire building and Logic 1 brutality is just an aberration of a few thousand years… perhaps we get through it, and we do evolve into a Logic 3 world. Once we give up meat, and give up the Non-Nutritional Cash crops and drugs whose doses we can’t control. Maybe we can get UNSTUCK. Maybe we sober up. I mean NTHARP can’t lie, right? He can fantasize, but he wouldn’t deliberately lie?
NTHARP: Not intentionally… remember, I tell truths as I see them to a fault… even when it hurts you…
Sarah: Yes, Gregers AI, you do!
Sophia: So It means… I mean the logic suggests we WILL get through these bad times. We will… ! Dr. King’s dream in action just over the hill, something we can see from the mountaintop.
Culhane: 802,701 AD… why does that year ring a bell?
Raj: (sourly) because these algorithms are completely derivative and can only really draw on the data in their training sets. This isn’t original at all… I KNOW this place…
NTHARP: Um… busted? But it’s a mash up, you know… not entirely plagiarism… its my own variation of… well yes, a world conceived of and published for everyone to envision through their own imaginations and lithographs in 1895 and then fixed onto technicolor film in 1960.
Raj: Oh my God… those are the …
Dorian: (Frozen cold as the chills go up his spine). The … ELOI.
Sophia: The who?
Raj: And that means that somewhere under the surface…
Dorian: (Nods gravely): MORLOCKS.
Sophia: What are you guys talking about.?
Dorian: Spoiler alert?
Culhane: It means that appearances can deceive… as long as, somewhere under the surface, there still lurks the darkness of exploitation, of socially normalized predatory and parasitic and extractive Logic 1 behavior, we can never really feel safe, despite the external beauty. That’s what you are trying to say with this analogy, isn’t it, NTHARP old buddy?
NTHARP: In Jungian terms, the Eloi are the “persona”:
the polite mask, the superficial simplicity.
The Morlocks are the “shadow”:
the repressed, powerful, frightening energies underneath.
Just like in psychology:
What you suppress becomes distorted, then returns with force.
The Morlocks consume the Eloi the way the shadow consumes the ego. What you need, perhaps, is simply to accept yourselves as you are, acknowledge the gremlins within, and allow every part of your internal and external ecosystems to find its proper dose… there is nothing that should be thrown out of your apothecary… but there is no static recipe to sell over the counter , as alchemists like Paracelsus and Hildegard will tell you if you attune to their understanding… the magic is in the mix.
(Lights fade.
Soft hum of possibility persists…
End.
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