The response demanded of us in the twenty-first century must operate at the level of metaphysics as well as the material, addressing our underlying assumptions about the instrumentalisation of nature and what constitutes a meaningful life in the face of technology’s relentless advance. To neglect that deeper terrain is to concede, in advance, the very ground on which our resistance to the machine must stand.

Daniel Garlett is a Noongar cultural educator and community advocate who has spent decades opposing logging, mining, and large-scale land clearing in Western Australia’s forests and catchments. He lives here because he says he cannot live anywhere else. The quiet, the canopy, and the smell of damp earth after rain are not amenities. They are conditions of life.