Leave behind impe­ri­al­ism and colo­nial­ism. Learn to love and respect that which we do not ful­ly under­stand, from new cul­tures to life itself.

It’s not easy to leave behind pat­terns we’ve become so accus­tomed to repeat­ing. Accord­ing to biol­o­gist Bruce Lip­ton, about 95% of our auto­mat­ic respons­es to every­day encoun­ters, events, and inputs are shaped by what we expe­ri­enced from birth to age sev­en.³² And all of that input emerged through gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of fam­i­ly pat­terns along with even ear­li­er evo­lu­tion­ary influences.

Trac­ing the human fam­i­ly tree back to the time of our rep­til­ian brains puts a lit­tle per­spec­tive on how far we’ve come. And yet, how read­i­ly we regress to our ani­mal instincts. Fear is the old­est emo­tion, and it gets eas­i­ly acti­vat­ed in the parts of our brains that con­nect back to our rep­til­ian roots. When we com­mu­ni­cate direct­ly to our lizard brains, we can become trapped in mis­tak­ing each oth­er for ene­mies and com­mit­ting evils against one another.

The evils of colo­nial­ism con­tin­ue to play out through sys­tems of enclo­sure. In this nasty trick, access to resources like water and land for grow­ing food were con­fis­cat­ed by invad­ing com­mu­ni­ties. This group of peo­ple then claimed own­er­ship and taxed the orig­i­nal inhab­i­tants of that land to use what was always pre­vi­ous­ly free to all. Enclo­sure cre­ates vio­lence against nature and human rights. De-enclosure—or restor­ing the envi­ron­ment and revis­ing poli­cies to ensure access to com­mon neces­si­ties, like clean water, healthy food, and ade­quate shel­ter, for all—is the response to a his­to­ry of unfair and unjust behav­ior that we believe must receive greater atten­tion. How might we align soci­etal pri­or­i­ties such that every­one might ben­e­fit from the dig­ni­ty of liv­ing with the nec­es­sary con­di­tions to thrive?

We might begin to improve our­selves sim­ply by resolv­ing the mis­take of believ­ing humans to be sep­a­rate from the rest of life on Earth. We now live with the shad­ow of so many of our past fail­ures. Who was the first man who decid­ed that nature should be con­trolled? Who first cut holes into the Earth to extract its min­er­als? Who began throw­ing away prod­ucts nev­er both­er­ing to con­tem­plate recy­cling those mate­ri­als to make some­thing new? And how did we come to not even know how we got to this state?

Because we’re not incen­tivized to pay atten­tion. Instead, we’re incen­tivized to play “the game” of mod­ern life. We might not ever know who the first man was that lead us down these ugly roads we now find our­selves too entrenched in to escape, but we do know that men and women are now stand­ing up to demand account­abil­i­ty from the peo­ple who look to deter­mine our future. And as author­i­ty for how our future is built becomes bet­ter shared between greater num­bers of peo­ple, we will hon­or the lessons from past mis­takes, and do what is right together.