Some call the civilized world dead. Cities, specifically, are constructed of artifacts which humans have fashioned from elements in the natural environment. In fashioning these artifacts, we have removed them from their natural life cycles. When a tree stands in the forest, about 20% of it’s mass is living tissue. If it falls through natural causes and lays on the forest floor for a year or two, 80% of it’s mass is living tissue — because microflora and microfauna convert its heartwood into loam. When a tree falls to a lumberjack’s saw, in short order that heartwood is suspended in time, preserved in its least lively state for years, sometimes generations. For this reason, some anarcho-primitivists you might talk to, if you have a good deal of time on your hands, will tell you that cities are made of death. In this sense, death is a stagnation in the flow of natures cycles of growth and decay.
I disagree. But the framing has merit.
How we define life has enormous implications regarding the perspective we take on the act of living — and everything involved therein. What we think life is determines what we believe a life form to be. It determines where we draw boundaries of responsibility and of cognition.
What follows is an argument less about the fundamental nature of life than about the relationship of life to cognition. While I may draw the circle around the meaning of life a little more broadly than some of my anarcho-primitivist counterparts, no especially esoteric notion of life or its meaning will be needed to draw a clear line between the fact of being alive and the fact of involvement in cognition. And, I believe that this demonstration will clearly show that cognition is not limited to single minds but rather frequently occurs between several — and sometimes many.
What does all of this have to do with how your neighborhood can organize a tenants union or your family can overcome generations of disenfranchisement? Everything.