Part of the reason we rose to “the top of the food chain” was that we didn’t simply react to the ecosystem’s gifts, but we held them in our mind. Thus, in addition to leading us to our material needs, qualia, in the form of both big gifts (like the change of seasons), and small gifts (like knowledge of the properties of plants and the habits of animals), gave meaning to our lives. Knowledge is a gift, just like yummy red berries and medicinal roots; the mind, too, is a gift, like the seasons, the weather, and ocean currents. Ideas, both little and big, are gifts.
The gifts of the ecosystem are qualiadelic, not material. Meanings, patterns, forms, ideas, spirits, and dreams are qualia. We are at the top of the food chain because we have learned to manipulate matter by the qualia we have discovered within it.
But being “at the top of the food chain” means little if we are out of balance with the landscape. It is a very, precarious spot, especially when all our reliable landmarks and pathways are about to fall apart. Mankind can’t stop climate change, but we can ride it out if we pay attention to qualia.
As we are seeing, the landscape – in this case, the planet – is doing the rebalancing itself. The big gift that the ecosystem has for us, right now, is the opportunity to be qualiadelic instead of materialistic. We can’t fight new weather patterns, ocean currents, or lava flows — they will destroy anything we can build. But we can move with them, surf them, live in motion with them. To anyone watching, being qualiadelic makes us appear like chameleons, invisibly blending in — balancing with the radical new landscapes. The ecosystem is the fulcrum, and if we can return to some level of equilibrium, we can concentrate on qualia, the infinite gift.