ABSTRACT
Like the infants about whom psychoanalysts have long been familiar, life on our planet possesses intrinsic capacities for adaptation. Those adaptations depend on a relatively constant physical and chemical environment. Humans have now radically disrupted that environment, placing the adaptive capacities of life on the planet under severe strain. The accumulating information about our planet can be treated as mere data to be organized—number and quantity arriving by happenstance from distant objects and a distant elsewhere—more found than sent, more catalogued than received. Such treatment would constitute an interpretive act, defining a basically emptied relation between the information's source and the information's recipients. In this chapter, the author treats the information as a message—the planet's "path of discharge, a kind of "kicking and screaming". As such, the meaning of the message can be thought congruent to an infant's cry—not only a communication, but, more importantly, an appeal.
