More Insights from Horseshoe Crab

I was deeply fortunate a few weeks back to join a systemic risk/polycrisis conference (my third in four years). It’s become a kind of a retreat for me—one in which I can relax in and talk openly about the rapidly accelerating systemic collapse we’re now starting to live through.¹ All while, ironically, burning way too much carbon to get to the venue and consuming nice food and drink. It’s surreal and hypocritical, but stimulating and joyful at the same time—kind of like modern life in our consumer cultures.

But this is not a humble brag, nor a request for forgiveness; this is a sharing of one moment of the conference that really got me thinking.

The highlight of the conference was a workshop where we considered the impacts of the polycrisis on the more than human world. Of course, I signed up for that immediately, and feared I’d miss out as sign up was first come first serve. But happily I got a spot and was surrounded mostly by ecocentric folks (though one or two seemed to find themselves signed up for this strange encounter with framing beyond the anthropocentric).

Beforehand we were given homework: pick an animal and get to know it: Where does it live? What’s it eat? How does it move? How does it sense? It felt like a perfect opportunity to deepen my relationship with my co-council member Horseshoe Crab. Truthfully, I should have already read about Horseshoe Crab’s way of being, but I hadn’t. Reading up, it turns out they’re even more fascinating than I realized. They mostly walk but can also swim upside down (at a 30 degree angle), they eat worms, mollusks, and little fish, and often eat at night.

At the workshop, we spent about 15 minutes meditating, encountering our animal (we were supposed to be our animal but I actually swam alongside her). We swam and walked along the ocean floor, foraging and simply being, but twice encountered the shock of man—catching our brethren for bait and then for our blood. It was horrific.²

After the meditation we walked out on the land with a human partner and exchanged our more-than-human experiences. I was with Dolphin who walked quickly and energetically. I, on the other hand, meandered. Yes, that’s how I normally like to walk in nature, but it was even more pronounced considering the experience I just had. While walking, we talked about our experience inhabiting the world of our chosen creatures.³

Returning to the room, we spent 10 minutes writing about our experience in an online survey form—then while we were at lunch, the workshop leaders weaved these into a compilation. While I’m not sure the audio will move you like it did me, but here it is:

Here’s the especially interesting part: in the next phase of the workshop we considered the more than human world as we engaged with a systemic risk—specifically a limited nuclear engagement (i.e. a regionally survivable event). We gathered as a group, talking about ways we could support the more than human world. How we might take down fences to facilitate retreat by animals, and whether that would lead to more human casualties (as farm and wild animals took to the roads). We wondered whether there were ways to provide iodine to animals to prevent radiation from being absorbed into their thyroid glands, or adjust plant and fungal communities after the fact to take up radiation and decontaminate soils for the creatures living there.

In the workshop, we also explored how a nuclear war would affect our species more broadly, and how they’d respond. And it dawned on me that Horseshoe Crab would probably be happy. Not joyful that those damned humans got their just desserts, but relieved that the purveyors of such death and destruction of its kind were now gone, or at least far less able to hunt them. And honestly, if tomorrow we had a global nuclear war, countless species on the surface would die but Horseshoe Crab, who often lives in the deep ocean, would probably be ok.⁴ In fact, horseshoe crabs might actually thrive as their nemesis, humans, were suddenly a much less potent force. The humans who, for the past several decades, have been catching them en masse for bait and for their blood; who have been warming and acidifying their home (and perhaps soon mining it too); and replacing the beaches they lay their eggs on with hotels and beach houses. The end of their “civilization” could possibly be a boon for Horseshoe Crab, depending on how it plays out.

Considering Horseshoe Crab inhabits me (metaphorically) and we share a council seat, it was an uncomfortable reality to sit within. But it also reminded me of a key point: there is no unified interest of nature. Just ask Mosquito, Tick, or Human Being. Some always benefit at others’ expense.⁵

In fact, just coincidentally I’ve been listening to Uncle Vanya—the classic Chekov play from 1897. In it, there just happens to be, for lack of a better description, a Gaian doctor. When he’s not treating TB and cholera, he’s planting trees and trying to prevent the deforestation that over the past fifty years, as he explains, has led to the loss of elk, wild goats, and “great flocks of swans, geese and ducks,” which have all “vanished like a cloud.” As he notes, “The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day” because humanity “destroys everything it can lay its hands on without a thought for the morrow.”⁶

We’re in trouble. Our self- and more-than-self destructive trajectory was clear back in 1897; now it has accelerated exponentially, so that in 2025 we’re in all likelihood nearing a decisive tipping point. It’s one I worry about every day (even while sipping wine at a polycrisis retreat), but one that Horseshoe Crab, and many other species may embrace—even celebrate—particularly if it comes sooner, rather than later, and in a way that focuses the destruction on humans, themselves, rather than all of creation.

Endnotes

1) And many others are already fully living within the collapse.

2) I’ve been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series where humans are being picked off by the billions as they journey through a reality-TV world-scale dungeon imposed on them from profit-focused aliens (definitely more about this another time). It’s trauma-inducing for the main character, Carl. I can only imagine how traumatic it must be for the countless species we’re doing similar things to as well.

3) Dolphin had a lovely insight: how different it would be to live in one environment but breathe in another. Every time you want to take a breath one must bring yourself to the edge of two planes of existence. We don’t have to do that—but it must make one appreciate that edge. I wonder how our minds and cultures would have evolved if we had had to do this too.

4) They do lay their eggs on the beach, so that might be an issue, but perhaps they could manage as the ocean waters rinsed away the radiation from the shores, diffusing it in the vast oceans.

5) Though in truth, in a balanced system, communities can flourish together, and that’s what Gaians are striving for: To create social, economic, political and cultural systems that sustain life and allow the collective whole to thrive.

6) The first quotation is from Act 3, the second from Act 1, and the third from Act 3.