Manifesto for the Primacy of Earthbound Restoration

Written as if by an Expansionist – a wealthy, tech-obsessed visionary with a penchant for risk and the future

Alright, let’s get something straight—everyone who wants to head to the stars needs to face a hard truth: we’ve got a lot of work to do here first. Earth isn’t some launchpad for our galactic destiny. It’s our only home. And right now? It’s burning. The climate’s collapsing, the oceans are dying, species are disappearing faster than we can even name them—and we’re sitting here talking about colonizing Mars like it's the next logical step. It's not. It’s the next way to dodge the responsibility that comes with having the privilege of creating the future.

Listen, I’m all for the future. I’m all for the innovation, the risk-taking, the breakthroughs that will propel humanity forward. But first, we need to make sure there’s a future worth having. We’re not going to escape Earth’s problems by running away from them. And no amount of fancy rockets or Martian settlements is going to change that.

The Earth is a finite system, right? No matter how much we pump money into space travel, no matter how many starships we build, this planet is all we’ve got. If we don't fix things here—really fix them—then our pursuit of the stars is just a distraction. A wealthy man's escape plan. A distraction that lets the real problems—like inequality, climate collapse, and environmental destruction—carry on unchecked.

And don’t get me wrong: space exploration is a cool idea. It’s exciting. But here's the deal: the question isn’t whether we should explore space. The question is why we’re looking for salvation out there before we’ve even tried to fix things here. The Earth can still be saved. We’ve got the tools. We’ve got the brains. We’ve got the ability to turn this thing around—but only if we commit to doing the work.

Think about it. You want to go to Mars, right? You want to terraform a new planet? But what are we going to do when we get there? Will we just dump all the messes we’ve made here, on Earth, onto a brand-new world? What do you think will happen when we bring our insatiable hunger for resources, our reckless disregard for ecosystems, and our addiction to growth without consequence to Mars? We'll just recreate the same hellscape we’ve built here. A Martian version of Earth—except, this time, it's even farther from home.

The problem is not our lack of ambition. It’s our failure to understand that solving Earth's problems is, in itself, an ambitious, bold, and world-changing mission. It’s the true frontier. We can fix ecosystems. We can decarbonize industries. We can shift toward renewable energy. We can build circular economies that reduce waste to nearly nothing. These aren't small dreams—they’re monumental, they’re far-reaching, and they’re just as risky as flying to the moon. And they matter. They matter more than making sure humanity can "live on another planet." Because the truth is, we can’t escape what we've done here. And if we fail to fix Earth, we will fail everywhere. And no amount of rocket fuel will change that.

If we can’t build systems of justice, sustainability, and balance here, then what’s the point of creating new worlds? We’ll just repeat the same old mistakes. If we're serious about the future, we need to get real about our present. And our present is right here, right now, on this planet. We can’t escape our mess by flying away in a shiny spaceship. Not yet. Not until we’ve earned it.

I’m not saying space travel is pointless. I’m not saying it’s not worth pursuing. But it’s not the first thing we need to be doing. We need to fix Earth. We need to restore our ecosystems, recalibrate our economies, and reimagine how we live with the planet, not just on it. Once we’ve proven we can do that—then maybe we’ll deserve to go beyond. Maybe then we’ll be ready to treat new planets with the respect they deserve, to build on them as stewards, not conquerors.

Let’s start by fixing Earth. That’s the real challenge. And once we’ve done that, maybe—just maybe—we’ll be worthy of moving on.

Manifesto for the Expansion Beyond Earth

 Written as if by an Earthbound Restorer channeling the voice of a passionate activist for progress and radical change

Listen closely. The future doesn’t lie in staying here, in clinging to a world that’s already slipping through our fingers. Earth is burning, drowning, suffocating under a system that thrives on consumption. If we don’t look beyond our planet, we will seal our own fate—and we will take every species down with us. Making the choice to condemn billions of people to remain prisoners on Earth is not just unwise, it’s reckless.

We face an inevitable fate. Escalating climate crises, political and social instability, pandemics—the truth is, our world is vulnerable, and ignoring the risks of remaining tied to a single planet is catastrophic negligence. Earth has already witnessed five mass extinctions - Some say the sixth is already in progress. Either way, it's not a matter of if we face another, but when. The question of survival isn’t just about fixing things here—it’s about expanding our horizons to secure a future for humanity and all life.

We can’t afford to place all our resources into Earth-bound repair. The world is teetering on the brink of disaster, and we need a back-up plan. We can’t ignore the infinite space over our heads, because the future of humanity depends on looking up. Our first priority as a species should be ensuring our own survival, the continuation of humanity. We have to expand our horizons, to move beyond the limits of a world that’s reached its capacity to provide.

Space exploration is not an ambition—it’s a necessity. The technology and knowledge we stand to gain from expanding into space won’t just stay out there; it will enhance everything we do here. Renewable energy breakthroughs, life-support technologies developed off-world, vast quantities of resources, will all come back to Earth, helping repair and heal this planet. What we build beyond Earth can directly benefit the world we call home.

Our efforts in space won’t just mean survival either, they will be the groundwork for creating new technology - ecologies, new habitats for humanity, where we can start fresh. Our push for interplanetary life creates avenues for peace, collaboration, and innovation that go beyond borders and governments. As we expand outward from our home, we will expand the notion of what it means to be human.

But let’s be clear: leaving Earth isn’t abandoning it. It’s about carrying what’s precious with us—our culture, our science, our collective dreams. We’ll not just be surviving, we’ll be extending human potential. It’s about securing the future of human life across the universe.

Yes, we must acknowledge our mistakes here on Earth. We need to repair what’s broken, learn not to repeat history. But we also need to look forward, the universe isn’t waiting for us to catch up. It won’t pause while we figure things out or until we think we’re ready. If we don’t push forward now, we risk oblivion. Space exploration is an extension of the best parts of us—our creativity, our resilience, our collective ambition to survive.

We must go, we are not running away, we go because have a responsibility to secure a brighter future for our great-grandchildren. The risks of staying on Earth far outweigh the unknowns of exploring space. The universe offers infinite opportunities that we can no longer afford to ignore.

The future is bigger than Earth.

The Listener and the Dust

Short fiction (introspective/speculative)

A contemplative fiction about outsiders who fail to perceive Country and Story, quietly observed by the land itself.

Reflection

In writing these two companion pieces, I intentionally interpreted the theory of manifesto through a process of play—shifting tones, voices, and personalities to challenge the ideas of both.

I went through quite a few iterations of these and decided to make the point of view writers into kind of amalgams of real people, the representative of the Earthbound Restorers should now (I hope), sound like an Elon Musk type figure, but holding the antithesis of his real beliefs. Inversely, I aimed for something like a combination of Greta Thunberg and AOC to advocate for the Expansionist position.

Traditionally manifesto’s are an urgent ideological declaration, and I think that idea can serve as fertile space for embodying a position as a form of advocacy, not just rhetoric. With that in mind, I have tried to explore the manifesto as a creative, performative vehicle for expressing radical beliefs, while also keeping a tension-filled, persuasive style.

By writing these manifestos through the lens of play I tried to experiment with different angles of persuasion, allowing the language of my characters to mirror not only ideological concepts but also the identity I tried to give them. This enabled me to explore more creative forms of argumentation. In the end I think I successfully swing from idealized and authoritative to impassioned activism.

Though it took me several attempts, this creative practice led me to try several new ideas. Originally the language used didn’t make it clear what kind of characters were writing the manifestos, so I needed to build the character’s background into their voices – wealth and political ideologies now shape the way they argue for their particular causes.

This process did pose a few challenges, not only did I have to start over several times to get the characters right, I felt it was vital to maintain a balance between exaggerated expression and credible argumentation. I struggled with ensuring the pieces felt authentic and avoiding turning them into caricatures or proselytising.

She stepped onto the ochre rise with the care of someone who believed reverence came in quiet movements. Her soles met the earth, bare, uncertain. A whisper of red lifted around her like breath exhaled from below.

The dust watched her. It curled along the lines of her ankles, settled against her calves, testing her presence. It had known many feet, some light, some heavy, some in rhythm with the land, some trying not to offend. This one was all pause. Her mind a box of echoes.

She sat. Notebook in hand, pen poised. The breeze stirred, and the dust followed, circling. She thought she was listening. Thought she was open. But even her stillness had edges—an outline drawn around herself in thought.

She wrote: The wind sounds like it wants to say something.

The dust tried not to laugh. Not in mockery, but in long memory. It had spoken to her already, in the settling on her skin, in the slight sting behind her eyes, in the invisible way it moved through her hair. It had said: I am here. I am older than your breath. I have carried stories you will never write down.

She shifted, squinting. The sun dipped low, brushing light across the paperbarks. The rustle of bark, the call of a crow—she heard them all, but as signs, not beings. She wanted them to say something she could translate. The dust drifted across her lips.

Heartbeat? she scribbled. Or wind? Or something more?

The land pulsed below her, not as metaphor but as continuity. It did not pulse for her. It pulsed because it always had. Her arrival had not changed its rhythm. But still, it allowed her to sit.

She did not know she was being observed—not just by the dust, but by every root beneath her, every insect skimming air, every cracked stone that held heat from generations past. The dust listened, not only to her, but to what was absent in her listening.

Her eyes closed. She thought this was how to hear. But the dust knew that hearing was not a posture. It was surrender.

Later, when she asked the old man if the land watched her, he nodded. "Sometimes it does," he said.

What he meant was: it always does. And not just the land. The dust. The breath between words. The silence she kept mistaking as empty.

That evening, by the fire, she didn't speak. The others shared reflections, small insights, things they had seen—a lizard’s pause on a rock, the smell of rain in dry air. She listened, but her mind was still folded around the afternoon. Around the red dust that had lifted like a veil.

She wondered if it had let her see something or simply obscured what was already there. Her thoughts tangled themselves into metaphor. She didn’t know yet that clarity isn’t always what the land offers. Sometimes it’s discomfort. Or stillness. Or questions that trail behind long after you leave.

When the group went to sleep, she sat outside her tent and ran her fingers along the soles of her feet. The dust was still there. Caked into the lines. She thought of washing it off, then didn’t.

The stars overhead shone like quiet observers. She felt observed in turn, but not watched. Known. As if her presence had been acknowledged—not welcomed, not rejected, just marked.

She didn’t know if that was enough. But it was something. And she held onto that something like a thread between then and now.

She left the next morning with the others. Packed her notes, brushed her clothes, shook her boots. The dust clung in quiet folds. In the seam of her pack. Behind her ear. In the hollow at the base of her throat.

She did not think to thank it. She did not know it had followed not to haunt, but to remain.

The dust stayed long after the vehicle tracks vanished. It moved again with the next wind. It curled into the roots of the paperbarks. It whispered against the stones. It lingered where she had sat, holding the shape of her stillness a while longer.

It had seen others like her—hopeful, unsure, too eager, too careful. Some had tried to carve meaning from the silence. Others had been too loud to hear it at all. This one had sat long enough to be marked, even if she didn’t understand what had happened.

In another town, she would open her notebook. She would write: Felt watched. Felt held. Unsure. And then beneath it: Didn’t ask enough questions.

The dust would read over her shoulder.

She would speak of that trip, years later. Say the land had a kind of intelligence. A kind of spirit. That she had felt it. Almost understood. Her voice would catch there—on almost.

The dust would remember.

Not because she listened perfectly. But because she tried.

Not because she arrived with the right words. But because she left with fewer.

In the years that followed, she would return to that red earth—not physically, but in dreams. Sometimes walking, sometimes kneeling, sometimes speaking to no one. In each dream the dust would rise, brushing her skin, entering her breath.

She would wake with her fingers stained ochre, metaphorically if not visibly. She would go to write about it and stop halfway, unsure of the voice she was writing from. Unsure if it was her place.

And the dust would not demand the answer. It never did.

The dust does not ask for accuracy. It asks for presence. For pause. For breath shared.

It asks that you remember. That you return in some way.

That you let silence mean something other than absence.

She had not heard the story. Not truly. But a line had begun inside her—a thread of quiet, taut with the memory of red.

And in time, she might follow it back.

The dust would wait.

Not still. Not silent.

Just listening back.

And if, one day, she found herself again in that place—feet bare, unsure, breath held like a question—she might feel it again. The dust brushing her skin in greeting.

She might not name it this time.

She might simply listen.

Below the Canopy, Above the Fault

Short fiction (speculative)

A speculative narrative exploring conservation and recovery from a non-human perspective, decentralizing humanity within ecological storytelling.

It began with the mycelium. 

Beneath the ash choked canopy of what used to be Tarra-Bulga, the forest floor had gone quiet—less birdsong, more heat fracture. Every time Calla set foot on that soil, boots sinking just slightly into the mossless mulch, she could feel it humming—not the familiar way machines hum, but like breath held too long in the chest.

This place had once been called a “temperate rainforest,” but those were colder, wetter days. Now, after two burnbacks and the failed drone-seeding, Tarra-Bulga was considered a red zone. Not economically viable. No longer included in the Regional Restoration Incentive Schemes. Too volatile. Too marginal. Too far from the zones of interest for the orbital surveys.

But Calla came anyway. She came with no drones. Not that drones were allowed. She came barefoot some days. She carried spores in her satchel, hand-picked from the last remnant patches in the south gully—fungi she’d traced through her great-aunt’s ledgers, back before all the old botanical records were digitised and “refactored” for relevance. Names like Mycena interrupta and Cortinarius sinapicolor written in slanted ink. Kin names, not data strings.

They called her efforts “anachronistic.” Even sympathetic academics politely described her as a “heritage ecologist,” as if she were staging an art installation rather than a reclamation. But Calla wasn’t restoring for show. She wasn’t rewilding for grants. She was rebuilding pattern. Pattern was place.

There were those who had left. Plenty of her cohort had followed the call of the lift stations, resettling into orbital habitats and transition colonies. The rhetoric had changed since the early expansionist days—now it wasn’t about conquest, it was about “biospheric backup,” “resilience archiving,” and “ex-situ planetary insurance.” The idea was that by saving humanity offworld, they were preserving Earth’s legacy. A global ark of sorts.

But Calla had stopped believing in arks. They assumed stasis. She believed in season. In rot. In the decomposition of arrogance into something edible by worms.

Calla sat beside a scorched tree stump—the remains of a hundred-year-old mountain ash—and poured a thread of thick liquid from her flask into the soil: a homebrew mycorrhizal inoculant. It carried the essence of five forest biomes, all collapsed, all documented, all blended into this one small act of translocation. As she delivered the delicate drips she whispered, not in ritual, but in memory. Her words were a way of feeling the edges of thought, letting them settle into the hollows of the land like leaf litter.

“There’s no outside,” she said to the stump. “There’s no ‘elsewhere’ that gets to be safe if this place is dying.”

A breeze moved up the gully. Not wind exactly—more like thermal shift. The air was sharp with eucalyptus ash and something older beneath it, fungal and loamy. She lay on her back, eyes to the canopy, where stripped limbs reached upward like broken antennae. Her earpiece pinged: another satellite path forecast. The expansionists were coordinating another long distance shuttle run. She silenced it.

The forest didn’t care for signals.

That night she dreamed of the root lattice. The underground net of old intelligence. In the dream, it wasn’t just plant matter; it was memory. Not human memory, not even animal. Just patterns—carbon and moisture and decay, arranged in rhythms too slow to be witnessed. But in the dream, she was slow enough. She could see the shift of time not as a line but as sediment: seasonal, systemic, symphonic.

When she awoke, the sky was bruised grey, the scent of ozone sharp. Rain. A rare thing, now. She set out immediately, climbing down to the gully, where the leaf runoff pooled in tiny channels—ghost rivers of a former ecosystem. There, she unrolled the moss mat she had cultivated herself, by hand. She placed it against a shallow rock basin, encouraging moisture uptake. She didn’t expect it to fix anything. Restoration wasn’t a fix. It was a relationship. And relationships were slow, recursive, and context dependent.

Calla had learned to listen, not for answers, but for signs of entanglement. A trace of phosphorescence along a bark line. The spiralling gait of a returning bandicoot, its pawprints small but confident. Even the shift in fungal spore scent—bitter to sweet, a sign of balanced pH.

She recorded her findings into the archive—not the Archive that ran from geosync orbit, but the local, micro archive: the place-based data node embedded in the root core of a still-living stringybark tree. It wasn’t cloud linked. That was the point. It stored only local knowledge, and it responded only to those who knew the pattern codes, those etched with charcoal and ochre into the bark in spirals of syllables.

“June 7,” she said aloud. “Three millimetres of rain. Spore cluster twelve has colonised the red loam. The moss took. A wombat came through but didn’t dig.”

She paused. Then added: “And I felt joy. Briefly.”

The archive blinked its blue-violet light and returned to silence.

Outside the zones, most thought these places were dead. Not just ecologically, but culturally. Spiritually. Economically. But Calla believed that’s because most had never learned to see pattern beyond the human. Beyond function. Beyond use.

Once, a young expeditionist named Romi had come to the edge of the red zone, seeking Calla out. He had been quiet, cautious. Still clean skinned with hope, but heavy with the weight of orbital ambition.

“I want to understand,” he’d said. “Why it is, that you stay.”

Calla hadn’t answered right away. She’d walked him through a thicket of regenerating bracken, showed him where the moss had begun to link the water basin to the hillside. She’d invited him to touch the bark of a tree she called “grandmother”—a tree that had lived through three fires, one pandemic, and the silence that followed them both.

“Feel that?” she’d asked. “That texture?”

He’d nodded.

“That’s what adaptation feels like. Not escape. Not salvation. Belonging. Through time.”

He didn’t speak for a long time after that. When at last he asked, “What happens if it doesn’t work?”

Calla smiled, eyes damp with morning dew. “It already has.”

Romi had left with spores in his satchel and moss on his boots. Whether he would ever return, Calla didn’t know. She had learned not to wait for returns. The forest taught you that: that life is not a closed loop but a ripple across an unknowable field. Some things you plant never grow in your lifetime. Some seeds awaken only when you are long gone. Some never take at all—and still, the act of planting matters.

The stories she left weren’t broadcast. They were encoded in action, woven into place. The archive in the stringybark. The slow return of birds. The clay circles she left in dried creek beds, slowly eroding with each rare rain, releasing nutrients. Not a monument—a guiding hand. Custodial glyphs. Ways of saying, “I was here, and I paid attention.”

She did not write for history.

That winter, the satellites failed. A solar burst fried the relay arrays, silencing orbital comms for almost two weeks. There was panic in the domes, disruption in the populace living in the clouds. The dependency on orbital governance was suddenly, painfully clear. “Backup civilisation,” they’d called it. Redundancy systems. But there was no redundancy for soil. For fungal intelligence. For time.

Calla’s micro archive survived. Untouched and unreadable to those not grounded in its syntax.

A month later, small groups came down from the sky. Quietly at first, without fanfare. 

Engineers, farmers, educators. People who had spent so long in controlled biospheres they’d forgotten what real variability felt like. Some came with arrogance still, expecting to teach. Others came barefoot.

Calla didn’t greet them with ideology. She gave them trowels. She showed them which mosses held water longest. She taught them how to lie still and listen for ground vibration. “Don’t expect to hear anything,” she warned. “Just wait for the moment you stop needing to.”

They came not as saviours now, but as witnesses. As kin. For the first time, the future they imagined wasn’t built on separation, but return.

On her final day, Calla walked alone through the old gully, now softened by a decade of slow tending. The bracken was fuller, the tree ferns cautious but rising. The stringybark bore new shoots. The sky remained bruised and volatile, but the wind carried less smoke.

She reached the root core, opened the archive, and recorded nothing. Just silence. Her breath. A moment stretched beyond language.

Then, quietly, she scratched a final spiral into the bark, no words, just pattern.

The archive blinked once in recognition, then dimmed. Not off, just resting.

In years to come, there would be debate about where the restoration began. Some said it was the turn of weather. Others claimed it was new carbon tech from the high orbit labs. Few named Calla, and fewer still remembered the name Tarra-Bulga. But the forest knew. The spores knew. The mycelium remembered.

And through the lattice beneath the soil, a story pulsed. Not as ownership, but as belonging.

Not as monument, but as map.

Not as heroism, but as pattern.