Levi Bryant speculates on the kind of thinking necessary for a future that can sustain human beings amongst others: “What’s crucially important to wilderness thought is that humans occupy no particularly privileged or unilaterally determining position within being. We are beings amongst beings and being, of course, would continue were we to cease to exist or die out… The mark of wilderness thought is this decentralization and multiplication of points of view. Now suddenly, human points of view are but one point of view among others. The fur trapper contends with the point of view of the grizzly bear and the approaching winter storm. He is amongst beings rather than a being for which all other beings are correlates.” In other words – we are not alone (on Earth, and who needs to grope beyond our atmosphere?). We’ve known it all along of course, but continue to do a great job of denying the fact. The question that Bryant’s ideas poses for Now Future, is how can such thinking become more than just thinking but a way of being in the world? Telling people they should do it doesn’t work, forcing them to do it won’t do the trick, though we may yet be forced into it – as a recent article from Larry Elliot contends: financial crises + peak oil + climate change = a new way of living.  By contrast, art seems an excellent an path to follow towards putting people in the “skins” of things like and unlike ourselves – other people, fauna, flora, ecosystems, matter itself. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it “Art is the result of the living creature's ability to extract something—a property, a quality, a sound- tone, a color-source, a rhythm or force—from the earth, from the usually uncontained territory in which it lives and enacts its activities. Art is the extraction of territorially linked qualities and their use in intensifying the energies and forces of living bodies. So art, like technology or like science, links living bodies to the earth… But unlike technology or science which aim to extract useful principles, principles which can be used to attain specific aims or goals… the arts redirect these forces of practical regularity through intensification to produce something… which actively alters the very forces of the body itself...”. Art can certainly do this, but there’s an intermediate step that needs to be taken, which is to put people in a space in which they can be open to something that appears very strange for many people in the 21st century: not being the most important thing on earth. We know we’re dependent on this planet and everything else on it (and this in ways both palpable and abstract), but we don’t seem to want to know it. We know we revolve around the sun, but we certainly didn’t want to know it in Copernicus’ time. Yet if Copernicus could begin the process of doing away with Christian cosmology, then surely the thought of figures as diverse as Grosz, Elinor Ostrom, Timothy Morton, Deleuze and Guattari, Martin Heidegger (and countless others), not to mention the work of enumerable scientists with minds for the ecological, heralds a second Enlightenment. Art played a huge role in the first one and we would like to think it is already playing such a role in the second one by opening people up to the fact that things are not at all what they have seemed to be...