Just throwing this apology out here in case anyone from the future might come across it: We were trying our best to figure shit out, but we were so self-centered and enamored with our own brains that we only focused on human consciousness, and didn't give much thought to the consciousness of other species in the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom.

There were some of us who thought water itself was conscious, but the idea was too radical a departure from the established, human/brain-centric theories.

I, for one, knew that trees and plants were conscious (from both personal experience and books), but in 2017 it would have been impossible to try to convince anyone of that. I didn't have a suitable vocabulary to express my ideas; the majority of scientists were reductionists (/materialists); and basically, the most common reaction would have been "so what if they are?"

We weren't going to stop cutting down the forests, even if the trees were conscious. Cutting down trees was part of our patterning, our upbringing, and we hadn't yet learned how to make massive shifts in our collective behavior.

As an example of our attitudes towards forests in the U.S.A, "The Forest Service" was housed within the "Department of Agriculture". If we had wanted to protect the forests from ruin, it should have been housed within the "Department of the Interior", whose mission statement started with, "Protecting America's Great Outdoors ..."

So, for the sensitive ones among us, the turn of the third millenium in the year of the Lord was a very hard time to be human. And I'm sorry we didn't do better by you.