Last August I launched my first self-published photo book with the title: 'Possibility of life and consciousness within rock'. My work has often been about the relationship that humanity has with nature, but this time I chanced perspective and looked at the relationship nature has with humanity. People, sometimes unconsciously, still have the idea of being the most important thing in the world. This idea stems from religions where it is believed that we are created and that the world is made for us.

Despite the fact that more and more people take Darwin’s theory of evolution as the truth, we still behave as the owner of the world and we hold nature as ‘our’ sacred place. Because mankind is just one of the millions of organisms on Earth, it would be strange to say that we are more important than all the others. In fact, we are all equally unimportant. Nature knows no emotion and has no ideals. In an interview done by Wim Kayzer in 1993, Oliver Sacks says the following: “Nature is amoral. I have to admit that this is one of the reasons why I love nature, because it frees me from the moral consciousness that is sometimes such a burden.”. With this, Sacks highlights an important difference between humanity and nature.

We are moral beings and it can be a liberating idea to let go of that morality, but to let go of it will never be anything but an idea. This is partly due to our consciousness. The lack thereof in nature makes it possible to be amoral and therefore to be indifferent to humanity. This indifference became undeniably clear during scientific research on consciousness within the rock in the 90’s.

My book tells the story of geologist Alex R. Flint, who recorded her thoughts during this time. You can tell what her relationship was with the material by reading the dialogues she recorded. And although the research came to an end without a sign of life, Flint still couldn’t shake the idea of the rock being aware of what they were doing. The story of Flint and her colleges illustrates the lack of understanding we have regarding nature as well as the obsession we have for understanding it. But some things should be left to be mysterious.