• I acknowledge that the Earth is finite in space and time, as are its many habitats. This is why living things compete with each other. It is why trees are tall, and why animals fight.
• I acknowledge that there is no place on Earth available for colonization by any living thing, without it being at the expense of the living things already in that place. Every living thing occupies a space that was previously occupied by other living things. I therefore acknowledge that I cohabit land that was previously inhabited by others of my species, and also of other species, but note that this is true of everyone, including the people who previously occupied the space that I now occupy, and those who will occupy this space after I am gone. To act as if the people who previously lived on this land, at the expense of the claim of those people who lived on it even before them, occupy a morally higher ground, is to assert a racist position; that is, the current spate of land acknowledgements on behalf of the most recently displaced people is racist.
• I acknowledge that most people are motivated by a desire to do good: to be at peace with their neighbours, to respect and to be worthy of respect, to love and to be worthy of love. And yet, all it takes to subvert this desire is bad data.
• I acknowledge that humans and other animals are fallible, being neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and decisions are never made with all the necessary information. That is, I acknowledge that when our understanding of what constitutes good action changes, things that we thought in the past were good may now be understood to be bad. When this happens with software - when code is designed and written without the time or knowledge necessary to understand fully the implications of its behaviour, and in due course becomes unable to adapt to changing circumstances - it is called "technical debt". When the same thing happens to larger systems such as cities and civilizations, we might call it "sociotemporal dissonance". An example is how cities, especially those in North America, got redesigned to improve the movement of cars, requiring the demolition of entire neighbourhoods, and now find that much of that car-oriented infrastructure needs to be demolished to be replaced with multi-modal transport in order to mitigate the chronic, pernicious, and ubiquitous effects of too much vehicular traffic.
• I acknowledge that liberating a billion years' worth of solar energy in the form of fossil fuels over only a couple of centuries has permanently changed the Earth's trajectory. Using fossil fuels as chemical feedstocks for fertilizer has saved billions from starvation, but at the expense of artificially inflating the number of hungry mouths far past the carrying capacity of the planet, dooming orders of magnitude more living things to live in untold suffering and then to die anyway. Using fossil fuels to power our civilization has warped our cities, poisoned the water, defiled the air, and driven us mad. Designing civilization to require fossil fuels is likely to be the single stupidest mistake that our species has ever made, and yet at every step, it seemed like a good idea, and as a side effect has freed enough people from the daily toil of staying alive to study and understand the world, and therefore to understand the nature of the problems caused by using fossil fuels.
• I acknowledge that most of the land used to grow crops has been needlessly repurposed from its wild state, because it is used to feed the animals trapped in industrial animal agriculture, rather than to feed people directly. Every farmed animal has usurped resources, directly or indirectly, from other species, and the ongoing destruction of the Amazon Rainforest in order to make room for cows is merely one recent example.
• I acknowledge that since I cannot change what has already happened, the best that I, or anyone, can do is to go forward from where we currently find ourselves and mitigate the problems caused by flawed understanding as best we can. Personally, as much as possible I:
  • replace concrete on my land with soil, shrubs, and trees, and encourage biodiversity by eliminating monocultures such as lawns;
  • replace my personal use of high-energy transport such as cars and planes with low-energy transport such as bicycles, with the concomitant elimination of casual global travel;
  • never eat or use animal products, particularly those produced from industrial animal agriculture, which destroys more than just the abused animals caught in that Satanic mill;
  • avoid consuming products manufactured by or transported by high-energy processes;
  • replace my use of fossil fuels with local, sustainable sources of energy.
• I acknowledge that none of this will likely be enough to prevent catastrophe, not even if everyone in the world did the same, but it is worth trying.