Life is entropy, chaos and death. All around you, every cell of every living thing is dying. Anarchy is encoded into the very fabric of reality: it is the Second Law of thermodynamics. Everything falls apart; the centre cannot hold.

 

But from death can come life. In each empty husk is the potential for the seed of rebirth. In every agonised deathcry is the clarion call of a new life taking its first breath. In life, in nature, is the power to reverse entropy: to hurl back the darkness. Perhaps just for a time. Perhaps just for a little while. But it is enough. One day the world will end, but not today.

 

Chaos comes in many forms: hatred, violence, injustice and greed. It is our curious vision that our wedding should celebrate all that opposes these things. You may call this twee, or trite, or glib but, though we are not religious people, we firmly believe that people - human beings - have the unique ability to oppose the tendency of the universe to tear itself apart. We bring order to chaos. This isn't some spiritual nonsense: evolution has spent aeons crafting us into pattern-spotting machines. We take the disorder of the world around us, and we transform it into something story-shaped. We see the meaning behind shifting patterns on a forest floor, the play of light on a rippling lake, the shape of clouds in the sky. Every day, we subconsciously fight the long defeat against the power of entropy.

 

We would like this to be the theme of our lives together, but I doubt we're strong enough for that, so we'll settle for it being the theme of our wedding. "Naturdämmerung", to coin a German compound word, meaning "nature's twilight". It's why we'll be asking you to dress in pale colours while we wear green. In November, as winter starts to take hold, the world is dying - but there is the hope of rebirth, of anarchy repudiated for another day.

 

In line with that theme, and with our rejection of the mindless consumption that we fear is second-nature to so many, we'd prefer you to make a charitable donation instead of giving us gifts. We already have more things than we'll ever need, so use your money for something better than that.

 

Humanity's greatest crime should be - no, is - that we have recklessly destroyed almost everything around us. Each extinction of an animal or plant species that we cause is a black mark against our collective name. It is a grim offering to the spirit of entropy: an unwitting effort to usher in our own apocalypse. Again, it's trite, but nothing can be more important than ensuring the world survives our coming as intact as possible. That we have already ruined and killed so much should fill all of us with deep and abiding shame. We should be better than this. We must be better than this. We're intelligent creatures, able to learn from our mistakes. Why are we still prioritising our own comfort over the lives of our sister species?

 

Maybe you don't care. Maybe reading this surprises you. That's fine - you don't have to have an opinion, you just have to appreciate that we do, and we're asking you to give to the charity we've chosen as a wedding gift to us. It's arbitrary, but Rhinos are one of the last remaining examples of the megafauna that once roamed the planet, but which were almost entirely hunted to extinction by ancient humans. The various species of Rhino still have the numbers left to stage a miraculous recovery, if we reverse our trends. There is no reason for a human being to ever kill a Rhino. We don't eat their meat. Their horns and bones have no use to any civilised person. They are peaceful, docile herbivores who never did a thing to hurt anyone. In a better world, the savannah would still be teeming with them.

 

This isn't a better world. And that's the whole point.