There was a time not so long ago when people believed non-humans could not feel pain.
When this nonsensical position was overturned it morphed into assuming that non-humans don’t have feelings as we do.
Which is also demonstrably false. They show their emotions without filter. Love, anger, jealousy. They get bored and lonely, as any dog parent who has come home to a trashed house knows very well.
It is all there, except perhaps things like regret which require a knowledge of the passage of time.
They are also, many of them, socially aware. Not all species, but many understand possession of territory and cultural hierarchies. We now know that even trees communicate with each other through their roots.
What other species don’t have is the large prefrontal cortex that results in designing and implementing complex strategies.
But we are still clinging as a species to our notions of superiority. We still discard and discount other species. I am not talking about whether we eat them or not. Being a predator is an acceptable position in nature.
I am more concerned with the wholesale dismissal that allows us to continue with an economic system that is literally undercutting the basic requirements of the natural world upon which all life rests.
The hubris of this is of such magnitude that there are no words for it.
Our current understanding of nature and our place in it, as of the year 2022, is so regressive that it could be considered prehistoric.
Except that the so called ”primitive” people did much better at this than any “great” civilization ever did. No, they were not perfect. They over-hunted large mammals and deforested some large areas. But the lived with and depended on the natural world. And their spiritual life revolved around that fact.
These earlier humans lived directly with the other animals and plants. And did not fancy themselves as superior.
As long as we lived IN nature this tendency towards speciesist hubris was held in check.
Was it the advent of writing that triggered the philosophical split in our collective consciousness? Agriculture? The advent of the patriarchal religions? Most likely a combination. But we ran with it on a global scale and have not slowed down since.
The same forces that allowed us to believe ourselves above the natural world also led to the new global religion of capitalism. And this was the lever which began the killing of the world.
It is time to stop this. Now. And time to rethink the entire human enterprise. We too are animals and we can not live in a plastic world. And neither can the other trillion species who share this fragile blue green orb with us.
It most certainly is killing us and the rest of our planet. Thank you for sharing this idea with such an articulate and interesting perspective.
This is a very important piece, thank you for sharing!