Animal Rights – New Antarctica

The Ideology of Disconnection

The Ideology of Disconnection: How Human Cognitive Capacity Built the Machinery of Extinction

The Ideology of Disconnection: How Human Cognitive Capacity Built the Machinery of Extinction

Our species did not run out of information. We ran out of the capacity to be moved by it. The reason lives in the same cognitive architecture that let us coordinate, moralise, and build civilisation in the first place — and that architecture did not come with a safety clause. On the 8 October 2026 release of the WWF‘s sixteenth Living Planet Report, the average size of monitored vertebrate wildlife populations stood 73% below its 1970 baseline. The figures were not new to anyone. What was new, three weeks ago, was the reminder that knowing has never been our problem.

Our cognitive capacity is the single most consequential fact about this planet — and it cuts both ways. The same faculties that let us coordinate, teach, and moralise let us build ideologies that sever us from the living world, justify its destruction as progress, and corrode the compassion that once made us care. The result is measured in dead species, dead people, and deadened hearts.

1. The Contradiction at the Centre of the Human Story

There is a version of human exceptionalism that runs like this: we are the only animals who understand the world as a whole, who can hold a future in the mind, who can formulate an abstract principle and bind strangers to it across generations. It is true, and it is why we dominate. It is also — this is the uncomfortable part — why we are capable of the particular kind of damage now unfolding.

The WWF’s Living Planet Report 2026, subtitled The Science of Hope, covers 1970 to 2022 using 35,803 population trends across 5,790 vertebrate species. The headline number is unchanged from the previous edition and remains almost unbearable: a 73% average decline in monitored wildlife populations.[1] Latin America and the Caribbean is down 95%. Freshwater populations — where the damage is most concentrated — are down 85%, terrestrial 69%, marine 59%.[2]

And yet the same report leads with recovery. Green turtles, Atlantic bluefin tuna, tigers in parts of Asia, southern African elephants. Around half of monitored populations are stable or increasing.[3] The Amazon Soy Moratorium, a collective supply-chain commitment, cut deforestation linked to soy expansion in the Brazilian Amazon from nearly 30% to roughly 2%.[3]

This is not a story about a species too stupid to notice. A species that has sequenced the genomes of thousands of species, monitored the world’s fisheries stock by stock, mapped the ocean floor, and built a global real-time financial system has known about this for decades. The environmental sciences have produced a body of knowledge more precise than anything in the previous 300,000 years of Homo sapiens history. The IPCC, IPBES, FAO, UNCCD, ZSL, WWF — the knowledge exists, it is peer-reviewed, it is public, it is free.

So the standard diagnosis fails. It is not ignorance. It is not even greed, exactly. Greed is a motive; motive explains intensity but not direction, and it certainly does not explain why the better-motivated half of humanity — the people who read the reports, who love rivers and birds, who would weep at a dead seal — vote for the systems that produce the collapse.

The problem is upstream of motive. It is in the machinery by which a group agrees on what is real, what is good, and what is worth sacrificing. That machinery is cognitive, and it was built by our species, and it is the thing that is failing.

2. What Cognitive Capacity Actually Is — and Why It Is Not Neutral

A. Shared intentionality: the “we” that made us

Michael Tomasello’s shared intentionality hypothesis is the standard account of what separates us from the other great apes. We can participate in collaborative activities with shared goals and joint action plans; we can represent a collaborator’s point of view from a “bird’s-eye view”; we can learn culturally and pass that learning down.[16] From joint intentionality in a dyad, this scales up to collective intentionality — the capacity to think as a member of a group, to take the group’s perspective as an impersonal, normative authority.[17]

This is a magnificent capacity. It is also the technical prerequisite for everything that follows in this article. Ideology is what happens when collective intentionality acquires an object. Shared intentions become shared worldviews; group-mindedness becomes group-ideology; the “we” that cooperates becomes the “we” that believes.

B. The argumentative machine

Here is the part that should worry us most. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s argumentative theory holds that reasoning did not evolve to find truth. It evolved to persuade.[18] Their summary of the evidence is uncomfortable for the folk view of rational deliberation: reasoning reliably produces epistemic distortions and poor decisions, but people become skilled arguers once they are placed in an argumentative context — and skilled arguers are “not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.”

Confirmation bias, myopia, and motivated reasoning are not bugs in this architecture. They are what a truth-seeking device would not do.

Follow the implication. A mind optimised for justification is a mind that can justify anything — including the destruction of the living world — provided the justification is good enough to survive among the people who must live with it. The extractive economy does not require anyone to believe that destroying a riverbank is good. It requires only that enough people believe it is necessary, efficient, inevitable, or someone else’s problem.

C. Moral reasoning as post-hoc legislation

Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist account took this further. When we make moral judgements, the judgement arrives first — rapidly, intuitively, affectively — and reasoning follows, constructing reasons after the fact.[21] His signature demonstration, “moral dumbfounding,” showed participants who condemned harmless acts and, when their stated justifications were shown to fail, responded: “I don’t know why it’s wrong, it just is.”

This finding is genuinely contested, and a good argument should say so. Scott Barry, Joshua Knobe and David Loss have proposed that moral dumbfounding in the taboos tested is better explained by participants’ assessment of the likelihood of harm than by a purely affective process.[22] The debate turns on whether post-hoc reasoning can be causally efficacious at all.

But note what survives the contest. Nobody in this literature argues that moral reasoning reliably tracks truth. The live options are “reasoning rationalises” and “reasoning is post-hoc but does real work in shaping verdicts.” Both undercut the idea that a rational person, reasoning carefully about the facts, will arrive at the right conclusion about a forest. Careful reasoning is what we deploy after the verdict, in service of the verdict.

3. Ideology as Cognitive Technology

Teun van Dijk’s Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach is the key text, and it is worth being precise about what it claims. Van Dijk defines ideology as the basis of the social representations of a group — not a set of beliefs but a cognitive framework that organises attention, memory, and inference.[19] Ideology does two things. It maintains group cohesion and solidarity. And it legitimises power: “ideologies may be used to legitimate or obscure power abuse.”

Crucially, van Dijk insists ideology is not inherently negative — it also organises resistance and opposition. This matters for honesty. The problem is not ideology as such; any group able to act together needs one. The problem is what a particular ideology does when it is totalised and when it is the only frame available.

Van Dijk also makes a point that undercuts the comfortable assumption that ideas come before actions and merely dress them up. Ideologies do not just legitimate systems of domination after the fact; they “monitor and organize group knowledge and attitudes and hence the beliefs that members need in order to construct the models controlling the actions that implement domination.” Ideology is upstream of the machinery. It is the operating manual.

A. Moral disengagement: how a civilisation disowns its conscience

Albert Bandura’s account of moral disengagement gives us the mechanism by which ordinary, decent people participate in inhumane systems without psychological collapse.[20] He identifies a family of psychosocial manoeuvres:

Moral justification — investing harmful conduct with high moral purpose. Not “we are destroying the Amazon for profit” but “we are feeding the world,” “we are feeding the world.”
Euphemistic labelling — sanitising language. Bandura cites experimental evidence that people behave more cruelly when detrimental acts are verbally sanitised than when they are called aggression. Soldiers “waste” people rather than kill them; bombing missions “service the target.” Livestock become “units”; the killing becomes “processing”; a forest becomes a “resource.”
Advantageous comparison — the manoeuvre that normalised empire, and which now runs through every supply chain. Our forest loss is small. Our emissions are necessary. Someone else is worse.
Displacement and diffusion of responsibility — the agentless passive voice; the faceless collectivity as agent. Where everyone is responsible, no one is.
Disregard or distortion of consequences — the starving, the smoke, the runoff, the silent spring.
Dehumanisation and blaming the victim — the final move.

Bandura’s own summary of the last two is the crux of this article. “To perceive another as human activates empathetic reactions through a sense of common humanity. It is difficult to mistreat humanised persons without self-condemnation.” And: “Combining diffused responsibility with dehumanization greatly escalates the level of punitiveness.”

That is the architecture of disconnection. Ideology supplies the justification; euphemism supplies the vocabulary; diffusion supplies the plausible deniability; dehumanisation removes the emotional brake.

B. The final reduction: from beast to machine

And here the reduction reaches all the way down. The Western philosophical tradition that culminates in industrial animal agriculture descends from a specific move: the Cartesian reclassification of animals as res extensa — mindless mechanism, the beast-machine. Frans de Waal has a name for the cognitive reflex this installs: anthropodenial, the refusal to acknowledge human-like traits in other animals and animal-like traits in ourselves.[48] Once a living being is defined as a mechanism without interiority, suffering becomes a malfunction rather than a harm, and killing becomes maintenance rather than murder.[27]

The parallel to Bandura’s human outgroups is exact and structural. Dehumanise, and the self-sanctions do not fire. Whether the victim is a person from a named ethnic group or a pig in a shed, the psychological architecture is the same, which is precisely why the speciesist frame has proved so durable. The neural evidence is consistent: when research participants perceive less cognitive capacity in an interlocutor, they show reduced neural mirroring, reduced empathic accuracy, and less successful cooperation.[24]

The empirical literature here is stronger than for most claims in the social sciences, and it has been sharpened by genuine scholarly disagreement. Over (2021) has raised seven serious challenges to the dehumanisation hypothesis — including the point that outgroup members are often denied some human qualities while retaining others, and that some non-human organisms are treated with great care while some human groups are harmed precisely because of their uniquely human qualities.[23] Lang (2020) argues that in collective violence, dehumanisation may matter less than the strengthening of justifications.[25] A 2025 meta-analysis of dehumanisation and aggression is the appropriate place to look for the current state of the evidence.[26]

This is a more careful position than the one usually taken in polemics, and it strengthens rather than weakens the argument. If dehumanisation is not the single master switch, then we should not expect a single de-humanisation fix. The whole apparatus matters: justification, euphemism, comparison, diffusion, and the slow loss of daily contact with living things. Which is to say that the problem is systemic, and therefore also potentially systemic in its repair.

4. The Operating System of the Anthropocene

A. Dominion, and the human–nature divide

Every one of the mechanisms above requires a prior frame: the assumption that the human is outside the natural order rather than a member of it. This is the “human–nature divide,” and it is not a natural fact. It is a theoretical framework, and it has a history.

It runs through the Judeo-Christian account of dominion. It runs through Descartes. It runs through the Enlightenment framing of wilderness as something to be mastered, and through the twentieth-century technocratic framing of the living world as a stock of capital assets. It runs through the phrase “natural resources” itself — a phrase that encodes the conclusion in a noun, and that Robin Wall Kimmerer has specifically proposed we retire: “It’s not a natural resource. To me, it’s a gift from the natural world.”[31]

And it runs through the most powerful ideology of all: the market itself, which requires that living systems be priced rather than related to. A tree with a price can be felled; a tree with a relationship cannot. Kimmerer’s diagnosis is precise: “The language of natural resources suggests that we own them, that we deserve them, whereas I want to remember that it’s a gift.”

B. The Anthropocene as diagnosis — and as alibi

Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed the term “Anthropocene” in the IGBP Global Change Newsletter in May 2000, dating its onset to the late eighteenth century and James Watt’s steam engine.[36] The name has done extraordinary work as a description: it locates human agency in the geology.

But a description can be conscripted into an ideology, and this one has been conscripted in both directions. One use names the damage and demands accountability. The other uses the word’s terminal aura — epoch, geological, irreversible — to convert responsibility into fatality. If we are merely a species passing through a geological phase, then nothing we do is a moral act; there is no one to blame and nothing to forgive. This is the Anthropocene becomes the perfect alibi for the very conduct it names.

This is ideology at its most characteristic: taking a true fact and attaching to it a conclusion that immunises the actor. And it is worth noticing that the terminal-epoch framing is itself doing cognitive work — the same trick Mercier and Sperber describe, except here the reasoning is not post-hoc but pre-emptive: the conclusion is chosen first (“there is nothing to be done”) and the reasoning is recruited to support it.

5. The Ledger

The frame has a price. This is what it has cost, as measured by the institutions we built to measure it.

Indicator	Latest figure	Source
Monitored vertebrate wildlife populations, 1970–2022	−73% average; Latin America & Caribbean −95%; freshwater −85%	WWF/ZSL, Living Planet Report 2026[1][2]
Species threatened with extinction	~1 million of ~8.1 million estimated animal and plant species	IPBES Global Assessment, 2019[4][5]
Vertebrate extinction rate vs. background rate	up to 100× higher than the 2 E/MSY background rate	Ceballos et al., 2015[6]
Terrestrial insect abundance	~−9% per decade (166 long-term surveys, 1,676 sites)	van Klink et al., Science, 2020[7][8]
Marine fish stocks fished beyond sustainable limits	37.7%, up from 35.4% two years earlier	FAO, SOFIA 2024[9]
Ice-free land degraded	up to 40%, directly affecting half of humanity	UNCCD, Global Land Outlook 2[10][11]
Agrifood systems’ share of global GHG emissions	~32% (16.5 Gt CO₂e, 2023); livestock alone 4.3 Gt	FAO[12]
Capital flowing to nature-destructive activity, 2023	~US$7.3 trillion vs. only ~US$220 billion to nature-based solutions (30:1)	UNEP, State of Finance for Nature 2026[49]
Public environmentally harmful subsidies, 2023	~US$2.4 trillion (fossil fuels, agriculture, water, transport, construction)	UNEP, State of Finance for Nature 2026[49]
Premature deaths from air pollution	~6.7–7 million per year; ambient 4.2M, household 2.9M	WHO[13][14]
Global population living in cities	45% of 8.2 billion, more than double 1950	UN DESA, WUP 2025[15]

Two of those numbers deserve a moment longer.

The extinction-rate figure — up to 100 times the background rate — was computed by Ceballos, Ehrlich, Barnosky and colleagues using deliberately conservative assumptions, adopting a background rate twice as high as the conventional estimate in order to minimise the case for a mass extinction. Under those self-limiting assumptions, the vertebrates lost in the last century would have taken between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear at background rates.[6] They concluded that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.

The capital figure is the one I would put on a billboard. UNEP’s State of Finance for Nature 2026 found that in 2023 roughly US$7.3 trillion flowed into activities that damage the natural world, against roughly US$220 billion directed toward nature-based solutions — a ratio of 30 to 1 against nature.[49] That is not an ecological imbalance that will correct itself through individual virtue. It is a system working exactly as designed.

And the composition of that figure is the part that should stop people in their tracks. Of the $7.3 trillion, US$4.9 trillion came from private capital concentrated in utilities, industrials, energy and basic materials — and US$2.4 trillion came from public environmentally harmful subsidies to fossil fuels, agriculture, water, transport and construction.[49] In other words, more than a third of the money destroying the living world is not greedy individuals in the private sector. It is public policy, written by governments, defended by lobbies, and paid for by everyone. The ideology is not merely a corporate preference. It is embedded in the state’s budget, which means it can be unembedded by it.

Meanwhile, close to 90% of the $220 billion spent on protecting nature came from public funds; private investment was just $23.4 billion, about 10% of the total.[49] Nearly nine in every ten dollars protecting the world are public, at a time when public balance sheets are under acute strain. The imbalance is not a temporary condition of a transition. It is the permanent shape of the system.

6. The Death Toll Runs Both Ways

The argument should be precise here: ecological destruction is not merely an assault on other species. It is also an assault on humans, running through several distinct channels.

Immediately and directly, through ideology itself. The ideologies discussed here — dominion, racial hierarchy, national supremacism, market fundamentalism, revolutionary purification — have killed humans at industrial scale for two centuries. Each deployed Bandura’s full apparatus: moral justification, euphemistic labelling, advantageous comparison, diffusion of responsibility, dehumanisation of the victim. The killing was not a failure of these ideologies. It was their purpose.

And then, deferred, through the ecosystems they destroyed. Air pollution alone, generated substantially by the energy systems our extractive ideologies built, is responsible for an estimated 6.7 to 7 million premature deaths a year — more than one in ten of all deaths globally, with roughly 90% of ambient-air-pollution deaths falling in low- and middle-income countries.[13][14] When we say that an ideology “works,” we should ask what it works on.

The air-pollution statistic is also where the ecological and human ledgers fuse completely. The same combustion that drives the climate system that drives the habitat loss that drives the extinction rate drives the cardiovascular disease that kills the grandchild of the farmer whose soil was poisoned. There is no separate “environmental” ledger and “human” ledger. There is one ledger, and the extractive frame is in default on all of it.

7. The Extinction of Experience

Now the compounding cost, and the one most rarely named.

Ecologists have a term for what happens when a species loses not just its members but its encounters. J. R. Miller called it the “extinction of experience” in 2005 — the progressive loss of direct human interactions with nature.[37] Soga and Gaston developed it into a research programme, defining it as the loss of human–nature interactions themselves;[46] later work has documented its intergenerational character, showing how diminished “personalised ecologies” erode emotional ties to nature, weaken pro-conservation attitudes, and reduce engagement in the actions conservation requires.[38]

The mechanism is now well mapped. Loss of contact produces avoidance; avoidance produces further loss; the result is a self-reinforcing cycle, which the literature describes with a pointed name of its own: biophobia.[40] And the empirical correlate of “societal extinction of species” is that as the encounter with living things disappears, so does the sense that there is anything to lose.[39]

This is where the loss of compassion stops being a metaphor and becomes a measurable mechanism. Compassion is not a general-purpose feeling that happens to be triggered by suffering. It is a response to perceived suffering, and perception requires contact. Bandura was right that dehumanisation disables the empathetic response — but the reverse is also true: the more the encounter is engineered away, the less there is to empathise with, and the less the machinery has to be switched off. The disconnection is self-completing.

And note the demographics. 45% of humanity now lives in cities, more than double the 1950 figure, with two-thirds of projected population growth to 2050 occurring in urban areas.[15] The single largest demographic shift in human history is, in ecological terms, a mass migration away from contact with the living world. We have not merely failed to teach our children the natural world. We have built the built environment, the road network, the warehouse, the algorithmic feed, and the zoning code that keeps them from it.

8. The Counter-Tradition

None of this is new, and the point would be lost if it were. There is a long tradition of people who looked at the same cognitive machinery and used it differently.

Aldo Leopold supplied the ethic in 1949, in A Sand County Almanac: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” — extending moral standing to soils, waters, plants and animals, and making the watershed move from a human-centred to a biotic-centred frame.[43] Albert Schweitzer gave the same insight its most quoted form, “reverence for life,” arguing that the will to live is not a human monopoly but a universal property of the natural world, and that our failure to recognise this is a deeper root of the cruelty we inflict.[47] Rachel Carson stood at the hinge. Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) did not merely document ecological damage; it demonstrated that the damage was produced by ideology and defended by the apparatus — the chemical industry mobilising Bandura’s full battery of moral justification and euphemism against a public health case.[44]

Arne Naess named the fault line in 1973, in “The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement.” His first principle was the “rejection of the man-in-environment image in favour of the relational, total-field image” — organisms as knots in the biospherical net. His second was biospherical egalitarianism, and he was careful about its implications: the equal right to live and blossom, restricted to humans, “is an anthropocentrism with detrimental effects upon the life quality of humans themselves.”[29] Note that he did not argue this from sentiment. He argued it from cognitive scope — the shallow framework fails because it cannot see the system it is operating in.

Paul Taylor gave the position its philosophical form in “The Ethics of Respect for Nature” (Environmental Ethics, 1981), later developed into the book Respect for Nature (1986), grounding it in a “life principle” and in biocentric equality — the view that no being has more inherent value than another.[45] E. O. Wilson turned it into a spatial programme — Half-Earth (2016), dedicating half the planet’s land and sea to nature — which rests on the empirical observation that habitat area and species richness are related closely enough to make the target defensible.[35]

Peter Singer supplied the secular ethic. Animal Liberation (1975) introduced “equal consideration of interests” and popularised the term “speciesism,” coined by Richard Ryder, defined as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.”[32][33] Sentience, not intelligence, not usefulness, not species membership, is the criterion. And Elizabeth Kolbert demonstrated in The Sixth Extinction (2015) that the sixth extinction is not a future event but a present condition with a documented cause.[34]

Frans de Waal dismantled the psychological alibi. Mama’s Last Hug (2019) documents the emotional and cognitive continuity between humans and other primates in detail that leaves no room for the beast-machine: empathy expressed as consolation, reconciliation after conflict, fairness preferences, yawn contagion, the embrace between a dying chimpanzee and the biologist who had known her for forty years.[27][28] Compassion, on this account, is not a uniquely human virtue that we extended outward as a favour. It is a trait we inherited, and our species has been systematically suppressing it.

Robin Wall Kimmerer supplied the economic alternative. Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) does not argue for austerity; it argues for a different unit of account — reciprocity, gratitude, and the gift economy, against a system whose “currency of an economy is not money” but the quality of our relationships.[30][31] The Three Sisters planting — corn, beans, squash, each fixing what the others need — is not a metaphor for a better economy. It is a better economy.

And the empirical side of the ledger is not uniformly bleak. The wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995 restored a tritrophic cascade: willow and aspen regeneration, beaver return, a richer and more balanced system — with the caveat, well stated in the synthesis literature, that the exact attribution of these dynamics remains debated.[41] European bison, extinct in the wild since 1927, are back in Białowieża and the Southern Carpathians. Giant tortoises reintroduced to Indian Ocean islands have increased germination for endangered plants.[42] Around half of monitored wildlife populations are stable or increasing, and the Amazon Soy Moratorium cut soy-linked deforestation from nearly 30% to about 2%.[3]

9. Rebuilding the Frame

If the diagnosis is cognitive, the remedy must be cognitive too. WWF’s 2026 report is useful here precisely because it is not a plea — it is a description of system dynamics. Its central concept is the positive tipping point: a threshold beyond which change becomes self-reinforcing, so that change accelerates, costs fall, and reversal becomes harder.[1][3]

The energy system has already crossed it. Solar power went from niche to dominant new capacity in a generation, and the transition is now reinforced by economics, technology and market demand rather than by environmental ambition alone. The food system is at the “enabling” stage — the point where conditions for a tipping point are being created but the shift has not yet self-reinforced. The finance system is earlier still, and faces a concrete obstacle: a global biodiversity financing gap of roughly US$1.317 trillion a year, nearly double the $711 billion estimated in 2020, set to be debated at the CBD COP17 in Yerevan this month.[50] The remedy is also quantified. UNEP calculates that nature-based-solutions investment must grow 2.5-fold to US$571 billion a year by 2030 to meet the commitments of the CBD, UNFCCC and UNCCD — and that this is equivalent to roughly 0.5% of global GDP.[49] Half a percent. That is the entire size of the ask, set against a $7.3 trillion flow in the opposite direction.

That is a far more actionable diagnosis than “we need to care more.”

Change the language, because language is the load-bearing wall. Euphemistic labelling is not a matter of politeness; Bandura cites experimental evidence that it measurably enables cruelty.[20] Retire “natural resources” for “living systems” and “relatives.” Retire “units” for animals whose names and faces are known. The vocabulary of the extractive frame is the frame.
Make the encounter structural, not aspirational. The extinction of experience is a design problem, and therefore a design opportunity.[37][38] Contact with living systems — school grounds, urban habitat corridors, restored rivers, community-owned woodland — is infrastructure in the same sense that our analysis of ecological connectivity and urban environments argues green space is infrastructure. If children encounter the natural world daily, the incentive to destroy it becomes incoherent.
Treat the food system as the primary lever. WWF’s analysis is unambiguous: the food system is the leading cause of habitat loss, the energy system the leading cause of climate change, and finance the mechanism that bankrolls both.[2] The food system is therefore where the next positive tipping point must be triggered — through national food strategies, the overhaul of agricultural subsidies, nature-positive production, sustainable trade and consumption, and the reduction of food loss and waste.
Move money, not just sentiment. WWF’s five key actions include requiring credible climate and nature transition plans from major businesses, removing deforestation-linked products from supply chains, and redirecting investment toward restoration rather than decline.[3] The finance system is the earliest stage of its tipping point, which means it is the cheapest place to intervene and the most expensive to leave.
Restore the moral vocabulary, including the ugly parts of it. Compassion is a capacity, and capacities atrophy. This is an argument for practice rather than for a better argument: the more the encounter is engineered away, the less there is to feel for, and the less anyone will want to act.[40][27]
Treat the Anthropocene as a diagnosis, never as an alibi. “Geological” is not “irrelevant.” A species responsible for a geological transition is responsible for it.[36]

10. Conclusion: Reason in the Service of Kinship

We are not, as the standard story has it, a species that failed to learn. We are a species that learned too well — that we can model, coordinate, justify, and consequently exclude. The same faculty that lets a human being understand that a river is a living system also lets that person file it under “natural resources.” The same machinery that lets us organise a rescue also lets us organise a clearcut. Nothing in human cognitive architecture contains a stop that says: and this is a living thing, so the argument must end here.

But it does not need one, because the counter-tradition has always been a cognitive tradition, not a sentimental one. Naess got there from systems theory. Singer got there from epistemology. Taylor got there from first principles about what is owed to life. Kimmerer got there from botany and Potawatomi law. Wilson got there from species–area relationships. de Waal got there from the data. Each of them used the faculty in question against itself.

The evidence from the 2026 Living Planet Report is that this works. The same report that documents a 73% decline documents a recovering bluefin tuna, a recovering tiger, a recovering elephant, and a supply chain that moved deforestation from 30% to 2%. Around half of monitored populations are stable or rising. Nature can recover, and the conditions for recovery are not mysterious — they are financial, agricultural and political, which means they are, in the fullest sense, cognitive.

What is required is not that we become more intelligent. It is that we aim the intelligence we have at a different object. We already know what is happening. The missing ingredient is not a fact but a frame: the conviction, sustained by daily encounter and defended by argument, that the living world is not the backdrop to human history but its subject — and that every other creature is a neighbour rather than raw material.

The WWF report is subtitled The Science of Hope for a reason. Hope is not optimism, and it is certainly not a feeling. It is the name of a threshold.

A Livable Earth Is a Compassionate Earth

Key message: Our problem is not a lack of intelligence. It is a surplus of the wrong kind of intelligence — reason deployed in the service of justification rather than truth. Ideology is what reason becomes when it stops asking whether it should be used. Because the cause is cognitive, the remedy can be too: a new frame, in which the living world is not the backdrop to human history but its subject.

Further Reading & Tools

All links open in a new tab.

WWF Living Planet Report 2026 — The Science of Hope (full report and summaries)
WWF Living Planet Report 2026: What the Food Sector Needs to Know (briefing PDF)
UNEP, State of Finance for Nature 2026 — Nature in the Red (the $7.3tn / $220bn finance flows)
Paulson Institute, TNC & WWF, Financing Nature: A Mid-Decade Update (2026) — the US$1.317 trillion biodiversity financing gap, ahead of CBD COP17
IPBES Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019) — full report and Summary for Policymakers
FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2024 (SOFIA)
UNCCD, Global Land Outlook 2 (2022)
UN DESA, World Urbanization Prospects 2025 — Summary of Results
WHO Air Quality fact sheets — ambient and household air pollution
Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug — publisher page and interviews
Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (1954) — the ethic of “reverence for life”
The Guardian: “Human exceptionalism” (2025) — on de Waal’s “anthropodenial”
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac — the Aldo Leopold Foundation archive
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring — the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass — publisher page and e360 interview
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction — publisher page
Rewilding Europe — European bison, Konik horses and Tauros reintroductions
Half-Earth Project — E. O. Wilson’s spatial proposal in practice

References

[1] WWF and Zoological Society of London, Living Planet Report 2026: The Science of Hope (8 October 2026). https://www.wwf.org.uk/press-release/living-planet-report-2026

[2] WWF International, “Living Planet Report 2026: Amid an average 73% decline in wildlife population sizes, scientists reveal grounds for hope” (8 October 2026). https://www.wwfca.org/en/?401797/Informe-Planeta-Vivo-de-WWF-2026

[3] WWF UK, “Living Planet Report 2026: What the Food Sector Needs to Know” (October 2026). https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2026-10/living-planet-report-2026-food-sector-briefing.pdf

[4] IPBES, Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019). https://www.ipbes.net/global-assessment

[5] IPBES Secretariat, “How did IPBES estimate ‘1 million species at risk of extinction’?” (22 May 2019). https://www.ipbes.net/news/how-did-ipbes-estimate-1-million-species-risk-extinction-globalassessment-report

[6] Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle and Todd M. Palmer, “Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction,” Science Advances 1, e1400253 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1400253

[7] Roel van Klink et al., “Meta-analysis reveals declines in terrestrial but increases in freshwater insect abundances,” Science 368, 417–420 (2020). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax9931

[8] “Comment on ‘Meta-analysis reveals declines in terrestrial but increases in freshwater insect abundances’,” Science (2021). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd8947

[9] FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2024: Blue Transformation in action (Rome, 2024). https://www.fao.org/publications/fao-flagship-publications/the-state-of-world-fisheries-and-aquaculture/2024/en

[10] UNCCD, Global Land Outlook 2 (2022). https://www.unccd.int/resources/global-land-outlook/overview

[11] UNCCD, “Chronic land degradation: UN offers stark warnings and practical remedies in Global Land Outlook 2” (26 April 2022). https://www.unccd.int/news-stories/press-releases/chronic-land-degradation-un-offers-stark-warnings-and-practical

[12] FAO, “Greenhouse gas emissions from agrifood systems: Global, regional and country trends, 2001–2023.” https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights-detail/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-agrifood-systems.-global–regional-and-country-trends–2001-2023/en

[13] World Health Organization, “Household air pollution,” fact sheet (16 December 2025). https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-air-pollution-and-health

[14] World Health Organization, “Air pollution.” https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/air-quality-and-health/air-pollution

[15] UN DESA, World Urbanization Prospects 2025: Summary of Results (18 November 2025). https://www.un.org/en/desa/WUP-2025

[16] Michael Tomasello, Henrike Moll, Malinda Goodrich and Claudio Tomasello, “Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition,” Developmental Science 8(2), 113–124 (2005). https://dornsife.usc.edu/henrike-moll/wp-content/uploads/sites/404/2023/11/Tomasello_et_alll.pdf

[17] “Cultural intelligence, shared intentionality and human cognitive development,” Mind & Language (2024). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-024-09966-w

[18] Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, “Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34(2), 57–74 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X10000968

[19] Teun A. van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Sage, 1998). https://discourses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Teun-A.-van-Dijk-1998-Ideology.-A-Multidisciplinary-Approach.pdf

[20] Albert Bandura, “Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3(3), 193–209 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3

[21] Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 20(1), 53–77 (2001); discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Morality and Cognitive Science.” https://iep.utm.edu/m-cog-sc/

[22] Scott Barry, Joshua Knobe and David Loss, “A reason-based explanation for moral dumbfounding,” Judgment and Decision Making 13(2) (2018). https://sjdm.org/~baron/journal/18/181220a/jdm181220a.pdf

[23] Harriet Over, “Seven challenges for the dehumanisation hypothesis,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 16(1), 3–13 (2021). https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/153302/

[24] “Recognizing humanity: dehumanization predicts neural mirroring and empathic accuracy in face-to-face interactions” (2021). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8094996/

[25] Joseph Lang, “The limited importance of dehumanization in collective violence,” Current Opinion in Psychology 35, 17–20 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.02.002

[26] “Dehumanization and aggression: A meta-analysis,” Aggression and Violent Behavior (2025). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178925000485

[27] Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves (W. W. Norton, 2019); NPR interview, 1 March 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/01/698902400/mamas-last-hug-makes-case-that-humans-are-not-alone-in-experiencing-emotions

[28] Frans de Waal, interview with Nautilus, “Empathy, Morality, Community, Culture—Apes Have It All.” https://nautil.us/empathy-morality-community-cultureapes-have-it-all-234306

[29] Arne Naess, “The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement: A summary,” Inquiry 16, 95–100 (1973). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00201747308601682

[30] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013); MacArthur Foundation, 2022. https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2022/robin-wall-kimmerer

[31] Robin Wall Kimmerer, interview with Yale Environment 360, “Reciprocity: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Natural World.” https://e360.yale.edu/features/robin-kimmerer-interview

[32] Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York Review / Random House, 1975). https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-14346-5_6

[33] Richard D. Ryder, “Victims of Science” (Davis-Poynter, 1975) — the coinage of “speciesism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism

[34] Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Bloomsbury, 2015) — Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. https://nature.berkeley.edu/albright/2021/kolbert

[35] E. O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (W. W. Norton, 2016); Half-Earth Project. https://halfearth.org/

[36] Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” IGBP Global Change Newsletter 41, 17–18 (2000). https://www.mpic.de/3865097/the-anthropocene

[37] J. R. Miller, “Biodiversity conservation and the extinction of experience,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 20(8), 430–434 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2005.05.013

[38] “Breaking the intergenerational cycle of extinction of experience: Actions needed and pathways forward,” Cambridge Prisms: Extinction (2024). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-prisms-extinction/article/breaking-the-intergenerational-cycle-of-extinction-of-experience-actions-needed-and-pathways-forward/15EBF05C36F62DB4192A602B4C070F47

[39] “Societal extinction of species,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2022). https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(21)00359-1

[40] “The vicious cycle of biophobia,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2022). https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(22)00360-3

[41] William J. Ripple et al., “Science for a wilder Anthropocene: Synthesis and future directions for trophic rewilding research,” PNAS 113(37) (2016). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1502556112

[42] John Carey, “Rewilding,” American Scientist (2016). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4743769/

[43] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1949) — “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” https://www.aldoleopold.org/

[44] Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962). https://www.rachelcarson.org/

[45] Paul W. Taylor, “The Ethics of Respect for Nature,” Environmental Ethics 3(3), 197–218 (1981); developed in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1986). https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics19813321

[46] Melanie Soga and Kevin J. Gaston, “Extinction of experience: the loss of human–nature interactions,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14(2), 94–101 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1890/150119

[47] Albert Schweitzer, “The Problem of Peace,” Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, Oslo (4 November 1954) — the fullest statement of his ethic of “reverence for life.” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1952/schweitzer/lecture/

[48] Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Human exceptionalism,” The Guardian (16 November 2025) — on de Waal’s concept of “anthropodenial.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/16/human-exceptionalism-essay

[49] UNEP, State of Finance for Nature 2026: Nature in the Red — Powering the Trillion Dollar Nature Transition Economy (Nairobi, 22 January 2026). https://www.unep.org/en/publication-series/state-finance-nature

[50] Li Zhu, Terry Townshend, Rose Niu, Linda Krueger, Andrew Deutz and Kevin Bender, Financing Nature: A Mid-Decade Update — From Isolated Progress to Implementation at Scale (Paulson Institute, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund, 23 September 2026). https://www.conservationgateway.org/content/dam/tnc/nature/en/documents/f/i/FinancingNature2026MidDecadeUpdate-d2.pdf

NewAntarctica.com / Ecology, Cognition & Human Nature

The Killing Fields of Aotearoa/New Zealand

Just as Britain lead the world out of the evils of slavery in the 19th century, Aotearoa has the opportunity to lead the world out of the dark age of extraction and into an era of inter-species harmony. The choice, ultimately, is whether we will continue to be a hunter-killer state, or finally become the peaceful, harmonious society we claim to be.

The Hunter-Killer State and the Illusion of Species Supremacy: Re-imagining Aotearoa’s Relationship with the Living World

Globally, Aotearoa New Zealand is marketed as a pristine, peaceful utopia. It is the “clean, green” paradise of the ‘Lord of the Rings’, a nuclear-free haven, and a progressive society nestled in a breathtaking natural environment.

But this carefully curated branding masks a dark, systemic reality. Beneath the rolling green hills and the pristine marketing campaigns lies a society deeply structured around violence, domination, and killing.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the government’s recent $2.7 billion defense package to purchase five MH-60R Seahawk “Romeo” helicopters. This purchase is not merely a military upgrade; it is the ultimate, multi-billion-dollar manifestation of a national psyche addicted to violence. From the slaughterhouses that drive our export economy to the poisoned forests of our biodiversity projects, and our eager enlistment in foreign wars, New Zealand is not a peaceful nation. It is a profoundly violent one.

But to truly change this, we must look beyond the policies and confront the philosophical root of our violence: our arrogant and foolish belief in human supremacy.

The $2.7 Billion “Hunter-Killer”: Servicing Empire Over the Pacific

The MH-60R Seahawk is a premier “hunter-killer” helicopter, heavily optimized for Anti-Submarine and Anti-Surface Warfare. It is a weapon of war, designed to track and destroy enemies in the deep ocean.

Yet, the New Zealand government justifies this recent exorbitant purchase by claiming it will help with Pacific Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR). This is a profound deception. The MH-60R’s cabin is packed with mission computers and weapons systems, not optimized for carrying bulk disaster relief. With only five air-frames, NZ may only ever have one or two fully operational at any given time—leaving almost zero surge capacity for a major Pacific cyclone.

If the government genuinely cared about Pacific civil defence, they would have purchased heavy-lift, utility-focused aircraft like the Boeing CH-47F Chinook or the utility variant MH-60S “Sierra”. But we didn’t buy those. We bought hunter-killer choppers. Why? Because New Zealand has a long, sycophantic history of enthusiastically joining UK and US wars of aggression. The MH-60R ensures the Royal New Zealand Navy can act as a subordinate, interoperable asset for the US and Australian navies to thwart a mythical Chinese invasion thereat. It is a tool of empire, bought with money that could have been used to genuinely protect the Pacific.

The Slaughterhouse Economy: Millions of Lives, Objectified as “Products”

We know that those exposed to military violence abroad, bringtheir violence and trauma home with them This militarism abroad mirrors our violence at home. The foundation of New Zealand’s rural economy is built on the industrialized killing of sentient beings. Each year, the agricultural sector slaughters tens of millions of animals. While the industry uses sterile, bureaucratic language to desensitize the public to the terror and cruelty they inflict —referring to living, feeling individuals as “stock,” “meat,” “carcasses,” and “products”—the reality is visceral and brutal.

Recent scientific consensus has thoroughly dismantled the Cartesian illusion that animals are unfeeling automatons. The 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness formally acknowledged that non-human animals possess the neurological substrates of consciousness. Research has proven that cows experience grief, pigs possess complex problem-solving skills and emotional depth, sheep and even bees recognize human faces. They have full cognition, social structures, and a desire to live.

Yet our legal and economic systems maintain a staggering cognitive dissonance. While the NZ Animal Welfare Act was amended in 2015 to formally recognize animals as “sentient,” this very same state sanctions their mass slaughter. Below is a table illustrating the sheer scale of this killing over a recent five-year period (excluding the additional 100+ million poultry killed annually):

The methods of this killing are inherently violent: captive bolt guns, electrical water-bath stunning, and ex-sanguination. We normalize this daily, systemic bloodshed because it lines the pockets of big business and the export economy.

The “Pest” Paradigm: Militarizing Conservation

This culture of killing extends deep into our native bush. New Zealand’s biodiversity sector is dominated by a lethal paradigm: the obsession with killing introduced mammals to save indigenous birds.

Under the banner of “Predator Free 2050,” the state sanctions the killing of roughly 8 to 10 million possums annually, alongside millions of rats, stoats, and ferrets. We use military tactics—bombing the forests with 1080 poison, which causes a slow, agonizing death by internal organ failure, and deploying steel-jawed leg-hold traps.

This approach relies heavily on the sanctification of the hunter and the trapper as the heroes of our natural environment. But it requires a massive, willful blind spot. The NZ biodiversity movement rarely acknowledges the root cause of indigenous species decline: humans and our actions. The destruction of native habitats through rampant deforestation for grazing and dairy conversion, and urban sprawl is the primary driver of extinction.

Yet, rather than addressing the unsustainable expansion of the human footprint, or transitioning to true re-wilding, the conservation establishment defaults to endless culling. We are attempting to bomb, poison, and trap our way to ecological health, just as we buy hunter-killer helicopters to strafe our way to geopolitical relevance.

Beyond Human Supremacy: The Inherent Equality of All Life

To break this cycle of violence, we must dismantle the philosophical foundation that makes it possible: anthropocentrism: the belief that human beings are the supreme rulers of the Earth, and that all other life exists merely as a resource for our consumption. That belief is a destructive fiction and the key driving force for humans destruction of our natural environment globally.

The reality of our shared existence demands the recognition of the inherent equality of all living beings. This does not mean that a human, a cow, or a kauri tree are exactly the same; it means that their right to exist, to flourish, and to live free from unnecessary suffering is of equal moral weight. A pig is the center of its own universe, just as a human is. A possum, a rat, and a kiwi all possess an inherent value that is entirely independent of their utility—or perceived detriment—to human beings or our prioritising of one species over another because of our conservation ideology.

When we view the world through the lens of inherent equality, the language of “pests,” “stock,” and “resources” dissolves. We recognize that we are not the masters of the web of life, but merely one strand within it. The violence we inflict on the slaughterhouse and forest floor is directly derived from the arrogant and foolish delusion that we are somehow separate from, and superior to, the natural world.

Five Pillars for an Inter-species Aotearoa

To transition from a Hunter-Killer State to a society of inter-species harmony, we must move beyond identifying its failings and illogicality to creating a new reality. New Zealand has the geographic isolation, the wealth, the innovation and the progressive heritage to pioneer this shift. Such a new paradigm could look something like the following…

1. The Parliament of All Beings: Expanding Legal Person-hood

New Zealand is already a global pioneer in the “Rights of Nature” movement, having granted legal person-hood to the Whanganui River (Te Awa Tupua) and Te Urewera. But we have stopped halfway. We must expand this legal framework to grant person-hood and inherent rights to all sentient species and ecosystems.

Imagine establishing an “Ecological Parliament” of equals. Just as the Whanganui River has human guardians to speak for it in court, every major species—the kiwi, the kauri, the honeybee, the cow—would have legally appointed, ecologically trained guardians. Their sole mandate would be to veto legislation, economic projects, or agricultural practices that harm their species’ right to flourish. This shifts our legal system from protecting human ‘property’ to protecting ecological kinship and inter-connectivity.

2. From the Slaughterhouse to a Laboratory of Caring

The argument against ending animal agriculture is always economic: “We need the export revenue.” But this assumes we cannot innovate our way out of the slaughterhouse. New Zealand has world-class agricultural science and a highly skilled rural workforce.

We must redirect the billions in agricultural subsidies away from the meat and dairy export model, and invest heavily in new strategies like plant protein based agriculture, fruit and nut tree proteins and precision fermentation using food-forest, permaculture and organic principles.

Our farmers wouldn’t be forced out of business; they would be retrained and subsidized to become “ecosystem stewards” and bio-technologists. NZ could transition from being the world’s slaughterhouse to the world’s “Laboratory of Caring,” exporting high-tech, cruelty-free, climate-positive food systems and proving that a vibrant rural economy doesn’t require a bloody foundation.

3. Healing the Hunter-Killer Psyche (Eco-Psychology)

We cannot change our external policies without addressing the internal, psychological conditioning that makes us comfortable with killing. New Zealand’s cultural identity is heavily tied to the “Hunter” (the bloke with the rifle and his pig-dogs in the bush), the “Warrior” (the ANZAC mythos), and the “Conqueror” (the pioneer clearing the bush).

We must integrate ‘Eco-Psychology’ into our education system and public health initiatives. We need to actively deconstruct the “toughness” associated with killing animals and fighting in foreign wars, replacing the “Hunter-Killer” archetype with the “Cultivator-Healer” who understands humanity’s interconnection with the rest of the natural world and our own dependence on it for our own survival. True inter-species harmony requires humans to heal their own disconnection from nature and their own internalized violence.

4. Aotearoa as the World’s First Inter-species Sanctuary

In 1984, New Zealand took a massive geopolitical risk and declared itself a Nuclear-Free Zone. It was mocked by superpowers at the time, but it ultimately became our greatest point of national pride and remains so to this day. It is time to expand this legacy into an “Inter-species and Ecological Peace” Declaration’.

New Zealand should formally declare its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and landmass a “Sanctuary from Speciesism and Ecological Violence.” This would mean legally banning the importation of products derived from ecologically destructive practices, banning lethal conservation methods (like 1080 and leg-hold traps) on all public lands, and refusing to participate in international military alliances that project violence into the Pacific. It would be a beacon to the world, proving that a modern nation can choose coexistence over conquest.

5. Technological Symbiosis and Non-Invasive Conservation

Our current conservation model relies on brute force: poison, traps, and bullets. The future model must rely on deep listening and technological symbiosis. Instead of spending millions on helicopters to drop poison, we must invest in AI-driven bio-acoustic monitoring networks, drone-assisted native seed dispersal, and genetic research into disease and predator resistance for native birds like the kiwi and kākāpō.

We must use technology to understand and facilitate nature’s own resilience, rather than using technology to bombard nature into submission. In this new paradigm, we can move from being the arrogant “managers” of the forest to its humble “students.”

Re-wilding the Budget and the Mind

New Zealand likes to look in the mirror and see a peaceful, progressive, nature-loving nation. But a society that slaughters 22 million sentient animals a year, poisons and destroys its own forests, and eagerly spends billions on weapons of war is suffering from a profound moral sickness.

True environmentalism and true peace require us to lay down our weapons, our traps, and our poisons. We must abandon the arrogant illusion of human supremacy and embrace the inherent equality of all living beings.

Biocentrism (Kaitiakitanga): the only future we have

Bill Mollison , the brilliant developer of the concepts and actions of permaculture once said; “We are not superior to other life-forms; all living things are an expression of Life. If we could see that truth, we would see that everything we do to other life-forms we also do to ourselves. A culture which understands this does not, without absolute necessity, destroy any living thing” .

Biocentrism in environmental ethics emphasizes that all living things have intrinsic value and moral standing. It extends moral consideration beyond human beings to encompass the entire biosphere. This perspective suggests that every living organism, whether sentient or not, possesses a right to exist and be protected.

Such a human culture, is able to live, sustainably alongside its fellow species. Able to acknowledge that all species are part of the web of life that also supports humans. Without that web, humanity, and most other current species, will inevitably die.

Anthropocentrism: the belief that human beings have superiority over nature has driven 6000 years of human’s ecological destruction, biodiversity loss, and now climate crises. This worldview contrasts sharply with Indigenous perspectives (like kaitiakitanga) and emerging ecological ethics that argue for biocentrism (all life has intrinsic value) or ecocentrism (whole ecosystems matter).

Anthropocentrism’s drivers appear to be derived from humanity’s view that the attributes that humans have- particularly the capacity to manipulate his/her environment, make humans a superior being to all other species on the planet. Our self-defined view of what is superior is derived from our own attributes; rather like an elephant determining that it is superior to all other species because it can reach high places with its trunk.

However our “superior” capacity to manipulate our environment is also our downfall; through 4000 years of manipulation of the natural world around us we have progressively destroyed the living world we rely on to survive.

Many like to think that if we did not have capitalism, we would somehow return to a world where humans could co-habitat in sustainable peace with other species – however it is clear that capitalism is simply one of many manifestations of anthropocentrism. Our belief in our inherent superiority allows us to consider capitalism and the pursuit of ‘wealth” by exploiting and destroying other living things as though that had no cost, as a sane objective.

6000 years ago, humanity’s anthroprocentric view of the world did not impact on the rest of the natural world as it does now. There were perhaps 7 million humans in the world, mainly hunter/gatherers who made use of the environment around them, but whose capacity to create systemic damage to the living world was limited in scale. As our capacity increased to not only defend ourselves against more ‘naturally’ efficient predators but also to kill and destroy other living things, so did the human population. Within two thousand years , the global human population had exploded to 160 million. In 2025 the global human population is estimated at around 8.2 billion people. Most humans now live in towns and cities ( what the Romans called ‘civis” – or ‘civilisation’). Surrounded by an inanimate world of asphalt and concrete we have lost our link with the rest of nature. We do not see its value because we cannot see it- except perhaps to see it as ‘entertainment on a hiking trip in the ‘wilds’.

Many of the world’s religions, particularly but not exclusively, the Abrahamaic religions of Judea, Christ and Mecca instruct their followers to believe in humanity as superior beings before their god.

Perhaps part of that wanton destruction has been because humans not only do not understand the inter-relationships between living things, but are also largely oblivious to the living things around us- the insects, the microbes, the fungi, the birds and mammals that help sustain our lives. We do not see how we are ourselves inextricably woven into that intricate web of life.

This sense of superiority has also led humans to become largely compassion-less for the suffering of others- except perhaps for those people and other animals that we focus our attention on and value for whatever reason. e.g. Cats, dogs, dolphins, whales are somehow living things to be valued- but sheep cattle, rats mice can be killed mercilessly; they do not suit our purposes. Or, as in New Zealand, humans may decide that this living animal is to be exterminated because we value this other living species – it is perhaps cuter, more indigenous, more suitable, more useful for exploitation.

Like most other species on earth, humans do not have the capacity to view the world long-term. We are oblivious to the ever encroaching tide year by year of concrete and asphalt into the living world, or of the one more old growth tree cut down to make way for ‘progress’. We cannot see what we have so tragically lost and the many lives we have destroyed.

If we are to save this planet from ourselves, we must re-learn how to value ALL living things; to see their beauty, their intrinsic value , their importance- and to act with compassion to all living things.

Without that compassion, we may continue to find fine and ultimately futile ways to lower our carbon footprint while we continue to destroy the rest of the living world, but we are nevertheless simply hastening our species’ (and many others) demise.

We can start now. Instead of our media pushing us to buy more and more ‘things’, or to travel here or there-we need our media to begin displaying how it is to become interlinked with our world. To grow trees in every back garden and park, to teach young people that they do not need to be ‘somebody’ important- but instead to be kind and caring to all, to learn how to be at ease with what we have; to ‘need’ less.

Politicians need to understand that GDP is a meaningless piece of garbage that does nothing to improve human’s quality of life and certainaly nothing to sustain our living world.

Politicians also need to be educated to understand the vital importance of bringing an end to anthroprocentrism; that given the destruction we have caused, we must now become true guardians of the natural world or ‘kaitiaki’ as New Zealand’s Maori say. We must make more and more of our living world legislatively sacred -that all of nature itself has rights or ‘personhood’, like the sacred Whanganui River in New Zealand.

Links

Introduction to Permaculture Bill Mollison Tagari Publications Tasmania, (2011) Page 1

Understanding Our Collapsing World- https://open.substack.com/pub/predicament/p/understanding-our-collapsing-world

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/14/rights-of-nature-laws-gaining-momentum

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/intrinsic-value-ecology-and-conservation-25815400/

https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_41

The Sacredness of Life

Life on our planet is a complex and often invisible intertwining of organisms; each one dependant on many others for its survival.

The World Wildlife Fund states that half the planet’s wildlife population has vanished since 1970 as a result of human activity. 52 percent of Earth’s mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish disappeared over those 50 years, 40% of all insects species and 60% of birds are declining globally.

And those figures do not take into account the total populations of the different species of birds, insects and wild mammals that are being killed off or starved from lack of natural habitat. When did the moths last bang themselves against your lighted nightime windows?- when did the smashed insects last cover your windscreen with their bodies on that last holiday in the natural world?- when did you last see the huge flocks of birds that used to be everywhere?

That absence may seem of no consequence (or even a relief!) to many humans (especially those who live in urban spaces) but in fact we are all reliant on the multiplicity of other species for our survival-whether it be for pollination for our food, the birds that spread the seeds of life, the Mycorrhizal fungi that ensure plants and trees grow healthily, or the many predators and ‘pests” who keep life in balance.

We need to revive our lost understanding of our linkage to all other life on this planet. Not just the species that humans ‘like’; our native fauna and flora and our pets, but ALL life. We must begin again to look and listen with respect and compassion to the living world around us and help rebuild the natural world that sustains us. We are perilously close to cutting the remaining threads that bind us to life on Earth.

Acknowledging that human ‘growth’ is in fact creating more dead spaces, (more concrete sealing over the soil, more trees felled, and fewer wild spaces to name just a few of our nature destruction options) . Planting trees, reviving diverse habitats and nurturing all other species with compassion are just some of our key steps towards a better and sustainable world.

A Few Little Pieces of Gold and Silver

A Revised Letter to the Editor to a local New Zealand newspaper:

The current New Zealand government has, in a few short months, proposed a Fast Track Bill to permit friendly quick-rich developers to effortlessly destroy our natural environment which we all rely upon, not just for our wellbeing, but for our survival.

Similarly the proposed revisions to the Resource Management Act not only assist in this quick-rich process by stopping Councils from designating for at least 3 years Significant Natural Areas, but also permit farmers to resume ‘mud-farming’ and other farm process that not only destroy water quality but significantly impact on the wellbeing of farm animals.

But perhaps the pinnacle of achievement of this government to date in putting cash before humanity, is its proposal to resume Livestock Export by Sea. Thousands of cattle spend weeks at sea in pens wading in their own faeces horrific and terrifying conditions – but it makes lots of money!

The mark of a good human being is one who treats all other living beings with kindness, compassion and respect.I find it extraordinary that supposedly educated government ministers put money that they and their mates dont really need more of, before our long term survival and our humanity.

I would therefore respectfully suggest that Prime Minister Luxon and his Cabinet Ministers, spend a month at sea in a livestock transport ship wallowing in their faeces as a learning experience.

____________________________________

Links

https://eds.org.nz/resources/documents/media-releases/2024/make-a-submission-on-the-fast-track-approvals-bill-using-edss-template/

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/514993/government-reveals-first-changes-to-resource-management-act

Mud farming

Live export trade in New Zealand

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/511689/government-drops-need-for-councils-to-comply-with-significant-natural-areas-provisions

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO2407/S00001/live-exports-a-global-animal-welfare-crisis.htm

Super-charging our Descent into the Unknown

While a savage war grinds on in the Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of young men and women on its battlefields for no good reason (along with the other less visible but nonetheless as brutal wars in Yemen, Palestine, Syria and various states of Africa); planet Earth heads ever more rapidly down the slope to a new world: a world where wild weather is the norm, where temperatures and sea-levels climb ever higher at an increasing rate, and where fewer and fewer living things can exist.

A world where humans have increasingly become the predominant inhabitants. A world of humans convinced of their supreme intelligence and foresight when all the factual evidence suggests otherwise. A world where humanity’s short-term avarice has become the dominant driving force for major decisions about our long-term future.

Global warming and loss of bio-diversity are creating a world for which humans and others species are not prepared and will likely not survive in. That global warming and biodiversity loss is purely driven by greed. We do not need all this inanimate ‘stuff’ we have created to lead a full and happy life, but we are hell-bent on acquiring it!

Note that the emissions shown in the above graph relate to the country where CO₂ is produced (i.e.production-based CO₂) , not to where the goods and services that generate emissions are finally consumed.

But the greatest threat to us is not so much the steadily increasing temperatures and wilder weather around the globe caused by man’s constant production of Co2- but the loss of other species. Note that the graph below by Living Planet relates only to ‘wildlife’ , which in their terminology, only includes figures on vertebrate species – mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. It does not include insects, corals, fungi, or plants. The corresponding loss of total volumes and different species of insects is equally catastrophic. And man, not simply through his/her actions in increasing global temperatures, but predominantly through loss of habitat to produce more stuff, is the cause of these losses.

If we were to take the current reductionist simplistic approach to these losses we might say that we have no idea what impact these losses will have on humans, or what ‘benefits’ we could extract from those species if they were to survive. However if we were truly the intelligent species we claim to be, we would be examining the relationships between all these species, including ourselves and determining to preserve wherever possible, the current species we have.

We simply do not have a clue how each of the millions of species on this planet uphold the web of life here.

Increasingly ‘science’ is coming to the conclusion that all living things are sentient– they have awareness and are thus worthy of our respect, empathy and kindness, and a recognition and desire by humans to wherever possible preserve the lives of all other living things.

Death by a thousand cuts: Global threats to insect diversity. Stressors from 10 o’clock to 3 o’clock anchor to climate change. Featured insects: Regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia) (Center), rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) (Center Right), and Puritan tiger beetle (Cicindela puritana) (Bottom). Each is an imperiled insect that represents a larger lineage that includes many International Union for Conservation of Nature “red list” species (i.e., globally extinct, endangered, and threatened species). Illustration: Virginia R. Wagner (artist). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118

And while various mainstream media in the West (and almost nothing in China and Russia) talk about the latest research about climate change and biodiversity and how we need to be doing ‘something’ to address it, and while politicians and bureaucrats put in place global and state agreements to ‘manage’ climate change-in reality , nothing is happening to reduce the risks to us all.

And agreed, the path we are heading down is now a predetermined one, to very high global global temperatures for the next few hundred years or more that will almost certainly make life a living hell literally, but no-one is actually creating the mechanisms to stop humans creating more and more energy for more ‘stuff” we don’t need.

Our rate of destruction of this planet is not reducing!

And yet we humans are Masters of the Universe, are we not?

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Links

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/02/bees-intelligence-minds-pollination

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/12/the-trauma-doctor-gabor-mate-on-happiness-hope-and-how-to-heal-our-deepest-wounds

Highest ever readings of atmospheric carbon dioxide in human history recorded

A Change is Gonna Come..

The great Sam Cooke’s beautiful and visionary song ‘A Change Gonna Come’ epitomises the tipping point of a global transition we are now living through.

It seems astonishing that it cannot be understood that, as with individual’s power and influence, so too do nations rise and fall; from luck and opportunity -rarely from great leaders, and certainly never from the superiority of ‘race’.

It should be noted that the concept of human ‘races’ dates from deliberate misinterpretations of genetic theory.

The genetic variations between different human populations are so small that differing individual aptitudes of ‘intelligence’ -a quality entirely defined by culture and environments which either support or diminishes their mental and physical opportunities. Racial superiority is therefore a completely foolish myth used by those who wish to manipulate others for their own nefarious purposes.

A superb modern example of this cartoon-like myth of genetic superiority can be seen in this ‘white” ( more appropriately termed ‘pink’) supremacy painting circulated by one Carl Bildt – a former prime minister of Sweden and who one would have presumed to be an ‘intelligent’ man- alas not.

The painting depicts ‘racially superior’ Western Ukrainian Knights (descended from ‘Aryan’ Vikings in their myths) heroically destroying the evil Russian ‘orcs’ ( who are apparently ‘genetically inferior’ Asians , according to those same myths.)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is to be condemned- as is any violence directed against another country or peoples, but likewise, so are the actions of the Kiev government army in Donbass , killing its own population since 2014. There is good evidence to suggest that Western European countries and the U.S. actively encouraged , financed and weaponised the Kiev government to fight the Russian speaking Donbass ‘separatists’ for 8 years, and ignore the Minsk agreements Kiev had signed up to- agreements that would have restored peace to Ukraine.

Perhaps Carl Bildt’s tweet is one clue to the West’s determination to ensure a war between Russia and Ukraine.

And we can see racial prejudice in the extreme brutality against the Korean people in the Korean war ( what can only be called genocide)– a war between Europeanised countries supporting a brutal dictatorship in South Korea against a nationalist Korean communist army in the North supported by the Chinese and Russians.

Or perhaps we can see it in the savagery Western armies fought against a Vietnamese army trying to restore their country’s independence. Or the obliteration by the U.S. of an almost defenceless Iraqi army and Iraqi civilian infrastructure ( a society battered to its knees by remorseless evil sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children to the apparent delight of that much esteemed U.S. stateswoman Madeline Albright) prior to the Iraq war.

Or perhaps in Libya, where Libyan society was obliterated by Western powers in a mad grab for its oil. Or the well-documented use of jihadists in Syria by Western governments attempting to overthrow the Damascus government. Or the unconditional U.S. and U.K. support of Israeli European ‘settlers’ who have steadily continued to violently steal the lands of those ‘dirty Arabs’ in Palestine for the past 74 years.

The ‘Nakba” 1949. Expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine at Israeli gunpoint

And shall we remember the barbarous futility of the war in Afghanistan?- where the United States continues to believe it has the right to steal Afghan state bank money ( along with the theft of Venezuelan government and Russian state funds)

And we do not need to go back more than a century to know about the complete lack of morality of European and United States colonial troops or their proxies in Africa, India, South America or the Philippines.

In addition, the development of the Western controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund, have provided a secondary opportunity for Western countries to exploit and defraud by ‘legal’means former colonies of their resources.

We are talking about centuries of barbaric ‘white ‘ conquest and exploitation of most of the globe by force. And now, the times they are a changing.

With Russia being forced to turn East because of Western sanctions, and China now a very much an ascendant super-power, previously ‘third-world’ countries are beginning to asset themselves in the face of Western blackmail, bribery and military coercion.

The June 2022 Los Angeles meeting of the Organisation of American States was characterised by the courage of the Argentinian president calling out the United State’s presumptuous decision to ban South American countries it did not like ( Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela). Bizarrely the former Empire of Spain has permanent observer status at OAS meetings.

A number of the South Pacific island nations, previously beholden to their former colonisers and exploiters, Australia and New Zealand, are now looking north-west for economic and security agreements with China; agreements which are signed from a position of equality, not colonial subjugation. Ironically Australia has recently sent their Malaysian born Chinese born foreign minister Penny Wong, to the island nations to try and recoup the ‘damage’ to the West, by displaying a more ‘non-white’ face to the Pacific, while New Zealand sends its Maori foreign minister, Nanaia Mahuta – but the island nations are not fooled by this subterfuge; they know their history by heart. All the while, the United States simply makes threats to the Chinese on the sidelines.

Pacific nations are well aware of the bizarre racist viciousness from the whole Australian political spectrum against refugees and migrants, or indeed the decades long exploitation of seasonal Pasifika workers who harvest crops in Queensland and New Zealand.

Western media portrays these agreements with China as threats to the ‘rule based order’: the United States’ unilateral and often erratic and nonsensical set of decisions to exploit other countries, (‘rules’ much quoted by New Zealand’s Jacinda Adern), on what other countries should do unless they want to be threatened militarily, rather than an extension of China’s mutual trade agreements to supplement her hugely ambitious Belt and Road commerce initiative across the globe.

As has been often noted, China has one foreign military base, while the United States has at last count, 800 overseas military bases; all designed to intimidate at least one other country, or to intimidate the very country in which the military base is itself located, to follow the ‘rules’.

China has never been a colonial power. However, let us not be fooled into thinking that just because a currently weaker or emerging country does not as yet display the barbarity of the current ascendant countries (like the U.S. and U.K.) that does not mean that those arising powers will not descend into the same myopic and racist stupidity of thinking that they are somehow the exceptional nation, somehow always bound for glory.

Racism is not the distinct province of ‘white’ people, as those who were brutalised by the Japanese in the Second World War well remember.

All nations, when they ‘ascend’ to a position of power and global influence, are wont to believe in the fantasy that they are somehow naturally superior to others.

But we are definitively all equal as human beings.

My hope is that some time in the not too distant future, we realise that all other species are our equals too. Different skills, different attributes, but equal. Without that realisation we humans will continue to exploit this world until the natural world collapses around us – perhaps at that point we may realise we are an intrinsic and inseparable part of that natural world and that we need to cooperate – not destroy.

_____________________________________

Links

https://www.eurointelligence.com/column/the-west-and-the-rest

https://orinocotribune.com/solomon-islands-build-up-to-the-us-war-against-china/

https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3180953/eyes-others-us-not-benign-power-it-thinks-it

https://fee.org/articles/perpetuating-poverty-the-world-bank-the-imf-and-the-developing-world/

Nuclear testing and colonisation explain Pacific Island Nations’ alignment with China

The ‘Coming’ Climate Crisis

We are told that if we do not change our ways, reduce carbon emissions, ‘soon’ it will be too late.

If we haven’t guessed by now , that ‘soon’ is right now. We are already in a climate crisis- of massive fires out of control in the United States, in coastal Mediterranean areas, in Siberia to name just a few. Of “Once in a 100” or 200 year floods, of temperatures in parts of the world that are close to killing any living thing.. We are there – right now…and its not going to get better any time soon- no matter what we do.

This is not a ‘crisis’ that will go away if we just behave ourselves.

This is a crisis that will be with those who survive on this planet for at least the next thousand years- and many more years than that, if we cannot reduce our carbon consumption and start planting trillions of trees.

Even if we were to stop creating more carbon dioxide right now, the planet will continue to warm, the climate will become more unpredictable and unstable. And of course our great politicians are not talking about anything as radical as eliminating our carbon footprint any time soon!- no!- they want us to reduce the ‘rate of increase’ of carbon by 2030 or 2050 or – some other target date far away…that doesn’t impact on their corporate ‘sponsorship’.

However, right now that rate of increase of carbon emissions is just going higher and higher- we are indeed ‘accelerating towards the cliff’.

But somehow many of us continue to believe that those great human minds will save us with some new technology -perhaps detonating some nuclear bombs to provide a nuclear winter for us, or sending dust particles into the atmosphere!

Are we consuming more and more to cope with our fears for the apocalyptic future?- bigger and bigger cars, more and more tinsel and useless consumption, more and more glorification of killing of defenseless animals for pleasure- hunting and fishing ?

But the answer , while not immediate, is simple.

We have to adjust to a world where the climate is warming rapidly- first by accepting that infinite ‘growth’ on a finite world is just plain stupidity. We need to rapidly traverse to global no-growth economies.
We need to try and reverse our rapid destruction of nature around us- encourage insect, bird and other non human populations to rebuild in the face of a rapidly warming world- create new perpetual habitats for other species, stop the chemical spraying, return habitats to their natural states as much and as quickly as possible .. and most importantly, plant more indigenous forest- not for forestry- but for life!
We need to acknowledge that technology is not going to ‘save’ us from the climate crisis- in fact it is one of the significant causes of species loss and habitat destruction that is killing our planet.
We need to acknowledge that humans simply need to support nature to get back to doing its job of making this planet a living world for every remaining species here – there’s nothing fancy about it, it won’t create many new jobs, and it wont seem like ‘progress’ – but it will save us.
We need to encourage politicians to stop lying about what they intend to do about the environment and the climate. There’s no money in it from their company ‘sponsors”, and its not going to boost their fragile egos.
Saving the planet from global heating and species loss is not a side issue to any decisions any of us make. Every bit of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ we make as humans must now put the cost to the climate and species loss at the forefront of EVERY decision. In most cases, human ‘progress’ is not worth the cost to the planet.
We need to accept that we don’t need ‘more’. Teaching people how to be thankful and at peace with what they have and how to re-build their connection with nature – along with a respect for all living things.-that we don’t have a God-given right to treat other living entities as resources.

It’s not going to be easy- but it is simple…..

______________________________________

Links

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01092-9.epdf?

https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-is-warmer-than-its-been-in-125-000-years/

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

https://scheerpost.com/2021/08/09/code-red-for-humanity/

‘Planning’ our way to Environmental Catastrophe

We desperately need to understand and acknowledge that preserving and sustaining the living world around us is not just a vital thing to do in order that humans survive, but to acknowledge that our world is in reality a living entity; we do not have the right to destroy it, to market it, to unravel it.
All life is sacred.

A recent (May 19 2021) article in Common Dreams by Richard Heinberg highlights the fact that at least some planners have known since the 1950s that our current human civilization based on fossil fuels will end- and that unless we slow down our global economy (‘de-growth’) we are in a for a very very hard landing, and not far off.

Perhaps like the genial but simpleminded U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, we believe that, in the words of Charles Dicken’s Wilkins Micawber, ‘something will turn up’, to solve our environmental problems. Somehow, somewhere, some yet to be discovered masterpiece of human engineering will magically solve the anthropomorphic climate heating and catastrophic biodiversity loss humans have caused.

Or, like John Kerry’s older master, we believe that reducing the impact of climate heating and species loss can be done while creating more jobs that create more climate change and loss of species. While “Green” technology will reduce the use of coal fired electricity and less combustion engine vehicles, it will only minimally impact on human economic ‘growth’, which is the key driver in increasing environmental destruction of the web of life which sustains us all- for now.

Or, perhaps we can just ignore the whole issue and hope it will go away- like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. A country that is at the forefront of climate heating, with Siberia set this year (2021) to more than meet last years record temperatures in May of 10C higher than ‘average’

Or , we can, as most political ‘leaders’ do, spout all the right words about protecting the environment and launch some new project that is superficially ‘green’, and then support and fund countless other national and local projects which directly destroy the environment; more roads, more factories, more industrial jobs, more housing, more corporate agriculture, more importation of migrants from poorer countries, more international tourism…… the list goes on and on

Why do we need ‘growth’?- what is its purpose?- does it lead us somewhere when it is continuously destroying the web of life that keeps us all alive?

There are a multitude of possibilities for a significant proportion of national populations to live sustainable and ‘growth-free’ lives; growing and sharing the abundance of nature. But of course those simple lifestyles do not translate into taxes, into corporate expense accounts, into how big your GDP is, or into state expenditure on ‘important’ projects that swell the egos of politicians and that provide a military budget for threatening your neighbours, or subduing your own population.

Once those so-called ‘growth’ projects are eliminated, there will still be more than enough state resources for free health and education for all, and a sustainable future for our children and the planet

All life is sacred.

As the 2010 ‘Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth‘ unequivocally states in its First Article; (1) Mother Earth is a living being, and (2) Mother Earth is a unique, indivisible, self-regulating community of interrelated beings that sustains, contains and reproduces all beings.

How could we have forgotten that?

Links

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/05/21/humanity-must-embark-new-relationship-natural-world-says-jane-goodall

Humans need to make big changes to stem ‘suicidal war on nature,’ UN says

https://www.unep.org/resources/making-peace-nature?

https://www.climateemergencyinstitute.com/

https://climate.copernicus.eu/latest-projections-future-climate-now-available

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/05/19/most-colossal-planning-failure-human-history

Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/six-reasons-why-the-eu-isnt-as-green-as-it-claims/

Red Alert: Only One Earth

The unraveling of the web of life

A U.K. February 2021 report by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, entitled ‘The Economics of Biodiversity’ outlines the ‘extreme risk’ the ‘world’, is being put by not taking into account the ‘rapid depletion of the natural world’.

While the overarching intent of the paper is to be applauded in attempting to reduce species loss, the underlying assumptions outlined in the paper about humans’ relationships to the rest of this living world are, to put it mildly, grotesque.

Prof. Dasgupta’s comment that ‘Truly sustainable economic growth and development means recognising that our long-term prosperity relies on rebalancing our demand of nature’s goods and services with its capacity to supply them’, is truly bizarre.

The natural world (including the human species) does not exist to provide ‘goods and services’. This arrogant and ignorant perspective of the living world around us is the root cause of why the living planet around us, is dying. All living things on this planet exist in their own right and to construct a web of interdependent life around themselves; a web that humans have been unravelling at ever-increasing speed for the past 3000 years.

To view other living organisms as ‘good and services’ for humans, is not only to debase the sanctity of life, but also confirms our fundamental lack of understanding of how life on this planet life continues to maintain itself, and once thrived. The more humans choose some organisms as being ‘worthwhile’ ( for humans), and others not- the more we destroy the web that holds all life on this planet together.

There are many humans on this planet who have never known what it is to be connected with the living world around them – who look out their windows in the morning at the dead concrete jungle surrounding them and think this life. Who truly do think of the living world as a commodity solely for humanities’ use, and who never once consider that the view from their window would have once been a joyous riot of life- of birds, trees insects and many other animals. What humans have not known, we do not miss. The more humans become immersed in an inanimate world of concrete and tar, the more it becomes ‘normal’.

We do not comprehend what we have done to our world, and what awaits us at the end of this journey of ‘commodification’.

Links

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/02/economics-failure-over-destruction-of-nature-presents-extreme-risks

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/final-report-the-economics-of-biodiversity-the-dasgupta-review

The Ideology of Disconnection – New Antarctica on Ecological Connectivity/Climate Change and Urban EnvironmentsOctober 30, 2026
[…] Make the encounter structural, not aspirational. The extinction of experience is a design problem, and therefore a design opportunity.[37][38]…
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[…] Originally published here. […]

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A U.K. February 2021 report by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, entitled ‘The Economics of Biodiversity’ outlines the ‘extreme risk’ the ‘world’, is being put by not taking into account the ‘rapid depletion of the natural world’.

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