The following is an extract from Derrick Jensen’s 2016 book The Myth of Human Supremacy. From the book jacket: “In this impassioned polemic, radical environmental philosopher Derrick Jensen debunks the near-universal belief in a hierarchy of nature and the superiority of humans. Vast and underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life are explored in detail—from the cultures of pigs and prairie dogs, to the creative use of tools by elephants and fish, to the acumen of caterpillars and fungi. The paralysis of the scientific establishment on moral and ethical issues is confronted and a radical new framework for assessing the intelligence and sentience of nonhuman life is put forth.” Visit Derrick’s website to buy the book.
By Derrick Jensen
You’ve probably noticed I haven’t talked about the origins of human supremacism. Some say it began with the domestication of nonhuman animals, as we came to think of these as our dependent inferiors, as our slaves, our beasts of burden. Some say it began with agriculture, where the entire landbase was converted to human use. Some say the model for human supremacism is male supremacism: women are physically differentiable from men, and some men decided that differentiability meant inferiority, and validated their own superiority by repeatedly violating and controlling women; this model was then applied across racial, cultural, and species differences. Some say human supremacism really got its start with the creation of a monotheistic sky god and the consequent removal of meaning from the material earth.
These questions of origins, while interesting and on some levels important, are not vital to the current discussion. Right now this narcissistic, sociopathic human supremacist culture is killing the planet, and we need to stop it. Asking where it started feels a bit to me like wondering about the childhood traumas of the axe murderer who is tearing apart your loved ones. Sure, it’s a discussion to be had, but can we please stop the murderer first?
#
Because human supremacism—like other supremacisms—is not based on fact, but rather on pre-existing bigotry (and the narcissism and tangible self-interest on which all bigotries are based), I don’t expect this book will cause many human supremacists to reconsider their supremacism, just as books on male or white supremacism don’t generally cause male or white supremacists to reconsider theirs. The book isn’t written for them. This book is written to give support to the people—and there are a lot of us—who are not human supremacists, and who are disgusted with the attitudes and behaviors of the supremacists, who are attempting to stop the supremacists from killing all that lives. It is written for those who are appalled by nonhumans being tortured, displaced, destroyed, exterminated by supremacists in service to authoritarian technics. It is written for those who are tired of the incessant—I would say obsessive—propaganda required to prop up human supremacism. It is written for those who recognize the self-serving stupidity and selective blindness of the supremacist position.
It is written for those who prefer a living planet to authoritarian technics. It is written for those who prefer democratic decision-making processes to authoritarian technics. It is written for those who prefer life to machines.
#
I’m sitting again by the pond. The wind still plays gently among the reeds, plays also with the surface of the water.
This time I do not hear the sound of a family of jays softly talking amongst themselves. This time I hear the sound of chainsaws.
The forests on both sides of where I live are being clearcut. I don’t know why. Or rather, on a superficial level I do. The people who “own” both pieces of land had a “problem” they needed to “solve.” “Problem”? They needed money. Or they wanted money. Or they craved money. It doesn’t matter. “Solution”? Cut the trees and sell them.
Never mind those who live there.
So for weeks now I’ve been hearing the whine of chainsaws and the screams of trees as they fall. For weeks now I’ve been feeling the shock waves when the trees hit the ground.
Such is life at the end of the world.
#
We end on the plains of eastern Colorado, where as I write this a friend is trying desperately to protect prairie dogs. A “developer” wants to put in a mall on top of one of the largest extant prairie dog villages along Colorado’s Front Range. The village has 3,000 to 8,000 burrows.
Prior to this human supremacist culture moving into the Great Plains, the largest prairie dog community in the world, which was in Texas, covered 25,000 square miles, and was home to perhaps 400 million prairie dogs. The total range for prairie dogs was about 150,000 to 200,000 square miles, and population was well over a billion.
Now, prairie dogs have been reduced to about five percent of their range and two percent of their population.
Yet because yet another rich person wants to build yet another mall (in this economy, with so many empty stores already?), much of this prairie dog community will be poisoned. That community includes the twenty or more other species who live with and depend upon prairie dogs. The prairie dogs (and some others) who are not poisoned will be buried alive by the bulldozers, then covered with concrete. This includes the pregnant females, who prefer not to leave their dens.
If you recall, prairie dogs have complex languages, with words for many threats. They have language to describe hawks, and to describe snakes, and to describe coyotes. They have language to describe a woman wearing a yellow shirt, and different language for a woman wearing a blue shirt. They have had to come up with language to describe a man with a gun.
Do they, I wonder, have language to describe a bulldozer? Do they have language to describe the pregnant females of their community being buried alive?
And do they have language to describe the murderous insatiability of human supremacists? And do others? Do blue whales and the few remaining tigers? Do the last three northern white rhinos, all that’s left because some human supremacists believe their horns are aphrodisiacs? Do elephants? Did the black-skinned pink-tusked elephants of China? Did the Mesopotamian elephants? And what about others? What about the disappearing fireflies? What about the dammed and re-dammed and re-dammed Mississippi? What about the once-mighty Columbia? What about the once-free Amazon? Do they have language to describe this murderous insatiability?
#
And perhaps more to the point, do we?
#
By the time you read this, the prairie dogs my friend is fighting to protect will probably be dead, killed so someone can build yet another cathedral to human supremacism. And by the time you read this, yet another dam will have been built on the Mekong, on the upper reaches of the Amazon, on the upper Nile. By the time you read this there will be 7,000 to 10,000 more dams in the world. By the time you read this there will be more dead zones in the oceans. By the time you read this there will be another 100,000 species driven extinct.
And all for what?
To serve authoritarian technics, to serve an obsession to validate and re-validate a self-perceived superiority that is so fragile that each new other we encounter must be violated, and then violated, and then violated, till there is nothing left and we move on to violate another.
This is not the future I want. This is not the future I will accept.
#
What I want from this book is for readers to begin to remember what it is to be human, to begin to remember what it is to be a member of a larger biotic community. What I want is for you—and me, and all of us—to fall back into the world into which you—and me, and all of us—were born, before you, too, like all of us were taught to become a bigot, before you, too, like all of us were taught to become a human supremacist, before you, too, like all of us were turned into a servant of this machine culture like your and my parents and their parents before them. I want for you—and me, and all of us—to fall into a world where you—like all of us—are one among many, a world of speaking subjects, a world of infinite complexity, a world where we each depend on the others, all of us understanding that the health of the real world is primary.
The world is being murdered. It is being murdered by actions that are perpetrated to support and perpetuate a worldview. Those actions must be stopped. Given what is at stake, failure is no longer an option. The truth is that it never was an option.
So where do we begin? We begin by questioning the unquestioned beliefs that are the real authorities of this culture, and then we move out from there. And once you’ve begun that questioning, my job is done, because once those questions start they never stop. From that point on, what you do is up to you.
More from Derrick Jensen on the DGR News Service.
“The paralysis of the scientific establishment on moral and ethical issues …”
There is nothing in science showing that humans are better or more important than any other species. Quite the contrary. Wildlife biology and ecology show that, at least on a physical/logistical level, humans are the LEAST important species. Not to mention that we’re exponentially the most harmful one. This is not a defense of western or any other science. Western science is highly reductionistic and often leads to false conclusions because of that. Additionally, obsessing on the intellect and ignoring things like natural instincts, gut feelings, empathy, and wisdom, also leads to false conclusions and is one of the root causes of all environmental problems. The intellect is nothing more than a tool, and humans have greatly overused that tool for thousands of years.
I forgot to mention that in addition to western science being too reductionist, it also has a ridiculous mechanistic view of life and the universe, which also leads to false conclusions.
To address this excerpt:
First and foremost, I totally agree regarding the totally immoral concept of human supremacy. In fact, it’s just the opposite: humans are a cancer on the planet.
One small disagreement, mainly over accuracy: I don’t agree that it doesn’t matter what the origins of the false and immoral concept of human exceptionalism are. A more accurate way to state Derrick’s position would be that it doesn’t matter right now immediately, because we have to deal with extreme and existential symptoms right now, and we can get to the origins when we have time. But if we don’t deal with the origins, humans will just continue to think, feel, and act like they’re better and more important than other species. And for the record, I think that this bad attitude first manifested when humans started killing native plants and destroying native ecosystems in order to plant crops.
As for the origins of human supremacism, I blame the self-serving fantasies that invented our creator religions, and the illusion that the natural world is all the work of a six-day construction orgy, by a deity who, oddly enough, resembles an egocentric human male.
These mythmakers had a homocentric perspective from the beginning. They looked into the night sky, saw the stars and planets apparently revolving around Earth, and laughably concluded that the planet we inhabit is the center of the universe — rather than a tiny clump of dust, spinning around one of several billion stars, in one of several billion galaxies. Indeed, our “creation” was merely an explosive, physical phenomenon, and no more “divine” than a volcanic eruption on Earth, albeit on an infinitely grander scale.
Thus, as the only species that makes tools and weapons that allow us to kill apex predators, we concluded that our “nature” must be to rule the planet. To justify this “supremacy,’ we fantasized being wished into existence by a big, invisible humanoid male in the sky, who made the universe out of his grandiose imagination, and then created us to rule over and exploit it.
That’s pretty much the entitlement philosophy that most rich kids grow up with: Daddy gave it to us, albeit on a cosmic scale.
Genesis 1:26 is the operative rationale of the Bible’s Old Testament, and John 3:16 is the rationale of the New Testament: A humanoid god wished the universe into existence during a week-long power binge, and sent his man-god son to wipe any human guilt off the records.
That our “center of the universe” fantasy is also the greatest error in the annals of human thought is just a detail — which most of us never allow ourselves to consider, because it might lead to a more objective conclusion: that we are an evolutionary mistake in the primate line — whose other members accept their roles as just another of nature’s critters, and who don’t presume to rearrange and destroy anything that stands in the way of their taking more than their share.
I grew up in Texas, not far from that long lost prairie dog town that Derrick spoke of, and which was larger than some of our smaller states. When I was a kid, some men with delusions of grandeur built what was then the world’s largest earth-filled dam(i.e., a seven-mile-long pile of dirt) three miles from our house. They thus created a reservoir the size of a small city, while burying and drowning countless prairie dogs, lizards, tortoises, snakes, and other creatures, whose misfortune was to live in the way of “progress.”
A few decades later, I moved to “Silicon Valley,” where (in my four-plus decades of residency) I have seen several other natural habitats destroyed — for shopping malls, industrial parks, and residential subdivisions.
Among other victims, I have seen burrowing owls, trying futilely to make burrows under parking lots in retail developmemts, where the bayshore’s marshlands stood, just a few years before.
I have watched a coyote, starving to death at a place called “Coyote Hill,” because it had become surrounded by freeways and commuter routes. The coyote had lost a leg to a passing car, and was left to forage for food between an “artificial intelligence” lab on one side, and an Interstate on the other.
“Artificial intelligence,” in fact, pretty much says it all. We have designed machines to plan and create the future, in which human “growth,” “development,” “progress,” and “profit” will be the measure of everything, and the natural world is reduced to nothing but the resource pool industry will plunder to the point of exhaustion — before going on to plunder the moon, Mars, and the asteroids.
If I might make one positive suggestion, it would be simply to stop pretending there is a categorical distinction between “humans” and “animals,” and acknowledge that we ARE animals, just as surely as koalas, pandas, chimpanzees, baboons, rats, rattlesnakes, cockroaches, and lemurs are animals. And if we must make distinctions between ourselves and the rest, let us distinguish between our being the problem species, and the overwhelming majority of animals being the solution to the human problem.
I agree with everything you wrote about religion Mark, but I think you’re starting in the middle instead of the beginning. If humans had the attitude that we’re just one small part of the web of life on this planet, that all other species have just as much right to live and thrive as we do, and that nature is supreme and knows exponentially more than we ever will, humans would never have started using agriculture. Agriculture and the resulting civilization that most of us here oppose pre-dated monotheistic religions by thousands of years, and the bad human attitude toward other life did also.