the politics of empathy, and the doomer part has to do with how impressed I am by the evidence that the habitat for our species on this planet is profoundly compromised and is in a cascading process of contraction and likely collapse. A-a-and that ain’t good. Not for us, and not for all the other species.

Any news I might bring has already been brought. Thousands of scientific papers. Millions of newspaper column inches. Anyone who cares to pay attention already knows that we’ve broken Nature, and the world we know will soon end. This park, for one, is done for. This city I love, home to almost nine million, and one of humankind’s most extraordinary

The argument of The Arrogant Ape is that human exceptionalism—a.k.a. anthropocentrism or human supremacy—is at the root of the ecological crisis. This pervasive mindset gives humans a sense of dominion over Nature, set apart from and entitled to commodify the earth and other species for our own exclusive benefit. And it’s backfiring on us today, sp