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,

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This answer is no longer broadly resonant, or even acceptable as a go-forward baseline in the circles that run Western civilization (ref The Davos Agenda). It’s clear that pursuit of maximal human dominance has led to widespread, intractable and potentially irreversibly negative impact on “the planet”, by which we generally mean those planetary... See more

Ultimately, it is the ideology of human supremacy that allows us to maltreat animals in factory farms, blow up mountaintops for coal, turn vibrant rainforest into monocropped wastelands, trawl millions of miles of ocean floor with nets that scoop up everything that moves—while glorying in the Anthropocene, claiming that nature only exists to serve... See more