Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Cleve Hicks's avatar

Good points made, but as a primatologist I'll mention that chimpanzees are excellent ecosystem engineers, spreading fruit seeds around the forest and generally fitting into their ecology. Unlike consumerist human cultures, they don't wreck their own habitats and their hunting is pretty small-scale. We would actually do well to be more like chimpanzees and less like rapacious planet destroyers.

Expand full comment
Ted Howard's avatar

You are confusing biology with mother culture, IMO.

We modern industrial "civilised" humans are no longer homo sapiens. Talk to any remnant indigenous humans (homo sapiens!) and they will tell you: we modern industrial "civilised" humans are crazy and our dominant culture (aka "civilisation") is insane. They are really pissed off to be lumped in with us when we begin making this a species problem.

Who's "we"? We are homo colossus, homo economicus, homo rapiens, homo stupidus, homo separatus, homo parasiticus, homo indoorsians, homo domesticates....

Faced with peak everything, The 6th Mass Extinction and climate chaos, we're going to either change hard and fast to a low-tech, light ecological-footprint, local culture, or we're joining the die-off.

This is a cultural crisis. We are "civilised", swimming in an ocean of mother culture, so encompassing, so captive, so inculcated, so indoctrinated, the vast majority can not see it. And it's mostly by design. We've been raised to be energy and ecologically illiterate. This really suites The Powers That Be, who have been actively farming us for quite some time.

The issue is not us as human beings. The issue is us as "civilised" dumb-arsed idiots...city idiots, citiots.

What was needed was a massive cultural revolution 40-50 years ago, before the globalized "growth" and "progress" fetish took off. Now it's really late in the game. I wonder if there are enough waking up who can see? Even this late in the game, we could at least make a difference for whoever gets to survive the collapse, already underway and obvious to those who will look.

"The dominant culture is insane and unreachable, as are most of it's inhabitants. It has a death urge. It is pathological and suicidal. It wants to kill everyone and everything, including itself. And it will do so, unless we stop it."

Derrick Jensen

Expand full comment
74 more comments...

No posts