Compassion for Manatees

While taking on the ideology of human supremacy

I’d like call your attention to this article by author Eileen Crist as a sequel to my earlier post today on Scale Down's Facebook page (An Act of Compassion for Manatees, see below).

Quotes: "The root of how we got here [into this ecological mess] is human supremacy...the supremacist mindset dictated that the human is the creator of meaning: humans project meaning onto nature whereas meaning is lacking in nature itself." 

“The leaders in most social arenas (politics, business, media, religion, etc.) are card-carrying members of the supremacy club. They regard Homo sapiens as a distinguished singularity of consciousness and a technological wizard; having ascended out of the evolutionary fray into an unprecedented species umwelt, humans are believed to possess the technological savvy to squirm out of all tight spots, manage a planet, and reach for the stars. Because people who think like this rule through institutions made by people who also thought the same way, we have vivisection, factory farms, wet farms, fur farms, forests divested of animal life, dead zones, glyphosate in the rain, depredated oceans, and an extinction crisis below the bar of CNN’s newsworthy standard. Because of human supremacy’s reign, humans have taken over entire biomes without blinking an eye. It appears as an incontestable right that humans can do whatever they please with Earth’s waters. It is regarded as a human prerogative that humanity shall leave no stone unturned and no place unmapped, and that humans rightfully wield absolute power of life and death over all nonhumans. The ultimate cognitive dissonance of our time is that a meme as ugly as human supremacy continues to pose successfully as ascension.”

In short, our civilization sees the world empty of meaning behind ourselves — but full of resources, living and inanimate, solely for us to exploit. 

Yet there is one way out of this:

Eileen Crist explains: “The real way forward, away from suffering and toward hope, lies in denouncing the root cause of our predicament, the human-supremacy story, the destructive platitude of human specialness. If we focus our attention on the Earth in all her majestic diversity and irreducible mystery, we will see the human predicament with far greater clarity. What we must do will become obvious: we need to downscale human presence and activities across the Earth [my emphasis] and simultaneously release into freedom the majority of Earth’s geographies and all her beings. Scaling down the human juggernaut and scaling up nature protection may sound like an impossible thing. It starts with a choice: We can choose to acknowledge the plain fact that nature resounds with inherent meaning. From that inherent meaning, not only did we receive all that we are, we received the torch of meaning as such, and perhaps the ultimate meaning of our own existence…This swerve away from human supremacy is the only guarantor of human survival and maybe even of something bigger—of human salvation.”      

Today, I wanted to be positive and hopeful. But could only manage to do so at the end of this earlier post (last sentence, italicized):

An Act of Compassion for Manatees — a temporary lifeline, after we've polluted their habitat, bashed and sliced them with boats, harassed them with kayaks and tourism, and ruined or degraded their overwintering springs.

And after their many corpses are removed or decayed, nothing much will have changed. We'll continue destroying their future.

Unless, of course, we come to our moral senses, clear out, and give them back their world.

Farther out in the Atlantic, a Right Whale struggles, entangled in fishing gear with newborn calf by her side. The article, posted yesterday by Scale Down member Indigo Taylor-Noguera, points out that fewer than 350 North Atlantic Right Whales remain, of which only about 70 are breeding females. This is clearly a matter of ecocide as well as cruelty.

Frankly, until our society moves to end the incredible death and destruction we're inflicting on other life, I'd rather hear a lot less whining about how we humans are suffering from all the environmental damage we've caused.

That being said, I'm keenly aware that my use of the term "we" is over generalizing. The degree of culpability and callousness depends on who the "we" are. Yet clearly there's a horribly misguided mindset and failed morality that permeates our entire culture.

There are many good people, and many very influential ones, for whom this matter lies far beyond their mental radar. The airways are filled with news and opinions about the pandemic, Russia or China, inflation, and even climate change. But there's almost nothing about the mass destruction of life on Earth and how to stop it.

Sorry to say, but I think conservation leaders are generally doing a piss poor job. Where's the daily outrage? Where are demands to do more than "mitigate" — their demands for fundamental changes to our economy and way of life?

The good news is that I'm beginning to sense a drift in the right direction. I'll say more about this later, here and on our Facebook page.

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I just hope it will come in time for the Manatees and Right Whales.