Once a remarkably adaptive and highly successful species, Homo sapiens has become the victim of its own success, succumbing to its own “progress trap” that leads it to think the solution to its problems are more development and further growth. Humans – too many of them – have failed to learn from the mistakes of the past that brought down every moribund society and bloated empire.
“I’d like to share with you a revelation I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague.” “Agent Smith,” The Matrix (1999)
Prologue
Throughout the last ten thousand years of history, human empires rose and
fall, crumbling into pebbles and dust. Over the last two hundred thousand
years, an even larger empire began its mighty and perilous ascent. From its
home base in Africa, it established its presence everywhere throughout the
globe, expanding endlessly in all directions, growing exponentially in
numbers, colonizing land, other species, and entire peoples. Insatiable in
its consumption of natural resources, addicted to growth, it left death,
extinction, and destruction everywhere in its wake. This vast conglomerate
was not the Persian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Ottoman, English, or American
empires, but the consequence and aggregate of all particular empires and
unsustainable hierarchical societies, namely, the human empire.
Today we call this planetary monolith “global capitalism,” but humans became
global animals tens of thousands of years before the onset of capitalism.
Humans created hierarchical and growth-addicted societies some ten thousand
years ago and their ecocidal proclivities stretch back millennia more into
prehistory. And just like every political empire of the past, the human
empire has possibly reached its zenith and begun its downward spiral toward
collapse. This empire’s peak and slide into catastrophe marks a new epoch
not only in human history, but also the history of the earth. Debates over
whether advanced societies have entered into a new “postmodernity” (see Best
and Kellner 1991) pale in significance to the scientifically-based
proposition that human activity has created a new epoch in geological
history -- the age of the Anthropocene. This epoch characterized by the
dominance of human influence over earth’s systems and has led to, among
other colossal events, a sixth mass extinction crisis and runaway climate
change.
Once a remarkably adaptive and highly successful species, Homo sapiens has
become the victim of its own success, succumbing to its own “progress trap”
that leads it to think the solution to its problems are more development and
further growth. Humans – too many of them – have failed to learn from the
mistakes of the past that brought down every moribund society and bloated
empire. Just as today in the twenty-first century we are witnessing
societies like Syria (and perhaps even the US) collapse into chaos and
warfare, becoming “failed states,” so too, on a planetary scale, we behold
the catastrophic wreckage of a failed species. We are living witnesses to
the fact that every pathological lie and form of madness that humans have
thrived on is now being refuted by an awakened earth system fighting back
against the human onslaught, with devastating consequences to its
parasitical social orders.
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