To reinstate and inhabit that Earth the human must become transformed into a being who is in love with planet-home. Home does not mean house—home enfolds the state of being in love with home. Where did the stereotype come from, anyway, of the Romantic as a wrongheaded fool? Why is it foolish or wrongheaded to admire the big wild world so much that we’d rather be enveloped in it than dominate it? Why has humanity bought into the idea that the supremacist way of being human—superior and entitled—is the winning way, like it or not?
The sacred isn’t some superstition or wishful thinking. It’s simply
the way things are.
— Peter Kingsley
We are living in times that have been called a profitable apocalypse
(Anon 2023). A mundane, comforting sense of the future that has
always been here before has suddenly disappeared. Life feels like a
protracted now accompanied with a sense of an ending. An ending that
we are wondering whether we are not living through at this very
moment. An ending, in Frank Kermode’s words, “more immanent than
imminent,” one that perhaps has already arrived because it was
overdetermined if not politically executed.
Borrowing from Kermode again, our experience of time these days can
be described as follows: “It is as though the morrow could not link
itself with today. Things as they are totter and plunge.” This is
the experience of time in times of crisis: An empowered capacity to
navigate the present into the future feels shattered. “The time is
not free,” wrote Kermode, “it is slave to an end.” We are living in
a precarious meantime, time itself having become “an endless
transition from one condition of misery to another.” From one war to
another. From one weather-related catastrophe to another. From one
mass killing to another. From useless politics to hopeless politics.
Invisibly: from extinction to extinction. We could say Kermode’s
words were prophetic.
Even as we live in a protracted now that is disjointed from the
future, we endure a strong historical sense. Not being able to see
forward, we are ricocheted to look back. Not coincidentally, social
identities have flared up, righteous and menacing. A fractured
historical sensibility has revived sociocultural grievances,
hostilities, memories, and resentments. So the sense of an ending
intensifies since on top of looming threats—mass extinction, ocean
death, runaway heating, epidemiological collapse—gunfire, missiles,
and annihilation rhetoric are flying all around us.
The world’s ecological citizens, who are without sociocultural
identity (or without too vested an attachment to it), who viscerally
inhabit green-blue Earth as home, share a state of grief. So much
has been destroyed, purposely or carelessly, en masse and by a
thousand cuts.
As an example, marine ecological literature reports of the abundance
of life that inhabited the ocean even a century ago. As a child, I
used to snorkel with my family in the Aegean and I remember the
colors. I remember schools of fish, big and small. I remember seeing
an orange seahorse (20 miles from Athens as the coast hugs) that
took my breath away. I recall making eye contact with a large
octopus swimming in open waters; he changed twenty colors as if he
was blushing to be caught by human eyes. Those living waters then
were but an echo of their former selves, having suffered from
centuries of declining ecological syndrome. But sometime in the
early 1970s, when I was around 10 years old, the sea suddenly turned
lifeless, its colors choked in charcoal grays, and the schools of
fish disappeared. We stopped snorkeling and nobody talked about it.
Today, Aegean beaches pride themselves, if they can get away with
it, with blue-flag proclamations of being “clean.” But there is no
life in them to speak of, often no life in them at all.
Gone with Earth’s living abundances is the planetary greatness that
they manifested and intimated. A plenum of life that humanity was
once engulfed in. The planet was not only big and spacious—in
philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s words, an immediate immensity—it was
alive and unfathomably strange. Increasingly, in the Age of Man we
inhabit a one-dimensional reality both in Herbert Marcuse’s sense of
a global cultural melting pot and in an ecological sense. Or as it’s
been called, the Homogenocene.
This diagnosis does not remotely imply that we stop striving to
expand protected natural areas, rewilded landscapes and seascapes,
and agroecological havens in all sizes and expressions. What I mean
is that big, diverse, and contiguous wilderness has been rapidly
shrinking. Concurrently, the idea of wilderness is not much debated
these days—the world seems to have moved past “the great wilderness
debate.” The ideal of nature autonomous from man, sovereign and
self-governed, with an inherent right to freedom has become…
outmoded. A social constructionist superficial anthropolatry—handing
over all things physical and semantic to anthropos—has won the day
(for now). The word wilderness has fallen into rare usage, and no
wonder, as the reality of wilderness is evanescing: If not to
agriculture, infrastructure, logging, and mining, then to the
panopticon of Google Earth. If not to the rapacity of industrial
fishing, then to the new normal of a farmed ocean to “feed the
world.” If not to catastrophic climate change, then to the scouring
of the seabed for materials for “the green economy.” We live in a
world that is not only smaller and flatter but far less lively—a
colonized planet turned human monoculture. Welcome to the
Anthropocene, as the saying goes.
Many people think that longing for thundering wild herds, expanses
of ancient forests and grasslands, free rivers, abundant animal
migrations, life-filled seas—longing for unbounded wild and free
nature—is a romantic dream. Having applied the scoffing label
romantic (inwardly or aloud), such people believe they’ve exorcised
the romantic vision and don’t need to give it another thought. The
fact remains, however, that the Earth the Romantic yearns toward is
one to which the Anthropocene cannot hold a candle. That world of
pristine life, regenerative and symphonic, is the haven that made
us, a world to which humanity is indebted beyond hope to repay.
To reinstate and inhabit that Earth the human must become
transformed into a being who is in love with planet-home. Home does
not mean house—home enfolds the state of being in love with home.
Where did the stereotype come from, anyway, of the Romantic as a
wrongheaded fool? Why is it foolish or wrongheaded to admire the big
wild world so much that we’d rather be enveloped in it than dominate
it? Why has humanity bought into the idea that the supremacist way
of being human—superior and entitled—is the winning way, like it or
not?
Human supremacy has never been an ideology, for it is not taught per
se but rather transmitted experientially and indirectly in
uncountable ways. Supremacy is constitutive of the human, meaning
that supremacy gets installed into human beings from a young age,
stitched into the developing brain matter of children and
youngsters, all but guaranteeing smooth induction and compliant
membership in human-supremacist consensual reality. Developmental
psychology studies indicate that an anthropocentric perspective is
not inborn to the human species but acquired between ages 3 and 5
(Webb 2025). The supremacist installation is comparable to an
Operating System program with haughty software for perceiving
nonhuman nature. Through supremacist conditioning, the inherent
radiance that presences directly in the perception of consciousness
in another is denied to nonhumans and nonhuman nature. A state of
mereness has befallen the other-than-human world, with its
self-being refuted, its inherent luminosity dimmed, its colorful
displays of agency and intentionality erased, literally and
metaphorically.
The following describes looking through the eyes of a human
supremacist: With the intrinsic standing of the natural world
denied, nonhuman nature appears to the human as something “mere” or
“nothing but.” A mundane example of seeing this way was delivered in
Ronald Reagan’s assertion that, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree
you’ve seen them all.” Indeed, all politicians, left-right-center,
are committed to upholding human supremacy. They not only have a
knack for anthropocentric one-liners and jingles, but a hardened
mandate to sustain human tyranny on Earth and keep it looking
“normal.”
To say that human supremacy is constitutive of the human means it
gets installed into the nervous system, producing neural nets that
gloss over existence as mereness—as prosaic, profane, and made for
instrumentalization. Via this desacralizing lens, human beings are
literally brainwashed to see the nonhuman realm as being for
takeover, using, “improving,” exterminating, managing, and
colonizing. Human supremacy has been passed down for hundreds of
generations. It’s an old inheritance that has become both physical
regime (world) and way of seeing (view).
Rendering the natural world as prosaic, profane, and for overtaking,
human supremacy is incapable of restraint—it sprawls the human. The
sprawl of the human is purchased through the eclipse of the nonhuman
and, inevitably following, through the eclipse of the human as well.
These twin dyings are already happening, but in the public eye they
appear isolated and unrelated. Sooner or later, however, their
entangled scale will become undeniable. In the recognition of the
paired events of massive nonhuman and human perishing the potential
for history’s turning awaits. That pivotal, high-potency moment of
history’s turning is known as revelation (αποκάληψη, in Greek), a
word that means simultaneously exposed-to-view and
collapsing-into-ruin. What will be unveiled in the ruins? That the
mendacious disavowal of the truth of nonhuman being as cosmos has
always been brokered by human homelessness and that human
homelessness can only culminate in the end of the human.
As human supremacy has become a sickness of human being—turning the
world into monoculture and endangering totality—will it be possible
at the historical moment of its unveiling to overcome it? That
question is presently unanswerable but we can endeavor to clarify
another: What is it that sees through the eyes of human supremacy?
By what lights does human supremacy see?
The matter of seeing might be explored through an intriguing story
that author Naomi Wolf relates from her childhood. As a child she
was deeply inclined toward wonder, especially about living beings
all around her. She was acquainted with a secret garden “all her
own” that was enchanted with an inner glow. A garden so pregnant
with faerie that its aura bordered on the preternatural and the
mystic. She invited a friend of hers to come see it, and her
friend’s mother came too. As the three of them gazed at the garden
from the gate, Naomi turned to see their enraptured faces only to be
taken aback by faces soured with disappointment. “Why there’s
nothing here!” declared the mother. “It’s just a garden.” Off she
trotted with her daughter. Naomi then turned and looked at the
garden again—and guess what: all its magic was gone, Poof, with a
suggestion. This story offers a vivid portal into how human vision,
especially the vision of children, is trained to see the natural
world, how profanation (or nihilism—turning something into nothing)
is implanted straight into the nervous system, shaping how humans
see. Human supremacy sees with the eyes of nihilism, for nihilism
(the profanation of existence) is the metaphysics of human
supremacy.
It’s just a garden. “It’s just,” “it’s nothing but,” “it’s merely,”
such expressions are all passwords of nihilism: Written or spoken,
they invoke, call forth, the nihilistic gaze.
We must free our vision and unknot the neural nets that profanate
reality to see Earth’s self-arising wonder, and yes, Earth’s
fragility. Simply see this. Because in truth no redwood tree is like
any other. And in the realm of existence, a garden (especially one
ripened into old age) is an exquisite, self-illumined thing to see,
mystical even, but liable like so much else to be darkened in the
eyes of the innocent through the venomous insinuations of nihilism.
Circling back to our shared experience of time as a protracted now
unhinged from the future, this is what it’s asking us to turn to:
the sacredness of all living beings in existence and the lit shadow
of apocalypse cast over them. Whereby we turn to cherish Earth not
“save it.” (If all becomes lost, Earth will create new
manifestations of life with time.) So that as we look back with our
current acute historical sense, we look back to the beauty of
world-Earth and its primordial living abundances and we also look
back to recognize ourselves as Earthlings. Whoever we happen to be
and however we identify, it is simply a fact that we are one as
Earthlings. It is only with our Earthling eyes that we may overcome
our spurious fractiousness and, in unity, surmount the stifling
sense of an ending: Instead of the conceited, nihilist gaze of human
supremacy, look at all in existence with the eyes of an Earthling.
We only have relatives here. They shine with inner light as bright
as we do.
Sources