A Natural History of Anthropocentrism and Its Antidotes

Rethinking modernity, Nature, politics and the sacred in an animist manifesto for change, reflecting on the words of Diné anarchist activist Klee Benally and humankind's spiritual war.

At the end of June I was blessed with an opportunity to witness a natural phenomenon I've long wanted to see, the elusive noctilucent clouds. The name we have given them, night-shining, derived from Latin, is just as poetic as their appearance when they stretch against the night sky like a sheer, sparkling fabric woven somewhere in faerie lands, too fine to be made by human hands. They’re some of the rarest clouds to see and the highest clouds in our atmosphere, about four times higher than most clouds we observe. They form in the mesosphere, around 80 kilometres (50 miles) above the Earth's surface, when water condenses on meteor dust at temperatures below -120 °C (-184 F). This in itself is extraordinary given that the mesosphere is normally remarkably dry; several times drier than the most arid deserts on our planet. These memorable clouds were first observed in 1885, two years after the devastating Krakatau volcano eruption that saturated the atmosphere with so much ash, it caused years of spectacular green and red sunsets and blue moons. However, early hypotheses that the ice crystals condensed on volcanic ash formed the noctilucent clouds were disproven; it seems more plausible that the explanation lies not in the ash, but the large amount of steam that was released during the eruption, introducing a substantial amount of vapour into the mesosphere.

Noctilucent clouds only appear during the summer months when the mesosphere is at its coldest, and only at latitudes between about 45° and 80° N. Or they used to; in recent years, they've been observed at previously unimaginable southerly locations such as Arizona, California and northern Mexico (Baja California sits at just 30° N), both the sightings and computer models show, in higher latitudes noctilucent clouds are becoming more frequent, sometimes visible several times in a single summer, while back in the 19th and early 20th century they were likely visible once every few decades. This shift might be due to changes in Earth's atmosphere, linked to human activity that led to increased greenhouse gasses. Carbon dioxide traps the heat in the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere, causing lower temperatures in its upper layers, which makes available water vapour prone to condensation into ice crystals. Methane, on the other hand, forms water vapour when it reacts with the ultraviolet radiation.¹

Photo by Joshua Humpfer on Unsplash

Unlike aurora borealis which can be expected days before it happens (like the extraordinary G5 event I witnessed back in May), noctilucent clouds can't be predicted. So when I saw fresh reports on sightings in an aurora chasers’ group I’m in, I instantly headed outside. Like most nights, I was sitting alone in the kitchen, hours after both the children and husband went to bed, using the silence of the night and the inspiration of the witching hour to read and write, so my only option to see these clouds was from our house and garden. Such is the predicament of modernity that trapped us in settlements with no or bare minimum of exposure to the natural world. An awe-inspiring sight like this should be enjoyed somewhere far from human civilisation, from a quiet hillside above the sea, not through a row of neat boxes filled with artificial materials that we call homes. I have no say and no choice; like most of us, I remain stuck within a system that prevents me from running away to live a simple life in remote mountains, systemically constricted in what I can do to counteract our human condition. By now, you're guessing it — this essay isn't about the noctilucent clouds. I offer their beauty as a soothing glimmer of hope and calm, very much needed when one is trying to fight the uphill battle of collective liberation.

A jar of pickled progress

All around me, Nature is desecrated, reduced to a commodity, butchered into neat parcels that are carefully wrapped in cling film and labeled with a price tag. Buying a piece of land, an act I’m having trouble processing because I find nothing more repulsive than the audacity and entitlement of owning the planet that birthed us, wouldn't be financially possible even if I wanted to buy something. Unprecedented numbers of young people face housing insecurity and income that simply isn't matching the imposed, artificial cost of living. And yet, despite our safety and quality of life virtually crumbling before our eyes and more people than ever awakening to the desecration of the sacred (often manifesting as depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions), most of our species still don't see the tragedy of our zeitgeist. In fact, an overwhelming majority of us still celebrate the ever-growing detachment from Nature, brandishing it as progress. The late Diné (Navajo) artist and activist Klee Benally writes in his book No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred that “civilisation is socially constituted violence against the Earth.”² I can't help but agree.

I tackled similar thoughts previously when I wrote about unraveling the endless threads of oppression in our everyday lives that mirror the violence of global colonialism on a small scale. For each and every one of us, the story inevitably starts with our upbringing and early immersion into systemic violence; a deep, dark hole many of us are now learning to claw their way out from. I wonder just when did I start soaking in this fractured relationship with Nature? Can I pinpoint the year, the day, the time, a particular event during my childhood? I remember my mother was a magician who created meals with a couple of pennies she summoned from thin air, somehow finding time for it when she wasn't beaten blue and black by my always unemployed, good for nothing father. Growing food wasn't a privilege, merely a reality of the rural non-Western world, and it was a necessity my mother learned from her own mother, both women being aware that their choice was between growing food and taking care of themselves or perishing. Both women being caught in a cycle of patriarchal erasure, both women making attempts at finding their way out of it — and ultimately failing at it, for they couldn't see their way out of the notion of linear progress.

My mother, and her mother before her, had the proverbial green thumb and it was the greatest gift I could imagine in a situation of poverty we lived in. The poverty itself was largely hidden from me, intentionally or out of subconscious shame, and it took me several years to start understanding that we've been surviving on handouts while building an illusion of a stable home for the outside world to see. To this day, an unhealthy relationship with money follows me around like a dark shadow and I'm constantly feeling panic over the low number in my bank account, a choking existential dread accompanied by feelings of worthlessness when my body can't participate in “productivity” as defined by capitalism. I'm not sure I'll ever get over those feelings; it's likely a work in progress that will never end. I can only imagine my mother once felt a very similar sense and source of misery. And yet, in the world she inhabited there was always a large garden with all sorts of fruits and vegetables, many of it being pickled or otherwise preserved for winter. She also reared animals – chickens, pigs, rabbits – that were all killed and processed right there in our yard (those scenes of violent death I disagreed with were forever engraved in my mind; I refused to eat meat when I was about 8 years old and I haven't touched the flesh of an animal since). The scents of my childhood were the scents of large pots of boiling jam and tomato sauce, decanted into dozens of glass jars and bottles. I can recall a string of jars filled with pickled gherkins, cabbage, peppers and cauliflower neatly sitting on cobweb-covered basement shelves. I remember crates of potatoes and apples stacked in the old, damp, cold basement to feed us in autumn and winter. I remember all sorts of sweet bakes hot from the oven. The thing is, even though we had this access to fresh fruit and vegetables, like most everyone did locally, our diet wasn't healthy. For a good chunk of my life, my main food was deep fried potato fries spiced up with fresh salads, and it was only in my early 30s that I taught myself how to understand, analyse and use healthy ingredients and consequently, to start developing a healthy relationship with food and my own body. As the reality of living in poverty and domestic abuse dictates, my mother was too busy surviving to offer me anything but the bare minimum needed to survive. Growing our own food wasn't a step towards food sovereignty, it was a remnant of Nature in a mad world, a remnant we didn’t really know how to deal with. There was no room for anything but tackling the realities of life on a superficial level; a perfect breeding ground for becoming alienated from Nature. Of course, back then I didn't have a word for any of this, anthropocentrism, and many years would pass before that word entered my vocabulary; it was anthropocentrism nonetheless.

Photo by Aysegul Yahsi on Unsplash

None of my mother's green thumb was extended to me. No cooking and baking was ever encouraged. I reached adulthood without being taught any of these essential life skills, the skills that can lead to self-sufficiency, because that was never my mother's objective — her objective was to immerse us into the system, for climbing up the ladder of social hierarchy was seen as a win. I grew up detached from any creative and nourishing human skills, and parallel to it ran the detachment from healthy, emotionally mature relationships (with myself and others). I came to believe that she subconsciously fought the idea of teaching me what she deemed as “primitive” skills, in a desperate attempt to push me into chasing individualism, fake feminism of the “girl boss” attitude and mythical progress, most easily found in the convenience of city living. But alas, I soon began showing an interest in everything that was the opposite of her vision of the progressive ease. I wanted to create and repair things with my own two hands and I was beyond horrified by the idea of an “easy” office job. Whatever I was doing throughout the years, be it learning metalsmithing, herbalism or exploring Earth-oriented spirituality, it was inevitably followed by remarks on how it's useless, how I was making life harder for myself, how I'm wasting time I could be using for a “real job”. It was the same when I was 20, 30 or now at 33. To this day, my mother is horrified by my dreams of a self-built hobbit-style cottage and things like my dedication to ditching processed bread and feeding my family only handmade sourdough. She still dreams of her vision of convenience and progress and fills her garden with whatever non-native plants look aesthetically pleasant. At the same time, I'm still horrified by the idea of linear progress as served to us by the “Western thought,” unknowingly planted in me by these two non-Western women, my mother and grandmother, who chased empty promises of a Western dream, while I whisper to the native “weeds” in my garden with the love of a sister to a sibling.

Our society is utterly obsessed with progress. Our entire worldview is shaped upon a premise of linear progress that centres humans. We allegedly went from being backward and primitive to developed and civilised. Our technology took us from wooden cottages to carefully designed dwellings insulated with plastic that keeps us warm, safe and healthy; never mind that this plastic is arguably the worst invention humankind has concocted in its frantic pursuit of convenience at the expense of the planet that hosts us and all non-human species that inhabit this planet with us. It doesn't matter; all that matters is an instant gratification of convenience. We made our lives easier and it's worth any price. Us, us, us. We build all sorts of altars to Progress™, exalting those who reinforce our linear worldview as superstars of the so-called pop culture. Writers and thinkers such as Yuval Noah Harari,³ Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond who speak from a staunch position of the “myth of progress” are celebrated as cultural icons while they peddle the myth of how we live in the best and most peaceful time in human history. Rabid anthropocentrism doesn't even make any attempt to conceal itself; it doesn't have to, because the linear notion of progress has firmly elevated anthropocentrism to its throne and made it palatable and desirable for the masses. Humans alone carry an intrinsic value, while the value of all other lifeforms is defined only in terms of how they serve humans. The basis for these ideas is rooted in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the age of Scientific Revolution that reduced the human experience to a mechanistic, technocratic worldview that left the doors open for detaching humans from Nature, but also for launching and justifying the violence of colonial expansion and transatlantic slave trade. It is no surprise that the world built on colonial violence, profiting from it to this very day, celebrates the Enlightenment that gave birth to it. I feel this rather odious quote from “eco-critic” Jonathan Bate, who considers the concept of deep ecology to be utopistic and impossible, illustrates this well:

“How can a world so crowded with cities, with ‘civilisation,’ possibly be returned to the state of nature? And, besides, who would we want to return it there? Life in the state of nature, Thomas Hobbes reminded readers of Leviathan in 1651, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. It may be necessary to critique the values of the Enlightenment, but to reject enlightenment altogether would be to reject justice, political liberty and altruism.”⁴

Embracing the progress narrative involves this sort of a blind belief that phenomena such as “justice, political liberty and altruism” are what the Enlightenment has brought us, despite these occurrences being all but non-existent in our society other than in name only. Such an approach is a celebration of human denial; an inability of the Western world to feel accountability for its lack of respect for human and non-human life. Unsurprisingly, Jonathan Bate defines nature as “the concept of the non-human⁵” and already in the very first page asks “how do we reconcile ‘culture’ and ‘nature,’ two forces which are traditionally opposed to each other?” Baffling, contradictory views like this are but an apology for anthropocentrism and colonialism.

Cancerous growth of exceptionalism

If you write the question of “what separates humans from animals?” in an Internet browser, you will get endless results, from both mainstream media and academia, using this specific language that seeks to superimpose humans above animals. The concept is entirely absurd because us humans are animals. Classified in the Animalia kingdom like millions of other species that share this planet with us, yet in our pompous pursuit of anthropocentrism, we seek to define ourselves through separation, distraught at the mere thought of not being above everything else, but equal to it. The correct approach would be to ask what differs us from other animals, but the question rarely takes that form without veering into contemplation on human exceptionalism in one way or another. An approach that doesn't put emphasis on humans is too disenfranchising, too ungratifying in the eyes of the creature whose existence was built on the wings of domination and self-idolising to the point it even made its god(s) look anthropomorphised, abandoning its primordial animism as “primitive” and “of the past.”

Photo by Manuel Velasquez on Unsplash

The universally accepted scientific claim is that we differ thanks to our consciousness. Human cognitive abilities, allegedly the most developed in the animal world, allow us to employ a myriad of human-exclusive traits such as abstract thinking, planning, as well as morals. There are of course opposing, animist voices: ecologist and philosopher David Abram, sees consciousness as something not specific to humans, but a property of the totality of the universe of which humans are a manifestation.⁶ Indeed, the exceptionalism of human consciousness falls flat when we once again, in the fashion of examining “progress,” ask ourselves just what does “developed” mean in the context of our cognitive abilities? What and whose framework defines “development?” All animals naturally seek to use the resources at their disposal as much as possible in order to survive and reproduce — but that's not what humans do, not anymore. Humans took this basic principle of life and stretched it into extremes, overriding the biological premises of our ecological niche and altering the existence of our species into something that is profoundly artificial and unnatural. The so-called advanced cognitive abilities we have developed equal a sense of arrogance, supremacy and domination and they're profoundly extractivist in their nature. We're pursuing the exploitation of our environment on a scale that is completely unsustainable and alien to other lifeforms on this planet. No other species on this planet oversteps the boundaries of their ecological niche in such a non-viable manner, to the point of self-destruction and driving itself into extinction, followed by a conscious denial of that act and its effects. There are many species of parasites on this planet, yet they're all firmly positioned within their own ecological niche, confined to using one or a handful of species to pursue their growth. There's not a single parasite that exists at the expense of millions of different species. Only humans achieved such an all-encompassing existence, extending its destructive influence not only to the entirety of Earth’s flora and fauna, but also to her water, soil and atmosphere. The way we exist and relate to our environment is utterly unnatural and sick, completely out of proportion to planetary boundaries. If this is the development, advancement and progress of our cognitive abilities as celebrated by anthropocentrism, then we're indeed separate from other animals; we don't act like them — instead, it feels like we share behaviour with a cancer that uses and abuses its host for its growth until the host dies. A cancer that in this very moment leeches so much, it's causing a multitude of genocides and ecocides around the planet, in Palestine, Congo and beyond, obliterating both human and non-human lifeforms and their habitats. In the end, it doesn't matter that the path is that of self-destruction, for the end goal of human exceptionalism is transhumanism, as written in the gospel of the obscenely wealthy billionaires who are embracing and promoting the exceptionalist ideology of longtermism⁷ while laughing at the impoverished majority. The latter are nothing but cannon fodder for the ruling class.

There is only one way you treat cancer: you get rid of it. You don't plead with it to leave you alone by appealing to its moral sense, because cancer is a sum of unconscious cells, once healthy and now utterly damaged by mutations, transformed into a ravaging monster that knows only one path, that of an uncontrollable growth. That is what humans are to this planet — an animal that mutated into an out of control monster that seeks nothing but more extraction from its host. An animal fundamentally changed from what other animals are, from its natural, healthy state; now unable to acknowledge that its destructive behaviour became a road to nowhere. Any system that pushes its growth beyond its natural limits will eventually eat itself alive, it will collapse; and that is what will eventually happen to human anthropocentric principles of extractivism, pursued with no regard for our environment. Our growth is achieving and will achieve a short-term betterment of the top 1% of our species (in terms of financial wealth) at the expense of swathes of impoverished sections of the society, but once the system inevitably implodes, it will bring down both the lower and the upper sections of the society. Your wealth can only do so much to protect you, it will not and can not save you from an ecologically devastated planet that can't support life as you're used to it anymore.

The alienation and amnesia of anthropocentrism

I'm not here as a messenger of doom and gloom. I'm writing this more as a messenger of hope, announcing a severe weather warning with an understanding that every storm passes. The trail of devastation that the storm left behind it doesn't change the intrinsic principles of existence for the uprooted trees and scared animals. This is not unlike humans in their post-cancer state, with their body exhausted by harsh treatments and often a limb amputated or an organ removed, or a human in a state of trauma. Facing existence in a changed reality, in a changed body and changed mind and soul, is existence nonetheless. Influential Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss who introduced the concept of deep ecology into Western philosophy and environmentalism thought that “there is no point of no return,” to which I’d add that the only question is — return to what? Human species can indeed prevail and emerge in a ravaged, post-capitalist world; and we have to accept that there is no magic switch that will return the planet to its pre-colonial state and land stewardship. We have to acknowledge that the return entails tending to a changed planet and life on it, yet that changed state doesn't change the natural, intrinsic value of every entity on this planet, animal, plant or else. 

Photo by Margot RICHARD on Unsplash

There is no time to allow ourselves to be paralysed by grief and rage over what we've lost or climate anxiety; the rightful grief and rage we feel must be a catalyst for reimagining our ancestral ways that we all once intimately knew and apply them going forward. We humans are decisively not our power systems, our cancerous effect on the planet is an artificial creation that is contradicting our very nature. As such, it must and will end. Our power systems, the ones that fight hard to convince us that they're irreplaceable and the only ones possible, are merely a couple of hundreds of years old, mostly cemented in our minds since the Industrial Revolution onwards (though the deep roots of anthropocentrism itself go back to the Neolithic agricultural revolution). As such, our power systems are just a speck of dust in the timeline of human history, and in the timeline of Earth's history, they're a stain so tiny it's pretty much invisible. They're indeed completely replaceable, and every system and every empire that has ever existed came to their end and were replaced. There is no point of no return in a cyclical worldview because a circle has no beginning and no end. We can't escape from it no matter how much we forcefully try to exit the circle in our pursuit of human exceptionalism.

We aren't special in any way, we're made from stardust same as the soil under our feet, we're an animal as much as the squirrels and owls, our existence belongs to this planet same as the existence of the frogs and ferns. We must embrace this fact and make it our new gospel if we want to have a viable future. The future of this planet includes humans who are, contrary to some defeatist viewpoints that are sometimes raised in environmentalist circles, not a pest that should be removed from the face of the planet to ensure its betterment, but its integral part. Humans as animals belong on this planet no more or less than a bumblebee, pine tree or whale, and to embrace our natural place we have to decentre humans and forgo human exceptionalism.

Lyla June, Indigenous musician, scholar, author and ecologist of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages, approached this topic beautifully in her TEDx talk titled “3000-year-old solutions to modern problems.” Watch the entire lecture here (the below video is an excerpt).

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“We’ve been reducing life to human purpose for centuries, even millennia,” writes

Rob Lewis

in his essay It's Time to Renature the Climate Conversation. “We shouldn’t be too surprised that the physical science basis would lead to a technical solutions paradigm, that the climate crisis would be reduced to yet another argument for industrial ‘progress.’ It’s our modus operandi. Rather than truly advancing, developing a more sophisticated and restrained relationship with the living planet we depend on, we’ve merely doubled down on the old mechanical mindset.” It doesn't have to be that way. Degrowth and divestment from anthropocentrism isn't a choice, it's a necessity, due respect and survival strategy that we owe both to ourselves and the entirety of life on our planet.

Sofia Batalha

writes beautifully in Trauma and Place (On anthropocentric and individualistic exiles):

“Here in the Western psyche, the long history of human domestication, accompanied by dissociation from the promise of divine transcendence, has made us forget and profoundly unlearn the 'nuances' of the relationship with Places. We have gone from being guardians to fearful and irresponsible usurpers. This deep amnesia is also the trauma that shapes us today, a disregard and detachment from intimacy and reciprocity in favour of the limited response of fear and control.

The alienation and dissociation made possible by the anthropocentric and individualistic beliefs that shape us make it very challenging to return to a responsible web of other-than-human relationships. This alienation and amnesia are reiterated daily, living in the recesses of our cultural movement and even in our metabolism, in other words, in our neurochemical and hormonal reactions and responses.

It's not just a matter of cognitive choice, of deciding that ‘we won't be anthropocentric or individualistic any more.’ However, we can divest ourselves from these behaviours and beliefs every day.

We can open ourselves up to befriending a tree, a stretch of river or a stone. Yes... It's as trivial as it is difficult because nobody will thank us or appreciate us for it, we won't be specialists or experts in anything. We’re just being available to cultivate relationships of affection and responsibility. And maybe, slowly, we'll realise how far we've come.”

Spiritual war in defence of the sacred

When talking about parting ways with human exceptionalism and the toxic system the anthropocentric ideology has put in place, it's impossible not to talk about politics, in the narrow sense of parliamentary and presidential politics. Once again I return to Klee Benally who had much to say about this from an indigenous perspective. His words are hard-hitting, particularly for those of us who are settlers on stolen land. Embracing ways of living that make humans a part of Nature as opposed to her masters includes accepting that undoing and unlearning the damage that we're imposing onto the planet won't come from presidents, prime ministers, parliaments and governmental bodies; it won't be achieved through the farcical illusion of change brought on through voting. We can lie to ourselves as much as we want, indulging in self-imposed limitations and distractions that whisper fear of change into our ears, turning a blind eye to various flavours of fascism and pretending fascism is not fascism when it's represented by tokenised, colonised darker skin. The perpetual falling for systemic deception hook, line and sinker and incapability to break out of the artificial systems we brought upon ourselves is noticeable all too well in the current political situation of Turtle Island.

Caitlin Johnstone

, among many others, offers a comprehensive analysis.

Parliamentary and presidential politics isn't the pathway out of fascism, but a mighty tool fascism uses to obscure its trail and throw sand into our eyes. All of these political phenomena exist and operate within the framework of an extractivist system that is anti-life and anti-Earth by nature and design. As such, there can never be a meaningful change within the system. Any “change” is merely performative; just enough breadcrumbs are being thrown to the subjects of the system to make them embrace the idea that changes are happening.

Photo by Amadeus Moga on Unsplash

The other day I saw someone proclaiming, with apparently genuine persuasion, that “Kamala Harris will put the planet’s health and the general well-being above narcissistic, predatory self-interest.” If this is not the textbook definition of hook, line and sinker and choosing to turn a blind eye, I don't know what is. I don’t have any respect or room left in me for system apologists, not when the planet is burning together with her children. While we're fawning, making excuses and swallowing breadcrumbs instead of challenging and dismantling the system, our planet, our only home, is dying. It's time to stop lying to ourselves about what the path to Earth’s salvation and rejuvenation is, for it's not in blue, red or yellow polka dot politics. In the words of Audre Lorde that so aptly describe any system of power and domination: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those (women) who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”⁸

Klee Benally, in his uniquely profound blend of anarchist politics and Earth-centred spirituality, writes that:

“the entire notion of voting as harm reduction obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial violence… It’s a strategy of defeat and victimhood that protracts the suffering and historical harm induced by ongoing settler colonialism. There is nothing intersectional about participating in and maintaining a genocidal political system. Voting is not a strategy for decolonisation, you cannot decolonise the ballot. Voting in the coloniser’s elections keeps indigenous people powerless. Our power, broadly speaking, does not come from non-consensual majority rule top-down man-made laws, but is derived in relation with, and in proportion to, all living beings. This is a corporeal and spiritual power that has been in effect since time immemorial and is what has kept Indigenous Peoples alive.”⁹

Modern self-proclaimed radical environmentalists call for the governments of the world to pledge to stop using fossil fuels and plastic and sign treaties to that purpose. Such activism is as far removed from working for the Earth as it gets because it ultimately puts the trust and responsibility into the hands of the state and its artificial institutions; the institutions that are anti-Nature by default. Environmental activism without feeling the sacredness of the Earth deep in your bones is but a performative, materialist charade to save a planet that is reduced to a faceless, dead third party. Our planet can't be saved within the framework offered by current violent systems of power, we can't “reconfigure the dominant social order towards a more ecologically oriented, environmentally conscious polity. Do we really want a more ecologically friendly form of settler colonial capitalist domination, or do we seek to abolish its very existence?” asks Benally.¹⁰

“The industries that are at the front-end cause of global warming have long waged war against sacred places and our bodies with impunity. Strategies informed by the logics of the enemies of the Earth do not threaten colonialism and capitalism. Unless the root ideologies and structures that precipitate this crisis are confronted and done away with, we condemn ourselves and future generations to non-existence. Global warming is a consequence of the war against Mother Earth, sacred places are integral to maintain balance with the natural world.¹¹ To desecrate a sacred place it has to be objectified — stripped of any and all living spiritual meaning and relations. To fully stop these pipelines, mines, and other devastating industries ravaging Mother Earth, we have to stop the political machinery and progression of the systems that generate them”.¹²

Humankind is having a spiritual crisis and we are in the middle of a spiritual war, borne out of profound detachment from Nature and our very essence as a living creature treading upon the face of our planet. The solution can only ever come from the depth of our being that “progress” has forcefully removed from its rightful place. Our only path is relearning our place in Nature. Arne Naess might have “defined” deep ecology, but its concept existed for hundreds of thousands of years before it was given this name. It's an indigenous concept of innate knowing that is as old as the Earth and the time itself. To simply be, in a sacred trust between Nature and all her creation, is to honour an intrinsic sense of duty and urge to steward our surroundings with utmost respect and love. Every single human being on Earth once felt this sacred trust in their bones and we allowed it to disintegrate, in a process that constitutes the gravest mistake in the history of humankind. It is crucial to recognise that Indigenous Peoples are, to this day, the keepers of the sacredness most of us have lost, and are therefore our most respected elders who are qualified to teach us Life itself. That being said, we have to recognise that BIPOC voices aren't a monolith and we have to develop critical thinking in approaching anyone's philosophy and opinions; critical thinking that decentres humans. No one will save us but ourselves, we can't juggle our shared responsibility to someone else. We can and must learn, humble and respectful, with not a trace of the vile colonial mindset of a “noble savage,” supremacy and ownership.

Return to our place, reimagined

“Modernity is composed in neat typeface written on every surface imaginable as a container of dominance in this temporal arrangement and stands in a sharp contrast to the knowledge of and with the land,” writes Klee Benally.¹³ Modernity, as an imploding system that has eaten itself alive, won't last. We have to stop perpetuating it in a state of constant fawn response in the face of tyrannical systems. If we collectively stay on our current trajectory of disrespectful extractivism and ownership, the implosion of the system will have us plunged into anarchoprimitivism, which is our original, natural default modality of being anyway. Only in the present time we are so far removed from that original state of existence, that being brought back to it will be completely alien to us. But we'll have no choice; we'll have to adapt to it or we will perish. Isn't it much wiser to prepare, adapt and maximise our potential for sustainability now instead of sitting and waiting?

So, what to do? The answer is — community building. “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation,” postulates Bell Hooks. Community can't be just a phrase that I'm sure many of us have heard multiple times in the past few months, or a temporary “trend,” it has to be an action born out of life-long commitment and solidarity. Standing for human life, all life on the planet and the planet herself; committing oneself to radical kinship that honours and empowers human and non-human kin alike, isn't a fad, it's a moral imperative we owe to Nature herself. We don't get to talk about dismantling and changing the system without talking about and organising for building. The approach to this is multifaceted, but ultimately, we can all do something, no matter how “small,” and below are some ideas where to start with organised resistance in form of food sovereignty (with foraging and permaculture at the forefront), traditional herbalism, making and mending clothes, skill sharing, repair hubs, community-led culture events and education, mutual aid, relearning a more respectful, natural way of relating to each other and the environment, primarily through degrowth and Earth-oriented, animist spirituality. For the latter, I highly recommend reflecting on these thoughts from anti-Zionist activist and creator of the Emergent Wisdom podcast, Yuval Mann.

decolonizemyself

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Developing essential life skills and reclaiming everything that was taken away from us through “progress” and “civilisation” and replaced by consumerism and the (nanny) state — our innate knowledge about our bodies and its needs, our environment, the ways we interact with that environment to sustain ourselves in a viable way — is a necessity to adapt to the post-capitalist world to come. We have to use the technology we currently have, like the very computer and Internet I'm using to publish these lines, to access and (re)learn as much knowledge as possible, with an aim to share it with our communities and transfer it to our future generations. We have to put knowledge back into our own hands instead of relinquishing it into the hands of controlled care provided by the state. This is particularly important in terms of healthcare. Across the “West” we're witnessing healthcare systems falling apart with collapsed budgets, with an increased number of people harmed by inhumane and non-consensual treatment, and then silenced about the harm the system has caused. I've sadly felt this on my own skin with a traumatic childbirth that could have been completely avoided if only I was treated like a worthy human being instead of a number. Maternal mortality rates are rising in most countries and the statistics for birth trauma are skyrocketing (research suggests 1 in 3 births are experienced as psychologically traumatic!),¹⁴ with BIPOC communities being failed at an even bigger rate. We know that climate change and the way we've altered the world, the planet, is leading us towards a post-antibiotic era,¹⁵ where we will build such an antibiotic resistance that most of our currently available medicine will be rendered useless. Thousands of people dying every year in Europe and the US as a result of bacteria that have become resistant is already our reality,¹⁶ and it's only getting worse. In light of that, learning how to counteract the shortcomings of state healthcare systems, how not to depend on third party care providers, and how to heal ourselves as much as possible is not a privilege, not a hobby for an idle person branded as hippie by large swathes of the society. It's a necessity, a sorely needed adaptation, a reclamation of traditional knowledge that we never should have lost and outsourced to the state in the first place.

Photo by Marc Pell on Unsplash

The plunge into an anarchoprimitivist existence doesn't have to be brutal and forced. We can collectively, consciously choose degrowth and more planet-friendly, sustainable modalities of being; a divestment from anthropocentrism and reimagining of our natural place within the animal kingdom. Anarchy is a loaded word that makes many upset because we've been raised to laugh at it and uphold the rotten illusion of democracy we currently live in. Many people feel a grave fear of “disorder” even though what we know as order in our society equals violence against us and our environment. I like how Sim Kern described it after someone asked about “orderlessness” when they talked of community organising (in a video I highly recommend), saying that

“anarchy is organisation based on cooperation rather than compulsion. It is the abolishment of hierarchy, not complexity.”

If we can't make this choice out of respect for the planet (and by extension, for ourselves), then brutal plunge it is. Buckle up. I for one remain hopeful because I see people talking about these topics more than ever before in my entire life. What are we without hope; how can we not have hope when we witness the breathtaking beauty of Nature? When I stood alone in my (rented) garden that night watching the movement of the noctilucent clouds, there was something incredibly soothing about those thin, veil-like formations. When you stand still for a while and see them slowly travel and shapeshift, like a dance of pearly cobwebs in the wind, thinking about what ancient elements were needed to form these clouds — meteor dust that might have seen the Universe when it was young! — it can only instill awe.

Maybe awe and hope are two sides of the same coin, and it's a coin that most certainly wasn't minted by capitalist colonialism, within a system that, in the words of Klee Benally, “cannot envision itself anywhere but at the centre of the progression of human understanding and meaning. It cannot truly speak of justice and freedom without vomiting the half-chewed bones of forests, extinct species, and generations yet to come.”¹⁷

Our decolonial work must concentrate on healing the misalignment with Nature we've imposed on ourselves, that made us drift apart from our evolutionary environment and the innate belonging to Earth that was written in our genes; it can't be codified into governmental politics that uphold a violent, anti-life system and it can't “spend more time studying and quoting long-dead Europeans like Marx than embracing the wisdom of our elders, medicine keepers, and the land.” I choose the Land; the rediscovered, animate, nourishing and welcoming Mother Earth.

1. “Climate change could be increasing 'night shining' noctilucent clouds” on BBC Sky at Night Magazine.

2. Benally, Klee. No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred (2023), p. 24

3. For some insightful critiques of Harari, see this article in Current Affairs and this commentary from Humanists UK. The article from The New Arab specifically tackles Harari's Zionism, as does this video from Yuval Mann who comments on Harari's laughable whitewashing of colonialism.

4. Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth (2000), p. 37

5. Same, p. 34

6. Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous (1997), p. 262

7. For an in-depth overview of what longtermism is and why it is problematic as the pinnacle of human exceptionalism, see Émile P Torres, “Against Longtermism” on Aeon.

8. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider (1984), p. 112

9. Benally, p. 239-257

10. Same, p. 141

11. This line of thinking is indeed central to my own critique of Just Stop Oil's performative action at Stonehenge.

12. Benally, p. 129, 145

13. Same, p. 31

14. Ayers et al. Traumatic birth and childbirth-related post-traumatic stress disorder: International expert consensus recommendations for practice, policy, and research (2024)

15. “Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat — is climate change making it worse?” on Nature.com

16. Hansson & Brenthel. Imagining a post-antibiotic era: a cultural analysis of crisis and antibiotic resistance (2022)

17. Benally, p. 29