The Myth of Human Supremacy

by Derrick Jensen

  SERIAL SEX KILLER EDMUND KEMPER

  It’s not that I don’t understand this whole notion of valuing what we create more than we value what nature creates. When I was a child—and of course now, I’m horrified and ashamed I did this—I loved making terrariums, even caught lizards and snakes to put in them. I dreamt and dreamt of making the perfect terrarium, which would be so large that none of those who lived in it would ever know they were in a terrarium, but still it would be my creation. Never mind that there was a wild world full of lizards and snakes and everyone else already outside my door, with no need for them to be deceived into thinking they weren’t captives, since in all reality they weren’t.

  So I understand the impulse. What we create and control has value. What nature creates does not.

  I still like planting seeds, and I pay closer attention to the seeds I plant than I do to the native seeds who sprout in this forest. Likewise, I love putting food scraps into the forest, and watching for when they’re eaten, whether by big creatures, in which case the scraps simply disappear, or smaller organisms, in which case the scraps can take weeks or months to change color, collapse in on themselves, and finally become someone else. And the point is that I get more excited watching this process for the pumpkin scraps I place in the forest than I do for the dried berries hanging on the salal shrubs. The former are my contribution, and therefore special.

  I understand all this. I also understand that this overvaluing of our own creations and creativity and undervaluing nature’s creations and denying nature’s creativity helps explain many things about this culture. It helps explain how an astronomer can say we need to explore Mars “to answer that most important question: are we all alone?” as this culture destroys life on this planet. It helps explain how so many foresters can continue to claim, as their “forestry” destroys forest after forest, that “forests need management.” It helps explain how people keep trying to “manage fisheries” as they wipe out species after species. It helps explain how even so many so-called environmentalists state explicitly that they are trying to save, not the planet, but civilization, which so many perceive as humanity’s—and thus the universe’s—most important creation.

  As opposed to perceiving life itself as the universe’s most important creation. Or the universe itself as the universe’s most important creation.

  Imagine living in a culture sane enough to perceive life on this planet as more important to save (and worthy of saving) than this culture that is killing the planet. Imagine how quickly and dramatically our culture would change if sufficient numbers of people were sane enough to perceive this, and to act on this perception. Of course, if we lived in a culture that was sane enough to value life on the planet more than this culture, we wouldn’t be living in a culture that’s killing the planet.

  This extreme valuing of what humans create and equal devaluing of what nonhumans create helps explain why scientists get so excited about “creating life” in a laboratory, as, once again, this culture destroys life on this planet. If we create an enzyme, that’s worth far more than the world creating entire oceans full of life as varied and wondrous as goblin sharks, sea horses, angler fish, bull kelp, Portuguese man o’ wars (who are not, in fact, single organisms, but communities of mutually dependent organisms) and the blue dragon sea slugs who eat them, then store their most venomous stingers to use for defense (and humans are the only ones who use tools?), and on and on.

  Here’s a question: who figured out penicillin’s antibacterial qualities?

  If you answer Alexander Fleming, I can, following QI, subtract points from your score and make a general hullabaloo. Then if you answer again with other scientists like Florey, Chain, or Heatley, I’ll subtract even more points and make even more of a hullabaloo. At this point you might get frustrated, call me a pedant, and throw out the name of Ernest Duchesne, a French physician who noticed that Arab stable boys at an army hospital intentionally kept their saddles in dark, moist rooms to encourage the growth of mold on them. When asked why, they said the mold helped horses heal more quickly from saddle sores. Duchesne then did some studies, wrote them up, and sent them to the Pasteur Institute, which didn’t even do him the courtesy of acknowledging receipt.89 But here’s the thing: if you throw out his name, I’ll subtract even more points and make even more of a hullabaloo.

  So then let’s say you do some heavy soul searching, and at last you say, “Fine, I get it. I was being racist. The real ones who figured it out were the Arab stable boys.”

  I smile and say, “That’s a very important realization, but you lose ten more points.” Then I make even more hullabaloo.

  Surprisingly enough, instead of strangling me, you get up and start pacing the room. Five minutes pass. Ten. Then you turn to me, an intense look in your eyes, and say, “I’ve heard that during the Crusades, soldiers on all sides put moldy bread on their wounds. They discovered it helped their wounds heal. You’ve got to give me those points back now.”

  Sadly, this leads to more lost points, and to more hullabaloo. Fortunately, it does not yet lead to you strangling me.

  You say, “Oh, now I really get it! I was still being racist, and excluding Indigenous peoples. I’m sure that some of them figured it out.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, but you lose ten more points.”

  I can see your fingertips quiver as you hold yourself back from forming your hands into claws.

  So let’s get to the point. Who discovered penicillin’s antibiotic qualities? Why, fungi did, a very long time ago, when fungi of the genus Penicillium were trying to figure out how to keep pesky bacteria from eating food—humans sometimes call this “spoiling food,” and I’m sure these fungi and bacteria say the same about some of the things we do—before the fungi could get to it. After all, bacteria reproduce a lot faster than fungi. Well, perhaps asked the fungi, what if we just trim their numbers a bit? What if we invent some way to kill the bacteria who try to eat our food? Let them eat some other cantaloupe, not this one. And thus, not only did the fungi invent, but also discover, and indeed figure out, penicillin’s antibacterial qualities. The same is true of nearly all classes of antibiotics: they were originally discovered and put in use by either fungi or other bacteria.

  Perhaps this is when you move forward to strangle me. Not for pointing out the human supremacism inherent in the way this question is nearly always asked and answered, but for being so damned annoying about it.

  •••

  Why do we as a culture refuse to acknowledge the creativity and subjectivity of nonhumans? Why do we insist on our own superiority? Why do human discoveries or inventions count, and nonhuman discoveries or inventions not count? (Of course, discoveries or inventions by Indigenous peoples don’t generally count, either.)

  Seventeen years ago I wrote that so often the perpetrators of atrocities “share a deeply unifying belief in their own separateness and superiority, and a tightly rationalized belief in the rightness of their actions. The perpetrators share a deep fear of interconnection and of the unpredictability of a life that may end in death tomorrow, or not for a hundred years, but one that will nonetheless end. The psychologist Erich Fromm changed Descartes’ dictum from ‘I think, therefore I am,’ to ‘I affect, therefore I am.’ If Gilgamish can cut down a forest, if he can make a name for himself, he has affected the world around him. If Hitler can ‘purify’ the Aryan ‘race,’ if he can become the progenitor of a thousand-year Reich, he has, too. If my father can make my teenage sister wet her pants from fear and pain, or if he can make me take his penis against my skin—and more broadly if he can destroy our souls . . . you get the picture. Frederick Weyerhaeuser (acting now through the unliving yet immortal corporate proxy that bears his name) deforested first the Midwest, then the Northwest, and now wants the world. Fearful of life, the perpetrators forget that one can affect another with love, by allowing another’s life to unfold according to its own nature a
nd desires and fate, and by giving to the other what it needs to unfold. One can affect another by merely being present and listening intently to that other. All of this is true whether we speak of forests, children, rocks, rivers, stars, and wolverines, or races, cultures, and communities of human beings.”

  That is as true now as when I wrote it.

  And it should not surprise us that this culture values what it creates and does not value what others create. What else would we expect from a culture of cheats, a culture based on systematic theft and murder? How deluded must we all be to believe that we can steal from a forest, call it “management,” and expect for the result to be any other than the death of that forest?

  •••

  How about if I steal your liver, and then see how long you live? Then your pancreas. Then your stomach.

  Why are you complaining? I’m just managing your body.

  •••

  Imagine this: a pancreas decides that the rest of the body doesn’t consist of other members of a larger community, but instead that the pancreas is the supreme organ, really the only organ who matters. All of the other organs, indeed, all the other cells of any sort, are taking up space and energy that could be better used by the pancreas. The pancreas starts to grow, needs to grow. The growth of the pancreas is natural. This is what all organs do: they grow and fight and compete, and the strongest, most fit organ survives. That’s life. And who needs a fucking appendix anyway? And there’s plenty of surplus intestine. And for crying out loud, there are two lungs and two kidneys. It’s incredibly selfish of the lungs and kidneys to have redundancy when the pancreas needs those wasted resources. So, good, done deal. One lung and one kidney gone. Next it needs to displace some gray matter. Oh, you say that gray matter won’t survive outside the brain pan? Too bad, so sad; the rule of nature is adapt or die. The gray matter can adapt to living somewhere else, or it can die. And frankly human supremacists have shown they don’t really need their brains anyway, having already substituted ideology for perception, thought, and reasoned and/or sensible response to external conditions.

  The pancreas takes over more and more of the physical body, and more and more of the body’s energy. The rest of the body is completely mortified, and is also dying. But that’s not really a big deal, since the size and growth of the pancreas are all that matter.

  A few of the cells in the pancreas think it’s a really bad idea to kill off the body that is the pancreas’s only home. But the vast majority of the cells in the pancreas are pancreas supremacists, who either believe that God—who looks like a giant Pancreas—gave them the body into which the pancreas is supposed to go forth and multiply, and over which the pancreas is supposed to have dominion and show good stewardship; or they believe that evolution gave the pancreas the tools to make the rest of the body jump through hoops on command. Pancreas über alles.

  •••

  Many environmentalists are infected with this same delusional supremacism, and this same delusional valuing of what they do over what nature does. I remember years ago I was doing a Skype presentation to an audience in the northeastern United States. At one point a simple living “activist” started doing what so many simple living “activists” do, which is to dismiss organized resistance and say the only thing that matters is one’s personal carbon footprint. He said, “You write books, and that harms forests. And you fly to do talks—except this one—and that adds carbon to the air.” I said the hope, of course, is that the books or talks might have a net benefit for the real world, that the value of at least slightly changing discourse ends up helping the real world more than the harm done by these (and any other actions) within the industrial economy. He then turned it into a pissing contest regarding who had the personally smaller carbon footprint. This was a contest he couldn’t win, not only because he had four children—he called them his “four delightful little accidents,” four being two above replacement level—and was therefore ignoring the fact that having a child is the single most environmentally expensive action any industrialized human can take; but because, as I told him, every spare dime I make goes into protecting forty acres of second growth redwood, who would have been cut without my protection. And then there are the tens of thousands of acres of old growth forest I’ve played a small role (as a part of various organizations) in protecting. Because of the carbon these forests are sequestering, when I go on tour I could hire Lear jets to fly me to the various cities and chauffeured Bentleys to drive me to the events, all the while consuming appetizers of caviar served on roasted hummingbird breasts, and my carbon footprint would still be negative.90 He responded, and this is the whole point, “But how many of these trees did you plant yourself?”

  Why do I need to plant the trees? Why is protecting a standing forest not as good as recreating a forest who has been destroyed? And why not let the forest plant trees on its own? It has been doing it infinitely longer, and is infinitely better at it. The forest knows far better than I do what trees it needs, and where, and when, and knows far better than I do what trees should die, and where, and when. The forest knows one has to take care of one’s own.

  •••

  I’m not, of course, saying that forests can never use help from humans (or salmon, or beavers, or mosquitoes), just like I’m not saying that rivers can never use human help in removing dams. I’m simply saying two things. The first is that protecting living forests from being cut down is at least as important to forests as helping them to regenerate once they’ve been harmed (just as protecting living rivers from being dammed is at least as important to rivers as is removing dams from those already harmed). And the second is that it’s irrelevant to me whether humans or forests plant the trees, just as it’s irrelevant to me whether humans or rivers take out dams. The important thing is not and has never been human agency and control. The important thing is the health of the forest, and the health of the rivers.

  •••

  There is something far more difficult to bear—at least for those of us who are alive, and who are not sociopaths—than the death of one’s parent. This is the murder of the planet.

  It is a beautiful, though far too warm late spring day. I used to sit next to the pond by my house for hours at a time, nearly every early afternoon through the sunny season. Now it is too often far too painful. Today I saw one dragonfly and three or four damselflies. Even six or seven years ago I would have seen a hundred of each. I saw no newts. A decade ago I would have seen a half dozen, and I’ve heard reports from old timers of seeing hundreds. I saw no tadpoles. I recall years ago seeing scores of tadpoles scatter from the shallows as my shadow passed over them. I saw no caddisfly larvae, no dragonfly nymphs, no butterflies.

  This is what it is like to be a living being at this point, a living being who recognizes that the world consists—for now, at least, even if not for much longer—of more than just humans.

  •••

  I’d love to be able to say that I first learned of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by reading Goethe’s poem when I was a child, doing a little light reading in the original German, of course. But the truth is that like so many people of my generation, I first encountered this story in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. If you recall, during one segment of the animated feature, Mickey Mouse is an apprentice to a sorcerer. The story begins with Mickey carrying buckets of water down some stairs in a castle, then trudging to pour the water into a large basin. When the sorcerer leaves, Mickey gets the bright idea to cast a spell he’s seen the sorcerer use to animate a broomstick. It works! The broomstick grows legs! And it walks! On Mickey’s command it grows arms and picks up the two empty buckets. He leads it up the stairs and out to a fountain. The broomstick fills the buckets, follows Mickey down the stairs and to the basin, then empties them. So far, so good! Mickey is making matter and energy jump through hoops on command! Isn’t that the point of life? Isn’t that why all of evolution has taken place, so humans—homo s
apiens sapiens, or in this case mickey sapiens sapiens—can make matter and energy jump through hoops on command (as a translation of Goethe’s poem puts it: “You’re a slave in any case, and today you will be mine!”)? With the broomstick firmly set to the task, Mickey takes a nap. What could possibly go wrong? He dreams that he has been able to likewise get the stars and ocean and weather to do his bidding. Sound familiar? All the while the broomstick keeps bringing in water. Mickey awakens to a flooded room. He doesn’t know how to make the broomstick stop (just like we have no idea how to get rid of or clean up or fix so many of the horrors we’ve unleashed upon the world: GMOs, invasives, plastics and other endocrine disruptors, nuclear waste, heavy metals and other pollutants, depleted and polluted aquifers, biodiversity crash, global warming, or neurotoxins; and just like on the larger scale we seem to have no idea how to get rid of agriculture, civilization, or industrialization). So he splinters it with an ax. Unfortunately for him, each splinter regenerates—think: hydra—and suddenly he has something like 279 broomsticks carrying buckets of water into the now completely inundated room. The water threatens to take him away, drown him. He could die because of his arrogance. But at long last the sorcerer returns. He cleans up the mess, and uses a broomstick to swat Mickey on the butt as Mickey leaves the room. The end.

  The story is a pretty straightforward metaphor: if you meddle in that which is beyond your capacity to comprehend, and/or if you attempt to control that which is beyond your capacity to control, you run a pretty good chance of causing catastrophe. Sound familiar? You may free yourself from some drudgery in the meantime, and you may dream about controlling the heavens and the seas and the skies, but you’ll come to failure. Sound even more familiar?

  I realized even at eight, when I first saw this in a theater, that at least for me the metaphor would have worked still better with nature as the sorcerer, the one who understands how the world is, and not merely a more experienced human—named, I later learned, after Disney himself.91 The latter implies that if we can just become better and more experienced slavemasters, we’ll be able to competently run the show. But of course that’s nonsense, and completely counterfactual; as humans have attempted to control more and more of the biosphere, more and more of the biosphere is being “reorganized,” read: murdered. I also recognized even as a child that the metaphor has at least one more point of departure from our situation regarding the earth, which is that the horrors created by this culture and its arrogance are creating permanent harm, and can’t be forced by some feat of magic to disappear with no harm done. Despite those two points of dissonance between the metaphor and our current situation, the metaphor has stuck with me all these years, helped inform my understanding of the world, helped inform my understanding of this culture’s stupidity, arrogance, and destructiveness. It has informed my understanding of this culture’s politics, religion, economics, philosophy, epistemology, and certainly its science. It also, sadly, misinformed an essay I tried to write for a high school German literature class about Goethe’s poem (which, as a youth, I never did read in its original German. And here is a free hint for those planning, as I did, on using Fantasia to cheat on an essay for your version of my aforementioned German literature class: in the original poem, the apprentice doesn’t have mouse ears, and the sorcerer doesn’t swat him on the butt).