Joshua Brott, Obscura Digital
THE CONSEQUENCES OF HUMAN PLUNDER
We have to understand that we cannot perpetrate a mass extinction and come out winners
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Interview with EILEEN CRIST by LEATH TONINO
ileen Crist knows more than a person should, more than seems healthy, about dying birds and dying watersheds. She’s keenly aware of the global crisis of biodiversity loss and ecological collapse, and she sees what’s driving it: direct causes like climate change and what she calls the “ultimate causes” — population growth, overconsumption, and technological power. But the thing that really interests Crist, the thing that she’s been studying and publicizing for the past three decades as a professor and radical environmental thinker, is an even deeper question: Why is so little being done to address this planetary emergency? She attempts, with a mix of intellectual rigor and lyrical passion, to provide an answer in her 2019 book, Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization. The cause of our inaction, she says, is “human supremacy,” a
20 Spirit of Change | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
largely unconscious belief that Homo sapiens are the masters of creation rather than just one humble species among millions. This worldview sanctions not only factory farming, clear-cut logging, mountaintop-removal mining, and bottom-trawl fishing, but also more commonplace behaviors such as cruising along in cars that slaughter wildlife and emit carbon dioxide. As long as human supremacy prevails, Crist writes, “humanity will remain unable to muster the will to scale down and pull back the burgeoning human enterprise that is unraveling Earth’s biological wealth.” Crist is a synthesizer of statistics and ideas. (The bibliography for Abundant Earth cites sources ranging from philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler to the United Nations Environment Programme.) She holds a PhD in sociology from Boston University and recently took an early retirement, at the age of
