CONFRONTING HUMAN SUPREMACY

What is human supremacy?

Human supremacy is the worldview that human beings are superior to the rest of nature, which is valuable only as it serves us. This attitude drives our population growth, our unlimited expansion across the planet, and our exploitation of nature and animals. The ecological destruction caused by this attitude is worsened by the belief in technological solutions to the problems caused by technology.

Animal agriculture

Our agricultural systems have impacted the vast majority of land, water, and air : fifty percent of Earth’s ice-free land is used for crops - mostly feed crops for farmed animals - and grazing. Animal agriculture is also a leading cause of climate change, uses 70% of the freshwater consumed by humans, and pollutes the rest with agricultural runoff and farm animal excrement. Humans and domesticated animals comprise 96% of all mammalian biomass, leaving only the remaining 4% as wildlife. Those domesticated animals experience a brutal reality: 80 billion land animals are slaughtered each year to meet our growing population’s insatiable appetite for meat and dairy, while trillions of marine and freshwater creatures face the same grim fate.

“What we do to animals is as evil as any other thing that humans have done to one another over the centuries. It’s as evil as genocide. It's as evil as slavery. The scale of what we do, the horror of what we do, and the universally accepted nature of what we do to other animals, there's no word adequate to describe this system.”

Dr. John Sanbonmatsu, The Omnivore’s Deception

Humanized Earth

As our population grows, so do our roads, vehicles, gadgets, appliances, buildings and power lines. This human-created stuff - this technosphere - now weighs more than the biomass of all living creatures on Earth. Due to the growth of our numbers, our agricultural systems, and our stuff, species are going extinct at a rate 100 to one thousand times greater than the background rate. As the human population has doubled from 4 to 8 billion over the past 50 years, the populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish have declined by 70%.

A future where our human footprint is in balance with life on Earth requires a shift away from the worldview that humans are superior to all other life. This shift must include a far smaller human population and the end of industrial agriculture in favor of regenerative and humane food systems.