Human supremacy

Human supremacy is the mistaken idea that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, when in fact all species alive today are equally evolved. While the popular “March of Progress” illustration gives the impression that humans evolved from chimps, in fact humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor, from whom modern chimps have evolved just as far as we have. This is true of all life. Alas, stemming from this misapprehension is an entire ideology which holds that because humans are at the top of the species hierarchy, we have the right to dominate and destroy all other species, and that is in fact what we have done.

From “The Ideology of Human Supremacy”:

An accumulation of studies around the world measuring the declines of species and ecosystems indicates that overall we’ve lost around ninety [90!] percent of nature’s profusion. We live, [the writer] Mackinnon observes, in a ‘ten percent world’. Those of us who gain sustenance from the sacred beauty of nature sometimes like to think of it as a temple. But, as Mackinnon notes, ‘a greater truth should be foremost in mind: Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.’ It’s rather stunning to consider that all this destruction has been carried out by a species that has been around for less than 0.01 per cent of life’s history; a species that makes up just 0.01 per cent of all life on Earth as measured by biomass.