"The sacred isn’t some superstition or wishful thinking. It’s simply the way things are."
- Peter Kingsley
We are living in times that have been called a profitable apocalypse (Anon 2023). A mundane, comforting sense of the future that has always been here before has suddenly disappeared. Life feels like a protracted now accompanied with a sense of an ending. An ending that we are wondering whether we are not living through at this very moment. An ending, in Frank Kermode’s words, “more immanent than imminent,” one that perhaps has already arrived because it was overdetermined if not politically executed.
Borrowing from Kermode again, our experience of time these days can be described as follows: “It is as though the morrow could not link itself with today. Things as they are totter and plunge.” This is the experience of time in times of crisis: An empowered capacity to navigate the present into the future feels shattered. “The time is not free,” wrote Kermode, “it is slave to an end.” We are living in a precarious meantime, time itself having become “an endless transition from one condition of misery to another.” From one war to another. From one weather-related catastrophe to another. From one mass killing to another. From useless politics to hopeless politics. Invisibly: from extinction to extinction. We could say Kermode’s words were prophetic.
Even as we live in a protracted now that is disjointed from the future, we endure a strong historical sense. Not being able to see forward, we are ricocheted to look back. Not coincidentally, social identities have flared up, righteous and menacing. A fractured historical sensibility has revived sociocultural grievances, hostilities, memories, and resentments. So the sense of an ending intensifies since on top of looming threats—mass extinction, ocean death, runaway heating, epidemiological collapse—gunfire, missiles, and annihilation rhetoric are flying all around us.
The world’s ecological citizens, who are without sociocultural identity (or without too vested an attachment to it), who viscerally inhabit green-blue Earth as home, share a state of grief. So much has been destroyed, purposely or carelessly, en masse and by a thousand cuts.
As an example, marine ecological literature reports of the abundance of life that inhabited the ocean even a century ago. As a child, I used to snorkel with my family in the Aegean and I remember the colors. I remember schools of fish, big and small. I remember seeing an orange seahorse (20 miles from Athens as the coast hugs) that took my breath away. I recall making eye contact with a large octopus swimming in open waters; he changed twenty colors as if he was blushing to be caught by human eyes. Those living waters then were but an echo of their former selves, having suffered from centuries of declining ecological syndrome. But sometime in the early 1970s, when I was around 10 years old, the sea suddenly turned lifeless, its colors choked in charcoal grays, and the schools of fish disappeared. We stopped snorkeling and nobody talked about it. Today, Aegean beaches pride themselves, if they can get away with it, with blue-flag proclamations of being “clean.” But there is no life in them to speak of, often no life in them at all.
Gone with Earth’s living abundances is the planetary greatness that they manifested and intimated. A plenum of life that humanity was once engulfed in. The planet was not only big and spacious—in philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s words, an immediate immensity—it was alive and unfathomably strange. Increasingly, in the Age of Man we inhabit a one-dimensional reality both in Herbert Marcuse’s sense of a global cultural melting pot and in an ecological sense. Or as it’s been called, the Homogenocene.
This diagnosis does not remotely imply that we stop striving to expand protected natural areas, rewilded landscapes and seascapes, and agroecological havens in all sizes and expressions. What I mean is that big, diverse, and contiguous wilderness has been rapidly shrinking. Concurrently, the idea of wilderness is not much debated these days—the world seems to have moved past “the great wilderness debate.” The ideal of nature autonomous from man, sovereign and self-governed, with an inherent right to freedom has become… outmoded. A social constructionist superficial anthropolatry—handing over all things physical and semantic to anthropos—has won the day (for now). The word wilderness has fallen into rare usage, and no wonder, as the reality of wilderness is evanescing: If not to agriculture, infrastructure, logging, and mining, then to the panopticon of Google Earth. If not to the rapacity of industrial fishing, then to the new normal of a farmed ocean to “feed the world.” If not to catastrophic climate change, then to the scouring of the seabed for materials for “the green economy.” We live in a world that is not only smaller and flatter but far less lively—a colonized planet turned human monoculture. Welcome to the Anthropocene, as the saying goes.
Many people think that longing for thundering wild herds, expanses of ancient forests and grasslands, free rivers, abundant animal migrations, life-filled seas—longing for unbounded wild and free nature—is a romantic dream. Having applied the scoffing label romantic (inwardly or aloud), such people believe they’ve exorcised the romantic vision and don’t need to give it another thought. The fact remains, however, that the Earth the Romantic yearns toward is one to which the Anthropocene cannot hold a candle. That world of pristine life, regenerative and symphonic, is the haven that made us, a world to which humanity is indebted beyond hope to repay.
To reinstate and inhabit that Earth the human must become transformed into a being who is in love with planet-home. Home does not mean house—home enfolds the state of being in love with home. Where did the stereotype come from, anyway, of the Romantic as a wrongheaded fool? Why is it foolish or wrongheaded to admire the big wild world so much that we’d rather be enveloped in it than dominate it? Why has humanity bought into the idea that the supremacist way of being human—superior and entitled—is the winning way, like it or not?
Human supremacy has never been an ideology, for it is not taught per se but rather transmitted experientially and indirectly in uncountable ways. Supremacy is constitutive of the human, meaning that supremacy gets installed into human beings from a young age, stitched into the developing brain matter of children and youngsters, all but guaranteeing smooth induction and compliant membership in human-supremacist consensual reality. Developmental psychology studies indicate that an anthropocentric perspective is not inborn to the human species but acquired between ages 3 and 5 (Webb 2025). The supremacist installation is comparable to an Operating System program with haughty software for perceiving nonhuman nature. Through supremacist conditioning, the inherent radiance that presences directly in the perception of consciousness in another is denied to nonhumans and nonhuman nature. A state of mereness has befallen the other-than-human world, with its self-being refuted, its inherent luminosity dimmed, its colorful displays of agency and intentionality erased, literally and metaphorically.
The following describes looking through the eyes of a human supremacist: With the intrinsic standing of the natural world denied, nonhuman nature appears to the human as something “mere” or “nothing but.” A mundane example of seeing this way was delivered in Ronald Reagan’s assertion that, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree you’ve seen them all.” Indeed, all politicians, left-right-center, are committed to upholding human supremacy. They not only have a knack for anthropocentric one-liners and jingles, but a hardened mandate to sustain human tyranny on Earth and keep it looking “normal.”
To say that human supremacy is constitutive of the human means it gets installed into the nervous system, producing neural nets that gloss over existence as mereness—as prosaic, profane, and made for instrumentalization. Via this desacralizing lens, human beings are literally brainwashed to see the nonhuman realm as being for takeover, using, “improving,” exterminating, managing, and colonizing. Human supremacy has been passed down for hundreds of generations. It’s an old inheritance that has become both physical regime (world) and way of seeing (view).
Rendering the natural world as prosaic, profane, and for overtaking, human supremacy is incapable of restraint—it sprawls the human. The sprawl of the human is purchased through the eclipse of the nonhuman and, inevitably following, through the eclipse of the human as well. These twin dyings are already happening, but in the public eye they appear isolated and unrelated. Sooner or later, however, their entangled scale will become undeniable. In the recognition of the paired events of massive nonhuman and human perishing the potential for history’s turning awaits. That pivotal, high-potency moment of history’s turning is known as revelation (αποκάληψη, in Greek), a word that means simultaneously exposed-to-view and collapsing-into-ruin. What will be unveiled in the ruins? That the mendacious disavowal of the truth of nonhuman being as cosmos has always been brokered by human homelessness and that human homelessness can only culminate in the end of the human.
As human supremacy has become a sickness of human being—turning the world into monoculture and endangering totality—will it be possible at the historical moment of its unveiling to overcome it? That question is presently unanswerable but we can endeavor to clarify another: What is it that sees through the eyes of human supremacy? By what lights does human supremacy see?
The matter of seeing might be explored through an intriguing story that author Naomi Wolf relates from her childhood. As a child she was deeply inclined toward wonder, especially about living beings all around her. She was acquainted with a secret garden “all her own” that was enchanted with an inner glow. A garden so pregnant with faerie that its aura bordered on the preternatural and the mystic. She invited a friend of hers to come see it, and her friend’s mother came too. As the three of them gazed at the garden from the gate, Naomi turned to see their enraptured faces only to be taken aback by faces soured with disappointment. “Why there’s nothing here!” declared the mother. “It’s just a garden.” Off she trotted with her daughter. Naomi then turned and looked at the garden again—and guess what: all its magic was gone, Poof, with a suggestion. This story offers a vivid portal into how human vision, especially the vision of children, is trained to see the natural world, how profanation (or nihilism—turning something into nothing) is implanted straight into the nervous system, shaping how humans see. Human supremacy sees with the eyes of nihilism, for nihilism (the profanation of existence) is the metaphysics of human supremacy.
It’s just a garden. “It’s just,” “it’s nothing but,” “it’s merely,” such expressions are all passwords of nihilism: Written or spoken, they invoke, call forth, the nihilistic gaze.
We must free our vision and unknot the neural nets that profanate reality to see Earth’s self-arising wonder, and yes, Earth’s fragility. Simply see this. Because in truth no redwood tree is like any other. And in the realm of existence, a garden (especially one ripened into old age) is an exquisite, self-illumined thing to see, mystical even, but liable like so much else to be darkened in the eyes of the innocent through the venomous insinuations of nihilism.
Circling back to our shared experience of time as a protracted now unhinged from the future, this is what it’s asking us to turn to: the sacredness of all living beings in existence and the lit shadow of apocalypse cast over them. Whereby we turn to cherish Earth not “save it.” (If all becomes lost, Earth will create new manifestations of life with time.) So that as we look back with our current acute historical sense, we look back to the beauty of world-Earth and its primordial living abundances and we also look back to recognize ourselves as Earthlings. Whoever we happen to be and however we identify, it is simply a fact that we are one as Earthlings. It is only with our Earthling eyes that we may overcome our spurious fractiousness and, in unity, surmount the stifling sense of an ending: Instead of the conceited, nihilist gaze of human supremacy, look at all in existence with the eyes of an Earthling. We only have relatives here. They shine with inner light as bright as we do.
Sources
Anon (2023). The Conspiracist Manifesto. Translated by Robert Hurley. Semiotext(e).
Bachelard, Gaston (1969). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press.
Callicott, Baird and Michael Nelson, eds. (1998). The Great New Wilderness Debate. The University of Georgia Press.
Callicott, Baird and Michael Nelson, eds. (2008). The Wilderness Debate Rages On. The University of Georgia Press.
Greer, John Michael (2017). “The Twilight of Anthropolatry.” Resilience. The Twilight of Anthropolatry – resilience.
Kermode, Frank (1966). The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford University Press.
Kingsley, Peter (2021). A Book of Life. Catafalque Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1977). “The Turning.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper Perennial, 36-49.
Marcuse, Herbert (1964/1991). One-Dimensional Man. Beacon Press.
Webb, Christine (2025). The Arrogant Ape. Penguin.
Wolf, Naomi (2023). Facing the Beast. Chelsea Green Publishing.
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