How Extinction Was Legalised

Although most species are territorial only within their specific niche, humans have taken territoriality to planetary level. The creation of the concept of entitlement – to food, territory, and even other humans – was our attempt to rewrite ecosystem etiquette by inventing yet another moral licence for aggression. By proclaiming our unlimited entitlement to resources, we convinced ourselves that we actually owned these resources as well as all the organisms who used them. In other words, we simply owned everything. Ownership was born, and hardwired into human society ever since.

But ownership was yet another supremacist narrative. As we pursued this convenient hallucination, we created “laws” which enshrined our entitlements, even though the ecosystem already had its own constitution: physical, biological, and ecological principles that dictate how far any given species can go. Our new, human “laws” prescribed how resources would be distributed between humans from now on, conveniently omitting any mention, even in the fine print, of the fact that all of these resources had been stolen from the ecosystem in the first place. We had the audacity to create laws that could only be interpreted in the context of human culture, yet whose jurisdiction covered not only aspects of humanity, but everything else beyond it.

As the list of “rights” and “laws” became more elaborate, humans eventually got together and awarded themselves a very long list of exclusive privileges: More than 193 countries ratified the Declaration of Human Rights which safeguards the right of every one of 8 billion humans to food, housing, education and health, and stipulates that all individuals belonging to the human species, and only that species, should be treated equally: with fairness, dignity and respect. Of course, given that the Human Rights Act was conceived, written, decided upon, and voted in by humans only, it was to become exactly what it said on the tin: focused only on the rights of humans. In order to service these “human rights”, all other 10 million species from now on would have to live with the constant threat of deportation, starvation, and extinction.

Never before had a species rejected the physics of the ecosystem in such a defiant, blasphemous way. Outside of the context of human culture, ownership is an absurd concept. Earth is a cyclical and closed system, meaning that nothing can ever be “owned”. All resources are shared and recycled, just like all matter. Ownership is, at best, fleeting and temporary: passed on, or inherited from one species to the next. Any aspiration beyond this is not only greedy but biochemically futile, because in a closed system there is no yours or mine. We are all simply molecules converting into one another.

The shared use of resources is the only way to run a complex system such as Earth. Shared use ensures that every organism has something to live on, even during tough times. Every being receives a share of the surplus when times are good, and likewise, the pain is equally distributed when resources are low. We either all starve or all prosper, together: Earth’s ecosystem is a stakeholder-owned, socialist economy where every being has something to gain, but never in exchange for the extinction of another.

The reason why Earth has managed to support 10 million different species is that none of these species ever “owned” any territory or resources outright. The success of Earth’s ecosystems lies precisely on this shared resource principle, which keeps all species in constant competition that forces them to become mutually dependent. When resources are shared, this forces species to collaborate and form cooperatives i.e. ecosystems, which further boost diversity and prosperity, and democratize the food chain. This closely-knit interdependency in turn is what has led to the planet’s tremendous biodiversity. The ecosystem is a support system for each organism, but it is also an intelligent resource distribution central brain that apportions resources in a highly algorithmic fashion. It could never be redesigned or replaced, not only because it is infinitely vast, but because it is simply perfect, and this is why it must be respected. It is humans only who view the ecosystem as an inanimate object. They only see its resources, and miss out on the incredible brain that manages them. Ownership is not only supremacist, but absurd. And by inventing ownership, humans turned themselves into a biological absurdity.

Ownership is a concept which is toxic not only to Earth, but to any planet. Ownership is the ideology of a parasite, as well as the ideology of the fascist. Nature does not favour one species over another through ownership “rights”, “laws” or “privileges”. Everyone is given the chance to thrive however big or small, smart or “basic”. Entitlement, ownership, supremacy, and superiority are not only meaningless concepts within Earth’s domain, but dangerous institutions that legitimise extreme aggression and extinction within the ecosystem. All ownership is autocratic, and a declaration of war to other lifeforms.

A “human right” therefore, although sacred in human society, is a fascist concept in the broader planetary context. Human rights and entitlements infringe on the very existence of non-human species which have no such “rights”, simply because they weren’t born human. The absurdity only becomes evident when one steps outside of the human supremacy bubble we live in. Outside of this bubble, human rights are illogical constructs conceived once upon a time by a species that became so insecure about “possessions”, it refused to share the planet with other life forms. Humans invented ownership and divided everything into “yours” and “mine” not to establish “human rights”, but to secure privileges they were never entitled to in the first place. Laws and the legal profession were built around this manufactured narrative of “rights” that only exists within the human supremacy bubble. The absurdity of laws is that they apply only to humans. Everyone is equal against the law if they are human, much like every Athenian in classical Greece had the right to vote as long as they were neither a woman, a slave, or a non-Greek. The donkeys that carried blocks of marble to build the Parthenon on the Acropolis never got a stake in this democracy.

The irony of humans is that, despite having access to a disproportionately large share of the planet’s resources, and despite enshrining into international law the right of every human being to dignity, food, and water, they still failed miserably to establish so-called egalitarian societies. We weren’t even able to fulfil our supremacist “rights” fantasy within our own species.

This civilization is a fascist regime that invented ownership to justify its aggression. Extinction is the ultimate form of violence, the permanent, irrecoverable deletion of a species from the present, future, and even the past. We are a very long way from genuinely accepting, embracing and protecting diversity and difference both within our own species as well as outside of it.

We are not living in the planet of the 1%, but the planet of the 0.000001%, if other organisms are included in the calculation. Earth has become a dictatorship of humans that has reduced 10 million other life forms into non-human resources, turning the planet into a sweatshop where every other organism lives, works, breathes and produces so that this malignant overgrowth of 8 billion hominids can claim even more of this planet for themselves. Before industrial humans came along, Earth was a thriving federation of millions of lifeforms finding strength and mutual support in their diversity. It is now a capitalist dictatorship pushing its non-human citizens to extinction.

Earth does not know how to be selfish. Nevertheless, it has the power to rebalance itself based on the only real laws that exist: those of physics. Selfish, independent actors who want everything for themselves are always sussed out by the ecosystem and punished handsomely. Our planet’s algorithm has its eyes and ears out, and it has already decided: these are not human rights. These are human crimes. Every species on this planet is now a slave working for humans. But imagine if the Amazon rainforest was to go on strike. The slave masters would run out of oxygen. This scenario is neither far-fetched, nor far away. It is in fact already baked in.

This essay is part of a larger body of work on the biology of collapse. Paid subscribers support the continuation of this research. Thank you to those already supporting, I deeply appreciate you!