Excerpt from The Myth of Human Supremacy

Don't They Understand the Importance of Community? (p. 92)

From chapter "Value-Free Science "

These scientists are projecting their worldview onto the plants. They asked, “Why should one plant waste energy clueing in its competitors about a danger?” This question manifests pretty much everything that’s wrong with this culture, wrong with science, wrong with this culture’s relationship with the natural world, and wrong with relationships between humans in this culture. This question succinctly shows why and how this culture is killing the planet.

I’ll answer the question. Why should one plant “waste” energy clueing in its “competitors” about a danger? Because the plants are smart enough to understand that they’re not the only creatures on the planet, and that their very survival requires the well-being of all these others. Plants in a redwood forest, for example, understand that a redwood forest consists of more than just redwoods, that it consists also of alders and cedars and firs and ferns and fungi and bears and otters and salmon and caddis flies. Industrial humans, including these researchers, don’t seem to understand that. And industrial humans, including especially foresters, don’t seem to understand that a tree farm of Douglas firs is not a forest. These plants understand that life is not a game of Risk, and they understand that the point of life is not for one group to eliminate every other group and conquer the world. They know that to do so would be immoral, insane, suicidal, and stupid. They know enough not to measure “superiority” by the ability to destroy all “competitors” but rather by the ability to improve the capacity of the landbase to support them. They understand something understood by Indigenous humans but understood by almost none of the civilized, that, as the Dakota writer Vine Doloria wrote, “Life is not a predatory jungle, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ as Western ideology likes to pretend, but a symphony of mutual respect in which each player has a specific part to play. We must be in our proper place and play our role at the proper moment.”

My niece is visiting. I read her the scientists’ question, “Why should one plant waste energy clueing in its competitors about a danger?”

She threw her hands into the air and exclaimed, “These people! Don’t they understand the importance of community?”

Evidently not.

I shared the quote (and the rest of the analysis) with another friend who responded, “This says everything you need to know about their worldview, and nothing about the real world. Why don’t they use the word neighbor instead of competitor?”

Probably because they’re members of this exploitative culture. It shouldn’t surprise us that members of the same culture that gave us capitalism as the dominant economic model—based as it is on the insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy human communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot)—would give us variants of the selfish gene theory as the dominant biological model—based as it is on the equally insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy natural communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot). Both are justifications for what the dominant culture does: steal from everyone else. Absent is the reality of how communities survive and thrive. These must be absent, if members of our culture are going to feel good about themselves as they steal from and destroy everyone else, and as they ultimately kill the planet.