Childishness as the Root of Human Brutality

Intelligence, wisdom, and our blundering into destructiveness

Image by Patrick Fore, from Unsplash

Currently, our species is the driving cause of a sixth mass extinction, meaning our global superpredatory behaviour, population growth, overconsumption, habitat destruction, toxic pollution, and climate change have drastically reduced the world’s biodiversity, annihilating plants and animals at least 100 times the natural background rate.

Amazingly, though, the ongoing Holocene extinction is a tempest in a teapot, because “today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land animals; human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent of the biomass,” as Peter Brannen explains in a careful article that points out we’re only at the beginning of a mass extinction, because if we were in the middle of it, all would already be lost and there would be hardly any life at all on the planet.

Brannen goes on to say, “This Frankenstein biosphere is due both to the explosion of industrial agriculture and to a hollowing out of wildlife itself, which has decreased in abundance by as much as 50 percent since 1970. This cull is from both direct hunting and global-scale habitat destruction: almost half of the earth’s land has been converted to farmland.”