As the corporate machines continue to slash and burn the planet, inequalities widen and power grows, logics of profit and control spread through soci… - Steven Best

Whereas the unconscious operations and blind forces of the planet have provoked turbulent changes over the last 4.5 billion years of earth’s evolutionary history, now change is being directed by a conscious and volitional agent – "humanity." We cannot speak of humanity equally, to be sure, as the problem was caused by the industrialized capitalist West and the poorer nations who contributed least to will be hit the hardest. But nations such as China, India, and Brazil are major contributors, and the cumulative impact of 7.5 billion people on the planet is causing extinction and collapse everywhere. The stability of the is now gone, changes are accelerating beyond our understanding and control, and chaos waits at our door.

Today we call this planetary monolith "global capitalism," but humans became global animals tens of thousands of years before the onset of capitalism. Humans created hierarchical and growth-addicted societies some ten thousand years ago and their ecocidal proclivities stretch back millennia more into prehistory. And just like every political empire of the past, the human empire has possibly reached its zenith and begun its downward spiral toward collapse. This empire's peak and slide into catastrophe marks a new epoch not only in human history, but also the history of the earth. Debates over whether advanced societies have entered into a new "postmodernity" pale in significance to the scientifically-based proposition that human activity has created a new epoch in geological history--the age of the Anthropocene. This epoch characterized by the dominance of human influence over earth's systems and has led to, among other colossal events, a sixth mass extinction crisis and runaway climate change.

Without understanding the co-evolution of human and other animals, and the systemic psychological, social, and ecological crises brought about by speciesism, animal domestication, the rise of agricultural society, and the "Might is Right" psychosis of civilization, we cannot formulate a viable theory of history, hierarchy and power, or of social organization and change. Without the animal standpoint, we cannot adequately understand human conflict, the dynamics of warfare, the pathology of violence and genocide, the alienation of humans from one another and the natural world, and the dynamics driving the current ecological crisis, such as stem principally from corporate agriculture and the global livestock industry. And if we cannot understand the key causes of our current crisis, then we surely cannot solve them, nor forge a better culture, humanity, and future for ourselves and all life forms on this planet.