Remove yourself from your personal values and assumptions. They cloud your judgement. I have come to an interesting discovery today, and that is appreciation and understanding of what it means to be #1. Humans dominate the planet. We are the primera, the numero uno. Our actions catalyze huge changes in the world around us.
My entire life I have thought of humans as tenants on earth, with a condominum much larger than that of any other species, but I have always thought that earth does not
belong to us; it precedes us and will outlast us, and thus we are it's creation - and that though we share this relationship, it is not ours in the way that we possess our parents (our mothers, our fathers) but rather, our creation has little intent behind it; we are an "accidental" creation, at best, though it would be better to make a comparison to a woman suddenly being with child despite still being a virgin, i.e. having taken no steps, intentional or otherwise, to create. Like all things, living or no, we are the growth of the planet, and it really does not care or consider us when it unleashes a cataclysmic disaster on a densely populated human settlment; to the planet, the space is her own, and it is leased to us at our own risk, like a decrepit apartment. It is most certainly cheap and easy to acquire, but not safe.
(interestingly, when we buy a house, we rarely choose the "cheap and easy" option, but when choosing a settlement humans have little concept of the long term.) In this sense, it might be safe to surmise that the planet "
owns" us.
But now I have been exposed to a thought: what if we, humans, owned the planet? That is certainly the way we've been acting up to now. And besides, there are none to tell us otherwise. There was, once long ago a pretender, a follower of the "path not taken", a conscious species much like our own, but Darwin's theory took care of that. They were extinguished, either as a result of their own inferiority, or because we though it unsightly to share the throne. We are at the top of the food chain, the kings, if you will, of the natural world. We are in fact so far ahead that it is unlikely that any creature in existinance or as a future mutation of any other species in this era will ever surpass us. Nothing stops us from laying waste to mile after mile of our territory, or polluting our own water resources. That is the extent of our power. If we are the kings, then the rest of the world is are our subjects. And what does it matter if a peasant goes hungry or dies in the eyes of a king? As long as the king himself does not bear witness to the suffering of the peasant, whatever happens to him is irrelevant to the life of the lord. I would view animals in much the same way. No matter how many of them die, or what happens to the ecosystems they live in, if we are not affected, why should we be concerned? Cruelty is natural. And the Strong rule. Let the weak argue that that isn't the way the world works. They're dead meat anyways.
