Species, God, and Dominion

Abstract

Species as a concept is the outcome of theological and philosophical considerations, not empirical or scientific need. It still holds political import for the religious movement of dominionism, with great impact on environmentalist and conservationist politics in the United States and elsewhere in the world. This chapter will argue that having a “theoretical” notion of species is inimical to science and polity. It is not needed, as it retains much of its original essentialistic religious origins and emphasizes human exceptionalism to the detriment of ecological stewardship.

This paper is based on a talk given at the Speciesism and the Future of Humanity: Biology, Culture, and Sociopolitics seminar (10–16 March 2013), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in Berkeley, under the guidance of Brent Mishler, David Hollinger, Eric Rakowski, and Kent Lightfoot (Berkeley) and Joan Diamond and Paul Ehrlich (Stanford). I am particularly indebted to Professor Mishler for the invitation and funding.

1 Introduction

Why do we in the West think that human beings are special? Since every species is special (or else it would not be a species—special is the adjective of species), what is so special about Homo sapiens that the needs of humans supplant the needs of all other species, unless the needs of humans are met by other species? I will argue that human exceptionalism results from modern interpretations of the biblical narratives, economic motives, and sociocultural accidents.¹

Technical terms in science are sometimes treated as contrary to religious doctrines, yet scientific terms shade from foreign intruders in religious usage to comfortable ideas that no believers need to worry about. For instance, the Bible does not recognize mammals (since they were first defined by Linnaeus in 1735), but religious folk seem to have no issue with using that notion in ordinary life; while other terms, like fish, which includes both crocodiles and cetaceans in the Bible: Gen 1:26, 28; Job 41:1 (Worster 1994; Burnett 2007), have in the past caused dissonance between sociocultural and religious usages and scientific discourse. Species is a technical scientific term with scientific, religious, and political overtones, which I wish to review here. Ironically, the term and concept of biological species itself (as opposed to the numerous other uses of the term in theology, chemistry, and other discourses) derives not only from a Christian context, but from Christian biblical exegesis in the context of early modern science.

Moreover, modern environmentalism is focused firmly upon preserving species and not, say, genes or trophic cascades. This means that species is a crucial term in debates regarding either conserving nature or utilizing it. Individual species then become the flag on the mast for different locales and situations. The United States ‘Endangered Species Act of 1973 made identifying species critical in the politics of the environment.² Therefore, Christian reactions to environmental issues and movements have tended to focus upon species and the specificity of humans in contrast to other organisms. This means that the “archaeology,” as Foucault would call it (1970), of this concept in natural science has implications for bad decisions, confusions, and bad policy. The past is retained in some fashion, thus influencing the present.

2 Species: Why Do They Matter to Religion?

The “default” Christian view of nature, according to many introductory books and papers, is that humanity (or in patriarchal language, “Man”) is separate from and superior to nature, and so it may be exploited for human benefit. There is some truth to this, and it persists among some religious thinkers (Rossello 2017), but as usual in the history of ideas, the reality is more complicated than that. Lynn White Jr. was a historian of technology at Princeton, who argued that Christian views of nature caused the growing environmental catastrophe (at the time, in the early 1960s, mostly industrial and agricultural pollution). He argued that the roots of our ecological crisis lay in the middle ages (White 1967). Before Christianity became the foundation of modern social, political, and economic activity and institutions in the west, pagans believed natural things had spirits (e.g., genii locorum). Christianity, he said, established (in the west) a separation of Man from nature, over which Man had dominion (Genesis 1:21, 24–26). His ideas were immensely influential in conservation thought, with one environmental historian, Gilbert LaFreniere, calling him (and Roderick Nash) “brave souls in academia” who “dared to make some powerful generalizations regarding medieval evaluations of nature” (Nash 1976, 1989; LaFreniere 2007). Although the White Hypothesis was severely criticized by historians (Whitney 2013; LeVasseur and Peterson 2016), the critique he offered (as a Christian) stung many Christians deeply. There were two general responses—one was to devise a theology that was pro-environmentalist. The other was to set up a reactionary theology. These are referred to, respectively, as stewardship and dominionism. Early signs of dominionism in public life came in the 1980s with the rise of the political influence of evangelicals in the Reagan administration. White himself noted the tendency of Christian thought to hold that

... it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his own ends.

This is illustrated well in the 1852 text on A complete guide to the mystery and management of bees, by James Beesley (as clear a case of nominative determinism as I have seen), who wrote in his Chap. 3.

… it is well worth our attention to contemplate the works of our good and great Creator; how and in what a wonderful manner He provides food for all His creatures, from the lowest insect to the lord of the forest, all of which He hath created for His own wise purposes, and for the benefit of man! How beautifully every field and meadow is adorned and variegated; not so much to please the eye, as to provide food for His creatures, the least and most despicable of which are not beneath the watchful eye of Providence, who has wisely ordained, that every plant, flower, shrub, and tree, should produce something for the support of some species of the animal creation!

White quoted “the [then] governor of California” (Ronald Reagan): “when you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.”³ White claimed that the standard theology of Western Christianity thought of living objects as just things, to which humans had no moral obligations, and instead recommended eastern Christian views, including the Eastern Orthodox theological positions, in which nature was valued as a message from God: “In the early Church, and always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men.”

A “Christian ecology” movement, the Stewards, did arise after this, but it seems to have involved just the elite—theologians, clergy, and activists—with little effect on ordinary lay Christians.⁴ And in reaction to what attempts were made to be more ecological in theology, both Christian politicians and conservative thinkers still asserted the “Reagan” view (cf. the “Cornwall Alliance” below).

3 The Problem of Kinds on the Ark

Ironically, and unsurprisingly to any reader of western history, theology had already played a role in these scientific issues in the very early scientific revolution. Even the notion of species in biology (or in natural history as it was then) was the outcome of theological events and arguments (Wilkins 2018). The irony of this is equalled by how Christian thinkers and activists currently treat species. During the fifteenth century, beginning with the Castillian theologian Alonso (or Alfonso) Madrigal, el Tostado, in his commentary on Genesis around 1436,⁵ followed by Johannes Buteo’s (De arca Noe) in 1554 (Buteo 1554, 2008), theologians began to take the literal meanings of Genesis seriously and try to work through the logistics of Noah’s Ark, as the burgeoning humanist movement required when interpreting historical texts.⁶ This logistical interpretive movement of Genesis culminated in the work of the Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher, who also published a text entitled De Arca Noë in 1675 (Kircher 1675). Kircher, known as “the last man who knew everything” (Findlen 2004), needed to fit all the “kinds” (Latin: species) on the Ark and supposed there were around 310 quadrupeds and several score bird species on the Ark. He did not use species as a biological term, but, as western philosophy had since the classical era, as a logical term, roughly equivalent to our notion of “subset,” with genus as the equivalent to “set.” Hence, a species could be a genus for kinds within it. However, the later logical tradition would also use the term “subaltern genus.” The final species in the logic of division, the least division one could make before individuals were identified, was the infimae species or “smallest kind.” Since this era was marked by exploration and reports of numerous new kinds of plants and animals, it was quite clear that the Ark could not accommodate all of them, and so a mechanism for the generation of new species had to be offered (in the seventeenth century, no less). He proposed that thousands of species of animals formed by hybridization or spontaneous generation, which was a standard western view since classical times. In the Christian tradition, spontaneous generation was reserved for those animals that did not have breath—basically invertebrates such as worms and insects that formed from worm-like grubs.

4 The Invention of [Biological] Species

Naturalists continued to use the term “species” in a vernacular way from the 1500s (e.g., Gesner, Jung, Bauhin, Aldrovani), but they were also as likely to use genus, stirpes, or several other Latin terms and phrases to denote the kinds of living things.⁷ Shortly before Kircher’s Arca Noë, Bishop John Wilkins⁸ wrote his Essay toward a real character and a philosophical language.⁹ He attempted to categorize all things in an artificial language designed to formalize both ontology and debate. He included lists of species drawn up by the botanist Rev. John Ray.¹⁰ Wilkins’ schema forced all species (living and non-living) into predetermined linguistic categories which forced Ray to place all species under artificial genera. Ray got a lot of criticism from leading naturalists such as Morison, so he wrote that he needed a definition of the kinds/species to justify his work cataloguing plants:

So that the number of plants can be gone into and the division of these same plants set out, we must look for some signs or indications of their specific distinction (as they call it). But although I have searched long and hard nothing more definite occurs than distinct propagation from seed [distincta propagatio ex semine]. Therefore whatever differences arise from a seed of a particular kind of plant either in an individual or in a species, they are accidental and not specific. For they do not propagate their species again from seed; …. But those which never arise with the same appearance from seed, are indeed to be considered specific; or if comparison is made between two kinds of plant, those plants which do not arise from the seed of one or the other, nor when sown from seed are ever changed one into the other, these finally are distinct in species. (Ray 1686, Chap. 20, translation by Lazenby 1995; emphasis added)

and he applied this also to animals, which is not surprising given that he worked on his benefactor and collaborator, Frances Willughby’s zoological catalogue after the latter’s death in 1672:

For thus in animals a distinction of sexes does not suffice for proving a diversity of species, because both sexes arise from the same kind of seed and frequently from the same parents, although by many striking accidents they differ among themselves. … So, equally in plants, there is no more certain indication of a sameness of species than to be born from the seed of the same plant either specifically or individually. For those which differ in species keep their own species for ever, and one does not arise from the seed of the other and vice versa. (Loc. cit.)

Ray’s was the first biological definition of species. He used it as a diagnostic criterion, assuming an underlying biological (“physiological”) generative power. This immediately caused problems, as the number of species Ray and others identified stretched the limits of what could fit upon the Ark, so a solution was reached whereby the species on the Ark were much broader than our modern concept—making use of Aristotle’s idea that new kinds of animals form by hybridization.¹¹ In short, according to this truism adopted after that, more species were formed by hybrid events between “created” kinds (of what we would now consider not closely related species). Other organisms, those that did not breathe, such as worms and insects, according to the natural history of the time, were formed out of mud spontaneously (generatio equivoca) (Gasking 1967). Moreover, each species was thought to be affected by its locale and environment to take on divergent forms, a view that persisted until the nineteenth century. This idea meant that many naturalists were extreme lumpers, treating similar taxa as the “same” species. Later taxonomists of a more exact kind, such as Adanson and Jussieu, also focused on distinguishing features, or “characters,” but used multiple characters rather than a few. Ray’s definition was adopted by Linnaeus, Lamarck, and later by Cuvier.¹² Lamarck, for instance, wrote

Any collection of like individuals which were produced by others similar to themselves is called a species.

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire:

The species is a collection or a succession of individuals characterized by a whole of distinctive features whose transmission is natural, regular and indefinite in the current order of things.

Cuvier, whose definition dominated the nineteenth century, defined a species as:

those individuals that originate from one another or from common parents and those which resemble them as much as one another.

The key concepts are resemblance and generation or genealogy.¹³ I have called this the generative conception of species, and in Species: The Evolution of the Idea (2018), I have argued that this is the definition at the base of all species “concepts” over the history of at least botany, from the early modern era until the modern day.

5 Setting the Baseline

The concept of species is, in logic and biology, a baseline group and an elemental kind. Species in biology have been called the “units” of evolution, of biodiversity, and even of selection (Hull 1977; Ereshefsky 1992; Claridge et al. 1997; Green 2005; Hohenegger 2014). They are the smallest obligatory ranks in the Linnean hierarchy of taxonomy and are the smallest name bearers in biological nomenclature. Many biologists think of species as a privileged level of organization, although recent work has challenged this (Ereshefsky 1998; Mishler 1999, 2010; Mishler and Wilkins 2018).

Creationists, however, found them to be too small, and from the 1920s on, the “kinds” were increased in scale, leading to hyperevolutionary scenarios (not unlike Kircher’s). God creates basic kinds in a single act, which with terrible Hebraism they call baramins (Marsh 1941; Numbers 2006). Under this approach, only a few baramins were on the Ark, but there was “microevolution” (evolution within the limits of these created kinds). Since there are tens of millions of species in modern biological systematics, this is a massive amount of evolution required by creationists in only a few thousand years. Interestingly, though, Kircher’s view was also held by many naturalists who were either devout or not (Buffon being one such; to call him heterodox is an understatement).

While Ray and Linnaeus were creationists, this was due to their piety, which did not interfere with good science. There had been a longstanding theological doctrine, due to Augustine (Augustine 1982), that God created the earth with potentia to develop new kinds (reading Genesis 1:12 “And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good”—as a statement of the power of the ground to generate new plants that could subsequently breed true). The notion that all created kinds were realized on the days of creation was not the only orthodox view in western Christianity.

On the other hand, modern biblical literalists need to shoehorn increasing biodiversity into a small box (literally!) They often, indeed usually, tie this into a view of ecology.

6 The Evangelical Backlash Against Ecology

6.1 Dominionism and Dominion Theology

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels,¹⁴ and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. [Psalm 8:3–8, Authorised (King James) Version of 1611]

Christian human exceptionalism has a long history, but the foundational text for the notion that humans (and particularly those chosen by God) have control over the living world is Psalm 8. Here there is a strong hierarchy in the scheme of the world, and while God dominates (rules) humanity, humanity dominates the rest of the living world. This is one of those passages in the Bible where a natural taxonomy is used to justify some state of things as “right” or “according to God’s plan.”¹⁵

There is a form of Christian evangelical theology that has come to be known as Dominionism (McVicar 2013). This view is an outgrowth of a theological tradition in the U.S., known as Christian Reconstructionism. Associated with the ideas of R. J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), it broadly holds the view that it is mandated by Genesis 1:26–28 that Christians (and only Christians) should rule the earth and its peoples. An eschatological movement outgrowth of Presbyterianism, it is a “post-millennial” movement in which the Rapture and Christ’s return will occur after a thousand years of a Golden Age of Christian dominance. Rushdoony called this theonomy since society's rules will be Christian due to the educational, legal, and political control of secular institutions. Dominionism is broadly opposed to ecological concerns. Maltby notes

Evidently, Dominionist philosophy does not recognize natural entities and species as autonomous life forms; rather, it perceives them as artifacts designed to satisfy human needs. Indeed, according to fundamentalist economist E. Calvin Beisner, to put the Earth before human needs is to be guilty of “idolatry of nature” (Maltby 2008, p. 120)

Maltby goes on to say

not only is conservation seen as irrelevant, insofar as the planet is thought to have no future (in the words of the 19th-century premillennialist Dwight Moody, “You don’t polish the brass of a sinking ship” …), but environmental catastrophe is positively welcomed by Pat Robertson and other fundamentalist leaders as presaging the Rapture and the Second Coming.

As Maltby documents, these movements have deep-pocket conservative funders. The Acton Institute, which is home to this anti-environment movement, is funded by, among others, Exxon-Mobil. Many resource-based companies invested in a fake grassroots (“astroturf”¹⁶) movement known as the “Wise Use” movement: Amoco, British Petroleum, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Marathon Oil, as well as the American Farm Bureau, Dupont, Yamaha, General Electric, General Motors, National Cattlemen’s Association, and the National Rifle Association. The phrase “wise use,” like “sustainable development,” is a subtle cue (a “dog whistle”) to the political ecology underlying the ideas of a writer or institution.

The evident capitalist nature of the dominionist and wise use movements, along with other movements like “property rights” (a misnomer since it means using public lands for private purposes) in the United States, appears to be driven mainly by corporate interests (Luke 1998). However, there is also an ideological base known as “Traditionalism.” A cross-religion eclectic philosophy, Traditionalism has influenced oligarchs in Russia, industrialists in the U.S., and many other elite groups (Sedgwick 2004). The core tenets of Traditionalism are hyper-conservative: as society moves away from traditional metaphysics, ethics, and politics, it degrades. The originators of Traditionalism, René Guénot, Julius Evola (a racist, fascist occultist¹⁷), Frithjof Schuon (Hindu influenced), and Mircea Eliade (a scholar of religion), were Muslim or Catholic or influenced by Hinduism. Still, the philosophy itself is more Platonic and involves both a view of a lost “Golden Age” and an eternal return of history. It claims to understand both a perennial religion and a perennial wisdom, both of which are thought to be included in every religion. In principle, Traditionalism, or Perennial or Esoteric Wisdom, opposes modernist societies and modernism. It is an open question whether corporatist thinkers have adopted Traditionalism because it suits the interests of the corporations the believers own or whether the ideology influences them to become corporatists. I tend to think the former is more correct. However, while Traditionalist corporations may fund it, Dominionism is nevertheless an evangelical Christian creation that stands on its own.

The pre-eminent “think-tank” of dominion-style ecotheology is the Cornwall Alliance. Their statement of intent has changed in emphasis over the years, but not its conceptual content:

WHAT WE BELIEVE

We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence—are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.¹⁸

The politicization of science by conservatives in America and elsewhere (Mooney 2005) has led to a devaluation of biological diversity in favor of social and economic goals, and to attempts in conservationism and ecology to cast the non-human world as having “ecological services” to influence conservative economic movements (Williams et al. 1996; Faith 1997). This has been adopted quite enthusiastically by the protestant evangelical Pentecostal movement. Evangelicals who oppose ecological conservation treat it as a secular “worldview” that opposes the gospel. Their motivation, however, is not theological: it is the Prosperity Gospel. Berger (2008) notes:

Weber believed (correctly, I think) that the socio-economic consequences of Protestantism were unintended. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley did not intend their moral teachings to make their followers rich (though at least the last of the three noticed, with considerable discomfort, that many of his followers did become rich—the “method” of Methodism turned out to have an economic result along with its religious one). The purveyors of the prosperity gospel are, as it were, intentional Weberians: They consciously intend the consequences that earlier Protestants brought about unintentionally. Sociologists will have a hard time quarreling with this program, whatever the qualms of theologians.

The idea that God favors those who are wealthy, or rather that those who are wealthy are favored by God, is an old view (as Weber argued), but this “intentional Weberianism” was made famous in the United States by Andrew Carnegie’s “Wealth” (Carnegie 1889, later retitled “The Gospel of Wealth” in 1901) but in its religious form Prosperity Theology was settled in the 1950s onwards, and became the guiding view of the Pentecostal, and later more broadly the Charismatic, movements of the 1980s. Many Dominionists, such as Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, and Pat Robertson, either promote the theology or are connected to it in various ways. It has become the heresy du jour of the popular church. Therefore, using nature to gain wealth is a trendy idea that ties closely to the belief in the uniqueness of human beings as separate from nature. As Cornwall in 2013 states:

Environmentalism sees human beings principally as consumers and polluters who are only quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from other species. The Bible sees people as made in God’s image, qualitatively different from all other species, and designed to be producers and stewards who, within a just and free social order, can create more resources than they consume and ensure a clean, healthful, and beautiful environment.

Dominionism, when post-millenarian, also harkens to a Golden Age, only it is not one we return to but one we will encounter once Christianity rules the world and the route to that age is to encourage the second coming through the exploitation of the earth, among other things (such as war in the middle east, etc.). Religious opponents of environmentalism tend to move “upwards” from species to determine what counts as important, partly due to Noah’s Ark and partly to the Christian right's underlying gospel of wealth theology. Humans are exceptional—a little lower than the angels.¹⁹ Dominionists like Joel Osteen desire to have humans separated from nature so that that money can be made. Dominionism may be more influential than Christian stewardship in popular Christian thinking, as is often the case with “elite” ideas in theology versus “folk” ideas.²⁰

7 We Don’t Need Species Anyway

In my view, species in biology result from religious and philosophical beliefs and is not a necessary theoretical concept of science.²¹ Given the ubiquity of the use of the term species and the arguments about whether something (like the red wolf²²) is a species, this might seem a surprising statement. However, when we look at the use of the term, it is clear that what biologists are doing is using the sign “species” to denote various and distinct notions (significations in semiotics) within each discipline, such as “trophic node” or “population” or “form,” and so forth.²³ But the notion that biological diversity is measured by the number of endemic and introduced species in an ecological region is confounded by this disciplinary relativity. For this reason, others have focused upon phylogenetic diversity (Faith 1992) or genetic diversity (Groves et al. 2017) as a “true” metric of the diversity that requires conservation efforts. In short, Ecology uses “species” as a surrogate for trophic roles or nodes, genetics uses “species” as a surrogate for genomes or genotypes, and developmental biology uses “species” as a surrogate for a typical life cycle. Systematics uses species as a surrogate for one or more specimens (or rather, uses specimens as a surrogate for species names). It seems that given the fact there are no universally accepted definitions of species, a pluralistic approach would undercut the need for species at all. However, I have argued that specialists will always describe species according to the practices and common properties within the groups of organisms in each specialty. They are more or less conventions in each field that act as phenomena in need of explanation.²⁴ We are wedded to species, at least for now, because we start with historical and folk taxonomy. Suppose species are just “kinds,” like other taxonomic ranks. In that case, we can find kinds of living things at any scale (and at the evolutionary level, we can simply describe the smallest clades that our analyses discriminate, which Mishler and I have called SNaRCs—the smallest named and registered clades). We need to achieve what is essential—conservation, understanding, inferences—from the diversity of life to whether species are necessary units.

What do we need species for in theory? We can do without them if we need to. They are the result of emic definitions within localized subspecialties. They have, however, no etic unitary meaning, to hijack Pike’s distinction. This implies that there is no privileged unit in biology, and hence no universal ranks. So, if species are not theoretical objects (ranks or grades), what kind of objects are they? Kant divided terms (in science as in other domains) into those that are about what exists—Ontology/Noumena (“Objects” or “Things”)—and those that are about what we observe—Epistemology/Phenomena (“Appearances”). In keeping with the history and etymology of the term species, we can say species are phenomena—they are appearances, and appearances do not necessarily give us the things (Massimi 2008; Leonelli 2009). For scientific theories, the things are whatever it is that explains species phenomena. Species are what must be explained (explananda), not the things that do the explaining (explanantia). We are no worse off without theoretical species; the explanations are still there for the phenomena if we abandon the notion of a universal kind. Species can be real (as Canis lupus, for example) without being a “kind of kinds”—no rank of specificity. For the philosophically inclined, this lack of a universal definition of species implies that the category has no essential properties that all species must instantiate.

Finally, we need to treat organisms as organisms, not “kinds.” Species do nothing, causally.²⁵ Organisms do the causal work in ecological terms. So we should divest ourselves of the notion that species are essential to understanding biodiversity and thus have innate value over and above the value of the organisms and populations that comprise them.²⁶

8 Ramifications and Conclusions

Having a term and rank like species suggests a natural kind, a rank of living things, upon which we can anchor moral, political, and economic interests. Although our history suggests we often do not think all human beings are “fully” human in some fashion, human beings are the prototypical species. Humans (the right humans, that is) are not only a species, however, but we are special in some manner, using criteria that we choose such as tool use, language, technology, or the ability to reflect upon our experiences and selves. Darwin once noted in his Notebooks that if a bee were doing the evaluation, the ability to fly, fertilize flowers and make honey would be the criteria. Likewise, the extensive literature on “evolutionary transitions” based upon modes of information transfer (a human specialism) suggests that humans are somehow the peak of evolutionary progress. Whether or not we are at the top of a food chain, an evolutionary trajectory, or an ability to produce restaurant reviewers is irrelevant to the ways things are: we are one species among many species, and form one clade among many clades, one producer and consumer of ecological services among many… and so on. The anthropomorphism must stop. Interests are had by species incapable of any of these things, and we, for instance, cannot see in UV or fly unaided by culture.

This isn’t the basis for an argument that other species have rights. They can be given rights, and I very much think that animals should have the rights and duty of care we assign to human children at the equivalent cognitive and emotional capacities.²⁷ Still, the point I am trying to bolster is instead that we should stop overexploiting other species for our interests, on the assumption that the Second Coming or if you prefer the Golden Age, if it occurs, is not likely to happen before we have done irreparable damage to the biosphere, at least in human terms.

Famously, Protagoras said that “man is the measure of all things,” although it is unclear precisely what he meant.²⁸ But at least in the period since the development of capitalism in the west, the tendency has been to treat the world as a reflection of human interests and capacities. This is anthropomorphism. It results from capitalist views of the natural world as being there for the benefit of and exploitation by humans. If species are not all “special” enough, we will lose on many current definitions of biodiversity. Religious-political beliefs must not take priority over the evidence that we must protect not all species but all ecological systems and processes as best we can. Others can say why species must have rights or why we have an Aldo Leopold-style land ethic; I just wish we did not focus fundamentally on a single category as a way to measure our economic and ethical concerns. Species are like labels in a shop: what they signify varies based on why they are labelled. Once we understand that, we must realize that we label ourselves and other species for our own purposes, folkways, and belief structures.

To summarise:

• 1. The species term and concept developed for non-scientific and scientific reasons, none of which support the reality of the species rank.

• 2. Like many other supposedly natural concepts (e.g., wilderness; Cronon 1996), species is defined according to our interests.

• 3. Species rights also reflect our interests.

• 4. So maybe we must stop the anthropomorphizing of living things and just try to preserve them. God knows it’s time.