A number of books have been written recently with the aim of drawing attention to the apparent misconceptions that have directed Western civilisation since the first murmurings of agricultural and industrial revolution were heard in Britain and Europe over four hundred years ago.
We have read and reviewed How to be Animal by Melanie Challenger, as well as This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. We have lingered over The Goodness Paradox by Richard Wrangham and cogitated Sapiens by Yuval Harari. We have also brandished Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond in the faces of the sceptical. Each of these books is different, but all of them have in common a pressing belief that things need to change and that a new vision of both the past and the future is desperately needed if society is going to survive into the next century and beyond. All of them believe that to build on the successes of the past (and there have been many, so let’s not feel too dismal), we need to re-evaluate the way we view the world and our place in it. These books have clearly been motivated by the current climate crisis, but many of them put forward the idea that we have had a tendency to see our role in the world as that of a dominant species with the superiority complex to match. And the warnings are insistent. We cannot expect to bring on mass extinctions and global warming with impunity. Something has to change…
