How many people lie awake at night pondering: “Just how much of the planet is dedicated to supporting me in the style to which I am accustomed?” This is — or should be — the first question of human ecology, yet very few people have given it a moment's thought. It seems that modern humans, particularly the growing proportion of urbanites, are committed dualists. People today are so psychologically alienated from nature that they rarely think of themselves as biological entities, let alone as dependent components of the world's ecosystems.

This is no trivial cognitive lapse. In 1992 the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated”. The world is facing an ecological crisis, yet most people have only the shallowest understanding of their own species' role as causative agent. True, everyone has something to say about climate change, biodiversity loss or some other so-called 'environmental problem', but the latter term effectively externalizes the issue (dualism again), drawing our attention from the cause to mere symptoms of the crisis. It is not just the 'environment' that needs to be fixed, but humans ourselves — the environmental crisis is the product of gross human ecological dysfunction (or, if you prefer, of humanity's spectacular evolutionary success).

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