FIELD NOTES — The Problem With Putting Humans at the Center of Everything

A case study in a very old mistake.

There is a word for the belief that humans are the central or most important entity in the universe. Anthropocentrism. It is so embedded in the way most cultures think about the world that it barely registers as a belief at all, it just feels like the obvious truth.

It isn't.

Humans have been on earth for approximately 300,000 years. Life has been on earth for approximately 3.8 billion years. For the vast majority of that time, 99.99% of it, the world got along without us entirely. It was not waiting for us. It did not need us to name it or manage it or assign it value. It just was.

The problem with anthropocentrism isn't that it makes us feel important. It's that it shapes how we make decisions. When humans are the measure of all things, the natural world only has value insofar as it is useful to us. A forest is valuable because it produces timber or sequesters carbon or provides recreation. A whale is valuable because it supports ecotourism or contributes to marine ecosystems that produce fish we eat. A river is valuable because it provides drinking water or generates hydroelectric power.

This is not wrong exactly, these things are true. But it is incomplete. And the incompleteness has consequences.

When we assign value to nature only through the lens of human utility we make it very easy to justify destroying something the moment a more profitable use presents itself. The old growth forest is worth more as lumber. The wetland is worth more as development. The river is worth more dammed. We have been making these calculations for centuries and the results are visible, in the brook trout that can no longer survive in rivers that used to run cold and clean, in the Northern Right Whale of which fewer than 400 remain, in the sixth mass extinction event currently underway that most people are only dimly aware of.

The alternative isn't to pretend humans don't exist or don't have needs. We do. We are also animals, evolved on this planet alongside everything else, dependent on the same ecosystems we are dismantling. Recognizing that is not a sacrifice, it's just accurate.

Animism, the belief that all things, living and nonliving, possess a spirit or energy, has been dismissed by Western thought as primitive superstition. But there is something in it worth recovering. Not the supernatural framework necessarily, but the underlying orientation: that the world around you is not an inert backdrop for human activity but a living system of which you are one small part. That the blades of grass and the dried leaves and the fish and the whale all have something going on that has nothing to do with you.

Dagkryper means day creeper. Present, watching, not inserting itself where it doesn't belong. That's the orientation. Not dominion. Not management. Just attention, and the humility to recognize that most of what's happening out there isn't about us.

We are part of nature. Not above it.

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