Our Great Reckoning

Leath Tonino’s interview with Eileen Crist on the consequences of human plunder [“Our Great Reckoning,” December 2020] and Naomi Stolow’s photo of the lion on the final page of that issue struck home deeply. I volunteer at a sanctuary for large cats — lions, tigers, pumas, and bobcats, among others — who have been taken from their habitat or whose habitat has been destroyed. Many were brought to the U.S. to be used as entertainment, sometimes in private homes, and many others have been confiscated by state and federal agencies.

I hope your magazine reaches those who have engaged in these practices — people who have not taken the time to thoroughly consider the consequences of their actions. I hope they are moved to action, and that they will take to heart the quote from Henry David Thoreau in Sunbeams: “Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.”

Eileen Crist [“Our Great Reckoning,” interview by Leath Tonino, December 2020] articulated important, controversial truths about our environmental crisis: that both population and consumption need to be reduced dramatically; that the current extinction crisis is not natural, but extreme and unprecedented; and that our ecological troubles don’t merely stem from “human nature.” She puts the blame where it belongs: millennia of indoctrination in the false notion of human supremacy.

The Indigenous practice of seeing “everything as alive, as wondrous in itself” — which she calls animism and I call Gaia-centered spirituality — seems to be the only spiritual path that has any hope of helping us.

All of us — including present-day “nature colonialists,” as Crist describes them — are descended from animist Indigenous people. We have it in our genes to be, as Crist says, “in love with the Earth, our source.” We don’t need to change so much as remember who we already are.