The Last Frontier of Empathy

When I studied anthropology in college, I had a professor with a crooked finger – allegedly from a monkey bite. He challenged us to see our own animal behavior, to recognize the 98.8% DNA similarities with chimpanzees, and the 98.7% similarity with bonobos. He advised us to be suspicious of our alleged altruism, and to be aware of our own animal nature.

I remember going out to the bar that semester, watching men and women interact and thinking: oh. Once you start seeing yourself as an animal, it’s hard to stop.

Once, eating dinner on my front porch, my two beloved dogs approached me. My shepherd mix, Nemo, tried to steal bread from my plate. “No,” I said angrily, turning my body. I recognized resource guarding behavior in myself, a glorified dog growling over a bowl of food. I had to laugh.

And nothing – nothing – connected me with my animal nature more than giving birth to my daughters. In those hours, I understood instinct as something ancient and physical, unmediated by thought. My body knew what to do before I did; I was acting from a primal, powerful place.

And so it sometimes baffles me to look at my life, safely ensconced in my climate-controlled home, buying and selling things on the internet, buffered from the weather and the wild, estranged from my origins in the natural world. My comforts arrive at the tap of a screen; the true costs are distant and invisible. As biologist EO Wilson observed: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

Humans have long been fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of significant animal intelligence and emotion, or the humility of viewing ourselves as animals.

In his lesser-known work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin argued that human feelings and their outward signs are evolutionary continuities shared with other animals. Those ideas were later pushed aside by 20th-century behaviorism and the taboo against “anthropomorphism”. Only with the rise of ethology (the science of animal behavior) and cognitive neuroscience did Darwin’s continuity thesis regain daylight.

Primatologist Frans de Waal long argued that Darwin was right: there is no principled boundary around “human” emotion and intelligence. He named the refusal to see this “anthropodenial”: a blindness to humanlike traits in other animals, and animal-like traits in us.

Why are we so unwilling to acknowledge our own animal nature? Perhaps because it would shift nearly all the ways we human animals move in our lives. It would threaten our self-concept.

I am ready to admit that humans may not be the sparkling, superior, bright, moral species we believe ourselves to be. We may not have the divine-purpose hall pass we so desperately want to believe in. We may have to admit that in addition to our better social traits we are also greedy, territorial, tribal and violent.

After all, there is only one species recklessly destroying the very planet it needs to survive.

Now a professor of writing, with no broken fingers to show for it, I have often taught Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery. In it, a small town gathers for an annual ritual, drawing slips of paper from a box to determine who among them will be stoned to death – a sacrifice so enmeshed in their tradition and identity that no one remembers why it began. The horror lies not only in the act itself but in the town’s calm acceptance of it, the ease with which cruelty becomes customary.

One of the aspects my students respond to most is the townspeople’s reliance on tradition: we should stone a person each year because that is what we have always done. The implication for our moment is hard to miss: sometimes the old ways of thinking must change, especially when we know they have helped usher in what scientists call the Earth’s sixth mass extinction.

Some who champion exceptionalism say humans hold a unique moral status and are the only full rights-holders; many ground that in religion, believing we are made in God’s image, and thus given dominion over the natural world. Others point to our brains – capable of abstract reason, language, cumulative culture – as proof that, when trade-offs arise, humans should get priority status.

The counterargument is simpler than it sounds. From the jump, exceptionalism confuses evolutionary human difference with superiority. Uniqueness has never equaled higher moral rank. If it did, the bioluminescent lantern fish, or even the 2,400-year-old honey mushroom located in Oregon’s Malheur national forest with its vast, interconnected network of mycelium over 2,000 acres, might be a contender.

With this logic, as some point out, if an alien species with superior intelligence and complexity arrived on planet Earth, humans would need to consent to being eaten.

If we truly believed in the intelligence of the living world, how might we live differently? What would it mean to build, farm and move across the planet with kinship, not conquest, as our organizing principle? What would a different world – one that works with nature, and not against it – look like?

While on assignment to write about Florida panthers and wildlife corridors, I learned that humans actually want better outcomes for wildlife. I met ranchers who leave gaps in their fences so panthers can pass through their land unharmed, and developers who leave borders along the edges of a neighborhood for wildlife passage – people who might never call themselves environmentalists but still act out of a quiet sense of stewardship. Yet, road construction and planning rarely take this bipartisan desire into account.

But tides are turning in some places. The Wallis Annenberg wildlife crossing over Los Angeles’s US Route 101 is under construction, while Utah’s Parleys canyon overpass has already cut wildlife–vehicle collisions dramatically, proof that strategic compassion and consideration works.

When I asked the environmental writer Ben Goldfarb about human exceptionalism and policy momentum in the United States, he was measured: “I see only faint signs of progress … the political and regulatory mainstream still seems to consider the concept threatening.” Goldfarb acknowledges that the concept of decentering humans still seems to be “political anathema” in the US.

“Even the idea of granting the Great Salt Lake the right not to be sucked dry by irrigators was so threatening to conservative Utah legislators,” he told me, “that they passed a law preventing personhood from being granted to any plant, animal or ecosystem.”

That is not to dismiss the growing “rights of nature” movement – often led by Indigenous communities – that has made meaningful strides. Goldfarb cites the Yurok tribe’s declaration recognizing the inherent rights of the Klamath River as a crucial step in advancing dam removal efforts. But for now, Goldfarb says, those efforts remain exceptions to the rule; within most political and regulatory circles, extending rights to nature is still treated as a radical act rather than an ethical evolution.

In the legal arena, the rights of nature have leapt from thought experiment to precedent. New Zealand’s Whanganui River and Colombia’s Atrato River now hold legal personhood; Spain’s constitutional court has upheld Europe’s first ecosystem personhood for the Mar Menor Lagoon; Canada’s Magpie River enjoys comparable standing through municipal and Indigenous resolutions. These are not a full move toward more compassionate regulations – but glimmers and proof that the concepts are real and growing in influence.

Goldfarb, who has written about roadside ecology and the lives of beavers, also offered the path forward for storytellers: “Centering animals as literary characters in their own right is both a way of honoring non-humans and, I hope, enthralling readers.”

In his book Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane notes how ordinary it is for a company to have rights while a river has none, and argues that story and statute can repair the mismatch. “Our fate flows with that of rivers,” he writes, “and always has.” Writer Amitav Ghosh has been vocal about decentering the human experience, offering that literature can help “restore agency and voice to nonhumans”. In his book of parables, The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh emphasizes the colonial tendencies of humans, writing that “Colonialism is … subjugating, and reducing to muteness, an entire universe of beings – animals, trees, volcanoes, nutmegs.”

These currents – court rulings, treaties, charters and a restoried public imagination – show that adopting a more-than-human ethic is not naive; it’s already happening.

Ibegan writing this piece the week Jane Goodall died – a coincidence that felt oddly fitting. In the tributes that followed, her words shone with what she had been telling us all along: that peace requires humility, and that we are not above the rest of life.

“In what terms should we think of these beings,” she asked, reflecting on the primates she studied, “nonhuman yet possessing so very many humanlike characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes?”

Policy will always be contested terrain. And when policy stalls in times like these, we can still move thoughtfully in our own lives: swapping lawns for native plants, skipping pesticides, feeding birds, keeping cats indoors, buying less, backing wildlife corridors, supporting dark-sky ordinances during migration, moving to a more plant-based diet.

None of this is heroic, but all of it counts. Each step we take lessens suffering in the world and broadens the circle of consideration – not with perfection, but with sincerity.

We are nearly out of time to do so, but not out of choices. The whale asks for more space. The river asks for standing. The tern asks for habitat and room. We can give it.

- Author: Megan Mayhew Bergman, The Guardian