Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of a

As the American ecologist Aldo Leopold deftly put it, we need to transform the way we see ourselves, ‘from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it’.41 Thanks to forty years of Earth-system research, we have a rapidly improving scientific understanding of how the Holocene epoch – with its stable climate, ample fresh water,

We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one.

it is too easy to only blame the eugenic systems out there without also examining how our private thoughts and judgments reflect and reproduce a dominant imagination that values specific lives over others. The first, perhaps most difficult, step toward exorcising eugenic ideas from our institutions is by reckoning with the ways that white supremacy