The mother and daughter are the last of their species. Their names are Najin and Fatu, and they stand alone in fields of grass and along river basins. They have beautiful brown eyes and large gray heads that look down at short stubby legs — seemingly very normal creatures if not for their horns. They will be etched into the history of this planet forever. Surrounded by a world of metal that speaks in haunting contrast to their mellow attitudes and desires only for preservation and survival, Najin and Fatu remind us of who we’ve become. These two beings, condemned to a long death under the watchful eye of a human species that is responsible for their situation, are members of the northern white rhino species that has been poached and abused into oblivion. We have turned their world upside down, but they are not even remotely close to being the only species that has a timer ticking until they are extinct. Even back in 2007, the effects of our authoritarian takeover of the planet had resulted in the United Nations estimating a daily extinction rate of up to 150 species per day.

Humans believed for a long time that we were playing a positive-sum game or, at worst, a zero-sum game, with nature. Let’s take a meadow as an example. By building a human settlement over a meadow, one can improve the human ecosystem within a given region. Many humans nowadays can find more intrinsic and instrumental value from a parking lot than they can find in a forest or a hike. This anthropocentricity has been an important part of our evolution as a species and has only been growing since the industrial revolution. Many of us do not give animals or nature moral standing, even if this moral standing can still mean unequal interests. Yes, most of us have accepted that we’re replacing hundreds or thousands species of beautiful trees within the ecosystem with a butcher’s shop, a supermarket or a university. However, many believed that we could offset our intrusions with good deeds toward a small number of animals. Still, we cannot save the incomprehensible number of pigs condemned to torture every waking moment of their lives in the industrial farming system by placing 100 pigs in a sanctuary. So, the game that we are playing cannot be positive nor neutral. We can plant more plants and we can even deem miles and miles of land as protected, but each of our intrusions into the natural world cannot be met with a preservation effort that places the negative in the positive. Despite the animal sanctuary that the environmentalist student visits, the industrial-capitalist machine churns out enough pollution to make hundreds of species of animals extinct compared to the handful that are being protected and nurtured.

Forty percent of animals in the United States are at risk of extinction. Thirty-four percent of plants in the United States are at risk of extinction. Forty-one percent of ecosystems in the United States are facing imminent collapse. Nearly half of all cacti species in the United States are at risk of extinction. Yes, I’m trying to make a point here. This isn’t an issue that you want to study in your environmental ethics class and then put in the back of your mind after finals week. It’s not an issue that should make you want to put some sort of “environmental conservationist” bullet point on your resume. We are quite literally destroying the planet, and we are not doing it at a leisurely pace. These numbers are important because they also tell us that, if we don’t act fast, the numbers are against us and our legacy is set in stone.

We are also not killing by accident. We are killing because the system that we have chosen derives its power from the murder of the natural to make way for the machinery that powers consumption and the capitalist class. While capitalist democracies have kind of democratized political society, they only divide the benefits between the worker and the capital owner so long as those benefits serve the next immediate generation of production. In a system that values output and its consumption and quite literally teaches its offspring that output is the most important thing in life, the instrumentality of human life is valued, and, therefore, we fail to place any intrinsic or worthy instrumental value in the animals that do not serve us in specific ways. What I mean by saying this is that capitalism has even made us value other humans in the workforce as instrumentally necessary rather than placing their intrinsic value above everything else. Those specific ways mostly involve domestication and slavery of animals for food, but these animals are not even treated with the dignity one might give to a spider that is in the dark corner of a bathroom.

Our legacy as destroyers of the natural world can only be prevented by a metaphysical revolution. We harm the natural world by poaching rhinos. We harm the natural world by cutting down forests and jungles. We harm the natural world by polluting the waters and land required to live. So we need to reset our brains to a different mode of thinking, and we need enough people to do this who are in both the elite class and the working class. During the short period of time that humans have been around, we have continued to lose our primal love for the world around us from generation to generation. We are no longer attracted to the debates and discussions surrounding how best we can serve the entire planet but are instead focused on debating entirely artificial concepts like ChatGPT. The status quo requires us to protect the wild so that we may go to work the next day, and the next year and the next decade — without having to worry about distractions. However, focusing on protecting our capitalist society will only lead to more extinction, as it has already done. We must feel the ground beneath our feet. The flowers that grow and die. The animals that are begging for our help.

Sean Reichbach is a sophomore double-majoring in economics and philosophy, politics and law.