The time has come to recognize the world as a person, too. To employ the half of humanity that doesn’t have enough in be

“LOL,” you might say, “Umair! Grow up!! What’s the point of that?” I’m coming to that. How do you think that would affect us — being closer to a planet we recognised as a person, instead of walking apes living in isolation in concrete and steel bunkers?

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ve a connection with my husband. I longed to have him interested in me and what fired me up in life. He loved me, he just didn’t need the things I needed. Connection for Stephen was just having me there. For a long time I thought I could stay married like that, but denying what I needed most, was chipping away at my spirit.

Now think about us through that lens. Excising nature from our lives with an industrial-age scalpel, what have we really done? We’ve massively reduced our own sociality, which just means we’ve massively limited our own chances at happiness and meaning and fulfillment. One, we live in isolation. Two, we don’t have the opportunity for sociality with the planet, for relationships with nature.

Why does our happiness and meaning and fulfilment go hand in hand with nature? And by nature, I don’t just mean “animals” or “woods.” I even mean a dancefloor. Something as simple as that.

Remember those trees on my block with no name? That’s a lost relationship. But Snowy’s become a part of the naeighborhood. Everybody smiles when they see him. “Hi, Snowy!” they say. That’s sociality becoming happiness, in vivid reality. Do you see what I mean a little bit when I say that bringing nature back into our lives is how we expand sociality, and since we are social beings, that is how our own happiness and meaning and fulfilment grow?

Until we recognize that — really recognize it, reshaping our world politically, economically, socially, culturally, my guess is this. We’ll go on being the violent, brutal, walking apes who destroy everything they touch. Maybe, finally, including themselves. Their violence comes from their loneliness, their isolation, their sense of meaninglessness. Not a single God they’ve ever invented, the walking apes, has reduced their capacity for violence one iota. Think about that for a second. Not one. Nothing has. So what can? Just being here, like the rest of everything living. Learning to recognize every single life has dignity, worth, purpose, and truth, too. Then, as our happiness grows, as our sense of meaning and fulfilment expand, maybe our need for violence, to enslave and exploit and terrorize, finally declines, too.

I stay up all night, because the light can kill me. And standing by the window at night, as Snowy sleeps, I smoke a cigarette, and a clever little fox walks by. At 3AM, every single night. Doing his nightly rounds for food. I chuckle. Another little guy. But why does he have to live in fear, skulking around? Why doesn’t he have a real place, a protected space, to live on my block, too? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone — making the kids happy, the parents, the dogs, and so forth, all a little happier, closer? Why don’t they greet him by name? Why isn’t he part of us?

We have a life-shaped hole in our lives, my friends, and it exists because we live in such a way that nature is not really part of it. Put nature into it — even in the way of a tiny pet — and our sense of happiness and meaning and fulfilment all skyrocket. That says, too, though, that our way of life needs to be redesigned.

We are deeply unhappy beings, us walking apes, because our opportunities for happiness are so small. It shows, in us being a civilisation that is still — still — built on violence, on slavery, on abusiveness. Of nature, and also of the half of the world that doesn’t have a decent life, while 1% of it has too much. How do we change all this? Fix it? Redress the balance?

The answer is that we walking apes have fallen prey to a dangerous delusion. We imagine that we’re supreme. You might not be a racist, but I bet you believe in human supremacy. The idea that you’re better than, above, an “animal.” Are you? Who said so? Just because our species destroys everything it touches? How is that “better”? In what sense, really, are you any more of a person than a dolphin, a dog, a tree, or a little fox? They all feel just the same things you feel. They all communicate and emote and know and love and bond and touch and want and live and die. Just as you will, one day.

No, I’m not kidding. That’s what having a little buddy, a dog or a cat, does to a person — tons of research proves that. Want to be happier? Get a pet, not just a shrink. But the lesson is profound. We are alienated things, living in our shining towers of glass and steel, in our concrete cities and suburbs. We’re deeply unhappy as a civilization, and it shows in everything we do. In our addiction to anti-depressants — can you think of another species like that? — in our constant need for dumb, violent escapism, in our endless wars, in our susceptibility to superstition, in our need for the acquisition of shiny things to fill the gaping hole in our lives.

Human supremacy is a toxin. It bears no fruit. It isolates us, limits us, restrains us, while justifying the slavery of the 21st century, which is the annihilation of our world. We aren’t supreme. We are just here, like everyone else. And all of us — fish, forests, reefs, rivers — are people.

We’re social beings. That’s our nature. And the more social that we are, the more happiness, meaning, and fulfilment we’re capable of. Those things come from having social bonds, from enacting them, from expressing them, from enlarging them.

Let’s go further still. How would our societies have to change? I often wonder why our cities are so…ugly. Recognising the earth as a person would mean what some call “rewilding” our cities. Letting animals and plants thrive, and learning to live beside them, making space for them, instead of simply concreting over them. Why is it that you have to travel to a zoo to “see” animals”? Why don’t they just get to live in parks, on every block?

Let me connect those final two ideas. The more people — recognized persons — that there are in our society, the more opportunities for happiness there are for all. Think about the LGBT. Before, they weren’t people. Poof — opportunities for happiness lost. Today, they can marry, date, romance, share — that’s personhood creating happiness.