Core Idea
Humans are the most successful species Earth has produced. Eight billion of us exist alongside 31 billion livestock we control, commanding 97% of all land mammal biomass.
We’ve colonised every continent, bent the power of rivers, rewired nutrient cycles, and redirected most terrestrial production into feeding a single species.
This is the measurable biological reality.
We are unique in our ability to capture and use exogenous fossil energy to defy the constraints that limit every other species. No organism in evolutionary history has managed this. We’ve turned agriculture from an energy source to an energy sink, subsidised population growth with ancient sunlight, and built civilisations that would collapse without continuous energy inputs.
Yet this extraordinary success makes environmentalists uncomfortable. The narrative demands humility when it tells us humans are a planetary virus, a destructive pest, a species out of balance. But the evidence suggests otherwise.
We’re not failing at being a species.
We’re succeeding too well.
Counterpoint
Humans should live within limits like other species.
So says the dominant environmental story that casts human exceptionalism as a dangerous delusion. We’re told to learn from nature, live within our means, and accept planetary boundaries. Indigenous wisdom, it’s claimed, shows us how to exist in balance.
But this narrative collapses under scrutiny.
For 300,000 years, humans lived as exceptional hunter-gatherers, spreading across impossible terrain, driving megafauna extinct, and reshaping landscapes with fire.
Then, agriculture wasn’t balanced either. It was the first great extraction, mining soil carbon and nutrients to feed expanding populations. Even “traditional” peoples transformed their environments profoundly with hoes and ploughs.
The myth of balance serves contemporary anxieties, not biological reality, for here is the thing.
Nature doesn’t live within limits. It expands until constrained by resources, predators, or disease. Population booms and crashes are the norm. Humans have simply become better at avoiding crashes by capturing energy that other species cannot access.
The uncomfortable truth is that our success story is nature’s most dramatic expression. We haven’t broken natural law. We’ve demonstrated what happens when intelligence meets accessible energy on a planet-scale.
Thought Challenge
Map your energy subsidy. Calculate your daily energy use from food, transport, heating, and manufacturing. Compare this to the metabolic rate of a similarly-sized primate. How much of your existence depends on fossil fuel inputs? Track the gap between biological need and actual consumption.
Test the limits narrative. Find examples of “living within limits” that don’t depend on energy subsidies from elsewhere. Examine traditional societies closely to see if they actually lived in balance, or did they export their impacts through trade, migration, or resource extraction? What constraint actually limited their growth?
A Reflection
Acknowledging human exceptionalism isn’t an endorsement. In fact, it has nothing to do with morality or values. It is ecological honesty.
We are the first species to harness exogenous energy at civilisational scale. This makes us responsible for consequences no species has ever faced, but pretending we’re just another animal won’t help us navigate them.
The path forward requires owning our exceptional status while understanding its constraints. We’ve succeeded too well to return to pre-industrial limits, but we’re still bound by thermodynamics, soil fertility, and the arithmetic of finite resources.
Exceptional doesn’t mean exempt. Perhaps it means accountable.
Evidence Support
Crist, E. (2013). On the poverty of our nomenclature. Environmental Humanities, 3, 129–147.
TL;DR… critiques the anthropocentric language that dominates science and policy by exposing how “human exceptionalism” leads to the marginalisation of nonhuman agency and obscures our dependence on ecological systems. She argues that prevailing terms like “resources” and “the environment” not only flatten ecological complexity but also reinforce a sense of human detachment and dominion.
Relevance to Insight… dismantles the comforting story that humanity stands outside and above nature, showing how such thinking enables ongoing exploitation and degradation, including of soils. It is directly relevant to challenging complacent beliefs about human uniqueness and highlights why a shift toward genuine ecological humility is essential for planetary survival.
Crist, E., Mora, C., & Engelman, R. (2017). The interaction of human population, food production, and biodiversity protection. Science, 356(6335), 260–264.
TL;DR… critiques the assumption that food production for a growing human population is the prime directive, showing how this view has led to massive conversion of ecosystems, soil degradation, and a biodiversity crisis. The authors argue that without abandoning human exceptionalism and accepting ecological limits, agricultural intensification will continue to undermine the biosphere’s sustaining capacity.
Relevance to Insight… dissecting the logic that human population and material needs always come first, the authors provide evidence that such beliefs have direct, measurable impacts on soil health, ecosystem function, and global stability. The research is directly relevant to the insight’s contrarian position that human comfort and control are illusions in a finite world.
Mathews, F. (2011). Towards a deeper philosophy of biomimicry. Organization & Environment, 24(4), 364–387.
TL;DR… critiques the conventional, utilitarian approach to biomimicry—where nature is viewed solely as a set of models or resources for human extraction—by exploring how true biomimicry subverts human exceptionalism. She advocates for a relational ethic in which humans recognise their profound dependency on, and kinship with, the ecological processes they seek to emulate.
Relevance to Insight… powerfully argues against the settler mindset that nature exists for human ends, proposing instead a humility that aligns with the core idea that soils and biospheric processes are not passive backdrops. It aligns with the insight’s contrarian stance that the story of human specialness is both scientifically unsound and environmentally suicidal.