Dualist philosophy was leveraged to cheapen life for the sake of growth; and it is responsible at a deep level for our ecological crisis. But this is not the only way of being that’s available to us. My colleagues in anthropology have long pointed out that for most of human history people operated with a very different ontology – a theory of being that we refer to, broadly, as animist. For the most part, people saw no fundamental divide between humans and the rest of the living world. Quite the opposite: they recognised a deep interdependence with rivers, forests, animals and plants, even with
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