Thanks for your extensive thoughts on this Michele, glad you enjoyed the book (and the review!)

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Thanks for this review. So interesting again!

I believe we often misinterpret biodiversity. It’s not nature, as the majority might think, nor is it a super-organism as Gaian thinkers suggest. Living beings are organisms forming a civilization. That’s how I perceive it with my eye before seeing it later with my mind, though I realised this viewpoint is in the minority. This makes such a book is a big delight for me.

The very fact that a scientist chose to approach the world from such a perspective deserves praise on its own. After, his struggle in climbing our world by such an unconventional slope should not really diminish the importance of his aim. As I believe his aim is our aim, I am not sure for example we can really talk of fringe territory in this book. I may be wrong but I haven’t seen anything that can be dangerous in it like the world we inhabit that see biodiversity as nature is regularly offering. Phenomena like climate change and biodiversity (humanity) collapse are real fringe. The imprisonment of two young activists for “soiling” a glass window at the British Museum is fringe. I am not sure I expressed myself well but I hope you will get my point.

I would have said that Predrag Slijepčević has not yet fully walk his talk. He haven’t reached yet the top of the Himalaya he promised himself to climb. I wonder why he still takes in this book non-human life as part of nature while trying to redefine it as culture. This is difficult to chew. He also seems to confuse the intension of living beings with Earth extension, continuing the semantic misstep launched by Lovelock. You can spot this right from the first page when PS states that “we are members of one Earth family.” Darwin already showed us 150+ years ago that we are literally one extended family. There’s no need to muddy this clear fact by including Earth (and Lovelock’s whim who mistook life’s intension for Earth’s mind). The tendency to diminish human’s uniqueness is another misstep. Humans, like all living beings, stays unique. Living beings are all anti-nature (a civilization), and in that, we reflect the diversity of life itself confronted to the universalism of the universe we are facing. The idea is to bring non-human living beings into the culture side not to send human is the nature’s one. These are two different things. I believe also PS is keeping the naturalist’ gradualism principle in place when this gradualism is only historical, not a present reality that we need to take into account when explaining our context. Slijepčević should have used and offered his readers a clearer divide between life and universe /Earth to show life as a civilisation. My guess is that he is replacing our material monism by a material holism. It doesn’t work that well. Better not go that way.

At the end, this book was an real enjoyable read. I wish that Slijepčević will apply Ockham’s razor to these lingering classical errors in his next book… It could be a standout. That’s what we should wish for him in the endeavor it chosen to pursue.

Best regards!

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Agreed, I’ve also never really understood the hostility. There often seems to be a lot bottled-up anger at perceived arrogance or deconsecration of something wholesome.

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