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The Third Biannual Robin-Griffiths Lecture

A Critique of Human Supremacism: Towards a New Sense of Reverence for the Planet

From the seventeenth century on, European thinkers developed - often from religious principles - theories of human supremacism that eventually flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as full-fledged ideas about humans being the master of nature, ideas that influenced anti-colonial modernisers in other lands as well as an integral part of the idea of progress. Marx, for instance, was a clear instance of such thinking in the 1850s.

In this lecture, which coincides with the 80thanniversary celebrations of the ANU, Professor Chakrabarty (PhD ’84) will build on the distinction that earth-system science allows us to make between ‘the globe’ and ‘the planet’ to argue for a secular, non-religious basis for a renewed spiritual sense of reverence for the planet. Without such a shared sense of reverence, whether sourced from religious ideas or scientific ones, it will be difficult for humanity to deal with planetary environmental problems while also striving for world peace.