21st Century Animism by Lilly Moss (2011) For the grandchildren!



An animist lives in a vibrant world in which all material being is infused with spirit and

intelligence, and everything is alive. Not limited by dominator realities, animists since the dawn of time have had eyes that see the soul in all things and ears that hear the voices of nonhuman life forms. This is also what I see and hear, because animism is the reality in which I live, here and now, in the 21st century United States.

I identify with a small but growing global awakening of animism, and I like the animist reality in

which I live. In fact, I’d say that if the majority of human beings started living in an animist reality, we just might be able to salvage our species from the fossil beds. It’s not fashionable these days for anyone but monotheistic book worshippers to claim cultural excellence, but that is exactly what I claim for animism.

I reject the dominator culture and its unquestioned institutions, even its science, which limits

existence to what we puny humans can control and sense with our foolish technologies. Dominator science can’t answer any of the really important questions. I repudiate the realities of the monotheists, always bickering and shoving at one another in their stampede to take over the reins of wealth and power. I disdain the humanist-individualist point of view — if we puny humans are the best this universe can come up with, then it’s a laughable universe — and I am not deceived by the capitalist-dominator water in which we human fishes swim, in which the great swell of human affairs is controlled by a small, elite group of criminal warlords and merchant kings. Why the hell should I bow down to their money?



The animist paradigm is ancient and revolutionary both and it is a gateway to a global society of

abundance and peace. Alive, ensouled, and cooperative realities like the animist reality, however, are subversive to dominator cultures and for that very reason animist thinking is currently taboo. It is taboo because our culture is controlled by people whom I call dominators who profit from the suffering of others. These wealthy and powerful profiteers do not want a world of peace and abundance and it’s time ordinary folks faced the fact.

Today’s profiteers benefit from more than wars and the sale of weapons or the contracts for

plunder that follow. Hiding behind a facade of multinational corporations, they generate wealth by any means necessary, with no regard for the welfare of humans or nonhumans. The disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a recent example. BP was reported to have committed numerous violations of safety and environmental law before the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon facility, but their profits reached upwards of 10 billion dollars per quarter in 2008. Concerns about problems with the facility prompted the investment firm of Goldman Sachs to dump BP stock in the weeks before the explosion, protecting their own profits against a potential 96 million dollar loss. Another profiteer, Halliburton, accused of sloppy setup work that may have caused the gas leak that precipitated the explosion, and are now cheerfully making money off our desperate scramble to clean it up.

Closer to home, on the Land-On-Which-I-Walk, profiteers such as Cabot Oil & Gas and are

mounting an offensive to use hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the shale beds of upstate New York so they can plunder our natural gas. The process is dangerous. Gas and toxic chemicals can easily leak into the water supply, contaminate the soil, start fires, and pollute the air, but the corporations are utilizing media and fierce lobbying efforts to overwhelm the protests of local residents. In a culture that values money above all, some local residents are ignoring the dangers and the toxic wastes left behind at previous sites, and are selling mineral rights to the profiteers.

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Humans are perfectly capable of creating a wonderful existence on a garden earth, but we don’t.

Entranced by a kind of communal Stockholm Syndrome, most 21st century people are taking orders from corporate profiteers and warlords. We’ve become disheartened. Many people are cynical and accept things the way they are. They observe the taboo against imagining a peaceful and abundant reality and call it foolish to hope for a better world.

For living in an animist reality, and for believing that even the rocks can speak, contemporary

animists have also been called foolish. Many dominator institutions label animists as primitives, faddists, poets, or usurpers. We are none of these. The truth is that we are subversive to the dominator culture. We have to be marginalized because a paradigm shift to an animist reality would bring the dominators down. As we examine the allegations against contemporary animism brought by several key dominator institutions, we will be able to unmask the dominator culture and reveal what a true 21st century animism could accomplish.



Let’s begin with some definitions. When I refer to a “reality” I am referring to consensual reality

or human culture. It is not hyperbole to talk about culture as reality, since human beings cannot experience anything at all without the filters and meanings that culture provides. Culture is traditionally considered the expression of human lifeways, our dress, art, and cuisine, our ways and means, but culture also determines what is possible and true, what exists or does not exist, who we humans are and what the meaning of our lives may be. In a practical way, cultures are the realities in which we live, and if there is a reality that exists without culture, humanity will never know.

A dominator culture is any form of reality that is defined by its subjection of humans and

nonhumans by a small ruling elite. Humans have created a plurality of cultures, but for the past 5000 years, variations of dominator cultures have steadily increased their hold on human life and now claim hegemony on a global scale.

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The ruling elite of dominator cultures are the people I call dominators. They constitute a wealthy

and powerful criminal class that has taken many forms and names over time, assuming such roles as warrior kings, priests, emperors, and royal families, corporations, nation-states, churches, and political parties. They use whatever facade is effective in establishing mastery, and also employ a variety of weapons to control human people and plunder the earth’s resources, including terror and threat, weapons of physical violence, and weapons of mental and spiritual control. Some examples of these weapons of mental and spiritual control include church doctrines, threats of hell and damnation, marginalization, assimilation, ridicule, pathologizing, and demeaning, as well as control of social institutions, mythologies, the sciences, and ultimately, what is acceptable as possible and real.

Dominator cultures are characterized by paradigms of materialism, that is, the disensoulment of

matter, and by absolutism and linearity. Hierarchies are maintained by violence and power-over methods rather than by authority (Starhawk), and the values and institutions of culture support the goals of the ruling elite over the welfare of the people and the land. Personal gain and self-interest, for example, have been established as virtues in all dominator cultures, and individualism, an extreme form of humanism, is encouraged. It may be surprising at first to consider that humanism may be a dominator philosophy, but humanism, after all, is the dominator hubris writ large, setting up humanity as the ultimate intelligence and the only ensouled expression of an otherwise mechanical universe.

The origin of dominator cultures is not easy to unearth. For reasons that remain speculative,

many cooperative cultures gave way to dominator cultures as far back as 5000 B.C.E. The rise of the dominators may have been a byproduct of times of scarcity or of the tension created by competition between nomadic groups. (Eisler) It may have evolved from expressions of a dominating impulse in human nature. We do know that the artifacts of civilization, such as cities, writing, and institutionalized religions seem to have arisen hand-in-hand with dominator hierarchies, although we can show no causal link. We also know that the actions of dominator individuals and groups are unconstrained by concern

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for the welfare of others. This selfish willingness to hurt has given them the power to control and command throughout the centuries, and to establish their vast wealth, their states and nations, and their churches and corporations.

As the 21st century opens, dominators control the institutions of almost every society on earth.

They achieved this hegemony by managing science, religion, politics, technology, economics, medicine, education, food production, and every other human institution to empower themselves and meet their own selfish ends. Today’s dominators have claimed a monopoly on justified violence through a corporate trust of churches, states, and other powerful entities that claim loyalty to and garner ultimate justification from a variety of monotheistic gods.



An animist reality, on the other hand, is defined by a paradigm of a living world. Humans are a

small, even insignificant thread in an enormous web of life. There is no ultimate authority beyond the consequences of our actions, what some people call karma, and the mysterious workings of the universe, or chaos. In an animist world, all material being is infused with spirit, and all spiritual being is made manifest. Therefore, spirit (or non-materiality) and matter are intrinsically the same, as inseparable as the crown and underside of a mushroom.

The values and institutions of animist realities reflect these beliefs, and include a humility and

empathy that is missing from dominator cultures. Aware of the interconnection between all life forms, and knowing that the survival of humanity is dependent on other life forms, animists seek an existence that maintains the planetary environmental system, the garden that grows our food and shelters us. Although competition is the norm in dominator cultures and comes highly endorsed by science, cooperation is the intra-species norm throughout the natural world and in non-dominator human societies as well. Extra-species cooperation may not respect an individual’s needs, but it maintains the balance between all life forms. We eat and are eaten. Trees breath out oxygen and humans breath it in.

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An individual animist is not only cooperative in his or her social life, but also participates in the

collective life of humankind, and understands him or herself as alive in the family or community. He or she will survive as the collective survives, even if the individual dies. If human nature is self-interested, or at the very least survival oriented, then this earthly collectivism is the animist road to survival, and cooperation in the interest of the human collective is the animist way.

I want to be clear that I am not defining animism as a religious form. Religion is a dominator

institution. Animism is the experience of a material world that is alive, ensouled, and intelligent. It is a consensual reality, and the animist reality is filled with people of all kinds, from grass seeds to gods. In a dominator culture, a person is, by definition, a human person, and personhood is bestowed on us by virtue of characteristics deemed uniquely human, such as individuality, character, and most of all soul, those aspects that are not defined by material existence. In a reality in which all life forms share these characteristics, all life forms claim personhood. Smaller-than-human and greater-than-human life forms are persons, quickly-moving and slowly-moving life forms are persons, what dominators define as material-only and what dominators define as spirit-only are still fully unified persons. The earth world is a community of persons in infinite variety—bacterias, rocks, puppies, cows, trees, mountains, angels, demons, and yes, even the gods, are all people. One doesn’t need religion as a separate institution in such an integrated world.



Now that we have defined these basic terms—culture, reality, dominators and animists, matter

and spirit and people—we can begin to examine the arguments against contemporary animism, and see what they reveal about the value of an animist alternative for the survival of the human species.

The first allegation is that someone who believes what science rejects is a fool, and that the

superstitious concepts of animism have been soundly rejected by science. Any science is circumscribed by the culture in which it exists. In addition to its traditional study of the material world, today’s science

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is the materialist and secularist arm of most dominator cultures. It functions to keep our thinking and our relationship with the nonhuman world within boundaries that maintain dominator ascendency and support their profit-making enterprises. Therefore, practicing science is subject to dominator approval and limited to credentialed experts who agree, in order to maintain their favored standing, to remain within a materialist model.

Dominator science has given the wealthiest humans longer lives, but its amoral stance has

allowed it to devise the most horrible weapons of death. It has given us more food, but less nourishing food. It has developed the ability to view distant planets and understand their material composition, even as the machines and methods of contemporary science destroy our home planet’s ability to sustain human life.

Dominator science is not bad, as Native American activist Vine Deloria points out, just

inadequate. It has become split off from its ethical foundation and does not answer or even address questions of true importance, and yet it sets itself up as the ultimate arbiter of truth in a secular and disensouled world. What right does this corrupt and incomplete science have to question the validity of the animist reality or deny us an ethically-based science? Although atheist scientists like Richards Dawkins may laugh at our lack of proof that material being is infused with intelligence and spirit, what proof have they got against us? Meanwhile, physicists continue to bump up against electrons and other particles that seem to exhibit will and purpose.

Scientists and other rationalists have also disparaged animism as primitive. By the word

primitive, they do not mean that animism is closer to humanity’s original ways of thinking, but that animism is “less than.” Less advanced, less complex, less technologically sophisticated, and therefore less true. Yet science itself has fallen prey to a dominator mythology that insists on the virtue of more, as if more speed, more quantity of stuff, more sophisticated technology, more complexity, money, power, and control are always and unequivocally better for humankind. With the devastating results of this

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quest for more warming up on the horizon, we are beginning to call its virtue into question, for it carries with it more pollution, malnutrition, species extinctions, wars, and climactic disasters along with its cheap sneakers, plastic food, and extortionist medical bills.

An animist science, grounded as it is in respect for both human flesh and the nonhuman world,

may not focus on the same questions as dominator science, but it is science nevertheless. Instead of profit or control, animist science seeks to understand the nonhuman world so as to help humanity live in balance with it, therefore sustainability is its hallmark. Respect and gratitude inform its probing of the world around us. It is open to direct and nonrational ways of knowing that provide a deeper and more intricate understanding of what is real and possible, and so may be aware of truths about the nonhuman world that are not accessible to materialist, rationalist dominator science.

In traditional animist cultures, shamans, wise elders, and others act as doctors, technologists, and

scientists. From his experience with Asian animist cultures, David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous writes that a shaman “ensures that the relation between human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it . . .”

Most important, animist science is grounded in a moral vision. Deloria quotes Red Thomahawk,

a Sioux elder, to explain this point of view. Thomahawk says “the knowledge and use of any or all the powers of the objects on Earth around us is as liable to lead a man wrong as to lead him right. It is merely power, with no way of knowing how to use it correctly . . . unless Woniya [Spirit] is with a man’s spirit for the light.”

So, animists reject the accusations of science as moot. Foolishness is clearly a trait of those who

would follow our technological chimera over the cliff, not of those who cherish and respect the sources of our survival: the green people and the animal people who feed and shelter and cloth us. We embrace the label “primitive” as a compliment, and refuse to allow the contemporary lust for material goods and

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extended life years to sway us from our ethical grounding. We believe that animist science could allow humanity to thrive, as it allowed our ancestors to survive for hundreds of thousands of years in balance on the garden earth.



The word primitive has also been applied to animism when it is described as a primitive form of

religion. Primitive in this case means ignorant and superstitious, but not evil. How can animists be evil, after all, when we appear powerless and childlike? This misunderstanding of animism as an obsolete form of religion, destined to give way to the more evolved and truer religion of monotheism, developed hand-in-hand with the application of evolutionary theory to the social sciences.

One might expect animists to argue against the claim, saying that animism is a mature religious

belief, but that would be false as well, since animism is not a religion at all. Animism is not any singular institution. It permeates and informs every aspect of human life, the same way that dominator cultures permeate and inform every aspect of life for its members. In fact, religion as a “spiritual” institution, set apart from the practical and material concerns of daily life, is not at all necessary or inevitable. Animist beliefs that currently fall under the rubric of religion were once considered consensual reality, and animists still experience reality as a unified whole, with no conflict or disconnect between science and religion or between the sacred and the profane.

The institutionalization of religion probably began in ancient times as soon as revelation was

taken out of the hands of common people. Revelation, by which I mean the direct experience of the greater-than-human, is a natural and common human apperception. With the rise of the dominators, revelation was fenced in and appropriated by a priestly class, who took their place as a special dominator clique. Religion as a social institution became the purview of this priestly class, effectively locking the doors of revelation to all but this budding religious aristocracy.

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The rise of monotheism furthered the institutionalization of religion by protecting the authority

of one singular divinity over others. One distinct revelation, now called “religion,” could be established as the official truth for a particular culture. Absolute sovereignty and power adhered to that one monolithic “G”od and his favored dominators, and these dominators could, in turn, claim absolute sovereignty and power through their ultimate “G”od. Because of the importance of revelation in human life, dominators everywhere found in institutionalized religion a powerful tool of subjugation, one that generated less resistance at lower cost than outright violence and terror, and they have used it to their advantage ever since.

From the earliest tribal monotheists to the time of the Enlightenment, institutionalized religion

still informed every aspect of human life and influenced every other institution, including education, medicine, and trade, because religion still held society’s monopoly on truth. Only with the rise of science as a greater authority did the church sink into the confines of its institutional boundaries. Science could not eradicate the institution of religion, nor would the dominators want it to, but science effectively segregated religion from everyday life and limited religious authority to certain aspects of life. Science now claims truth everywhere else.

Today, most people assume that religion has always been and will always be a separate

institution. We think it’s natural for religion to be controlled by a priestly class, that is, by religious authorities, just as science is controlled by authorities. We have surrendered our right to our own revelations and have become dependent on the revelations of ancient times and places as written down in books or expounded by religious experts. This has effectively cut humans off from our gods in the same way we have been cut off from the earthly neighborhood of life forms by materialistic science.

Animism is not a religion. It is a complete, whole, cultural reality, encompassing all human

concerns, and all human concerns in the animist reality are spiritual and material both, never only one or the other. Instead of conflicting with science, animism encourages a lively exploration of the living

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world around us. Instead of the one-upmanship and strife fomented by religious institutions as they jockey for preeminence, animism has room for many gods or no gods. Within an animist framework, there are numerous ways to understand and relate to the greater-than-human, to define life’s meaning and purpose, and to meet the human needs that religious institutions currently struggle to answer.

Today’s new animism is still and always forming and reforming. It is open to constant change,

just as nature exists in a state of constant change, because revelation is available to all. Animism is not owned by this writer or by anyone. There is no priestly class, no authoritative book, no ultimate revelation that must be mummified and affirmed for salvation. An individual’s experience of the greaterthan-human—and of the human and nonhuman—is unique to that person. In an animist reality, every vision is respected and each truth is one voice in the choir of human experience. Reaching out together, each of us singing his or her own song, new animists hope to draw closer to life’s mysteries.



Humanism makes its own critique of animism, not directly, but by virtue of its claims for

humanity and the human intellect: it sets human beings apart from all other things as the ultimate expression of life and intelligence. Professor and philosopher of biology David Ehrenfeld has explored the humanist paradigm in detail, and includes within this paradigm the ultimate value of humanity, the inevitability of our success as a species, confidence in the primacy of reason, science, and technology, and a faith that humans can do no wrong that humans themselves cannot set to right.

We do not typically think of humanism as a Dominator philosophy, because it purports to

champion the equal rights of all human individuals, yet it maintains the expectation that humanity will dominate other life forms—not through violence or greed, but simply by virtue of our intrinsic superiority. Like most dominator philosophies, humanism is materialistic. It denies the likelihood of greater-than-human beings, and escapes the pitfalls of religious violence and bigotry by simply withdrawing from the institutionalized religions. Humanists may enjoy an intellectual “spirituality” but

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they are never supernaturalists, so the humanist attitude toward traditional animism is often pity for people who still believe in superstitious nonsense. Since there is no room in their reality for nonhuman intelligence, they can only understand contemporary animism as a kind of metaphor, a poetic expression of life’s beauty or existence . . . surely, trees can’t really talk, now, can they?

But there is a darker philosophy that has emerged from humanism, and that is an extreme, even

pathological, individualism. Many humanists temper their focus on individual happiness with a nod toward the social welfare, but a growing number of objectivists, political individualists, libertarians, and followers of the human potential movement, have become cheerleaders for the primacy of the individual, and translate this primacy into a moral right to seek the happiness of the self above all other endeavors. This extreme individualist philosophy has integrated itself into Christian circles, so that the Biblical mandate for social welfare now takes a back seat to a patriotic pursuit of money and material goods. Radical individualism, euphemistically called “enlightened self-interest,” is heavily promoted by our contemporary capitalistic, dominator culture. Self-interest is encouraged as natural and appropriate, and certainly, each person must see to his or her own needs, but an individualism that is taken beyond the limits of the common good is destructive of communities and undermines the cooperation essential to the survival of any species.

The social counterbalance to individualism is collectivism, which has been associated in recent

years not only with primitive societies, but with fascism and racism. (citation) In ancient times, objectivists tell us, human creativity was lost and our potential was wasted in the service of a monstrous collectivism. The group demanded all of our allegiance. There was no self. Much of what is written about the topic of collectivism today is a celebration of individualism, representing human freedom, against collectivism, which is purported to drag us into a primal swamp of enforced enslavement to the state. "Collectivism,” Ayn Rand wrote, “is the ancient principle of savagery . . . It is the order of a very dark yesterday."

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Rand is not overstating her case. She is expressing our contemporary horror of the loss of the

individual self to the group. In an animist reality, this horror is unjustified, because individuals are the group. Humans did not evolve to live alone, but in cultures and communities, in cooperation with one another. In fact, if culture is our human advantage and our experienced reality, then we would be lost without one another, because culture is never the creation of any particular individual. It is the product of human communities and collective experiences over time.

Animists can only shake our heads in wonder at the peculiar history the individualists have

written. Far from denying the value of each individual to the group, ancient humans were highly dependent on one another. Individual burial sites, group hunting tactics that utilized individual strengths, and the great variety of kinship roles all attest to this. Animists, in ancient times and today, understand every individual human person to be part of a collective of persons, like cells in the body of Humanity— and Humanity is like a beach, made of billions of individual grains of sand, but getting its identity as a beach only when all those individual grains of sand are taken together. Earth, herself, is one great entity, made up of smaller beings, made up of smaller beings, and she, in turn, is part of the person we call Milky Way.

Whether causal or not, extreme individualism seems to have emerged in history as communities

disintegrated. This loss of community is a sad and dangerous path from an animist point of view. When we lose our connection to humanity as a whole living entity we lose our own future. Animists participate in the life of the community, so we live on in the grandchildren, the rituals, and the experiences of the community long after our individual bodies die. We are invested in the future of our descendants, and work hard to insure an abundant earth for them “to the seventh generation” as the animist Iroquois people expressed it.

In a world of rampant individualism, however, with our empathy for the human deva gone,

people are able to justify such horrors as the Christian pursuit of individual salvation with no regard for

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the perpetuation of the species. We can accept the consumer’s attachment to cheap sneakers with no awareness of the slaves who assembled them. As we disconnect from the human collective, what is to stop us from allowing any action in the name of self-interest or profit? Why shouldn’t we tear the earth to bits for personal gain? Only this life, this self, this soul has value to an individualist.



Rampant individualism destroys communities, reduces the empathic foundation of moral

behavior, and inhibits the development of cultures, but it is the rock on which the dominator elite built their circus of capitalist materialism and greed. The capitalist value of greed has been a tremendous boon to dominators, allowing them to accumulate sickening amounts of wealth, wealth beyond what any human could possibly need, the kind of wealth that buys them power. Meanwhile, capitalism has brought us to the commodification of all life forms and elements and institutions of culture. Humans, for example, become things named “labor” or “consumers.” The earth’s many and various nonhuman people, and the body of Earth herself, are now material resources. Their souls and their names are taken away. They are not living persons, worthy of respect. They are raw material, fuel, pharmaceuticals, commodities, defined by how they can serve humanity and create wealth and power for the dominators.

The value of art, music, and other creative works is measured by the price and audience they can

command. Access to healing and medicine is limited to those who can pay. Friendship is discouraged by our growing electronic landscape and paid therapists listen to our lonely problems. Work, play, entertainment, transportation, even religion and education are all managed to leverage the most profit for private interests.

Commodification also serves as a method of social control. Over the years, various interest

groups have attempted to question the authority of dominator cultures or to offer an alternative reality as a possibility. The capitalist method for shutting them up has been to commodify them. The hippie movement of peace, love, and back-to-the-earth community, for example, was turned into a fashion of

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tie-dye tee shirts and love beads. The American Indian uprisings of the 1970s were converted into a string of lawsuits, which indigenous Americans are still fighting today. Their animist reality and those of other traditional animists were churned into new age bestsellers. Traditional animists have been reduced to less than four percent of the world’s population, yet you can find their trinkets and their “wisdom” for sale on any online pagan shop. Animism is not a fad or a fashion. New animists resist commodification and refuse to jump on the shaman-for-pay bandwagon.

I do not have to list here all the crimes and excesses of the global capitalist dominators. From oil

spills to drug wars to “ownership” of water and living genomes, their evil doings are already familiar from the headlines. In their relentless pursuit of profit, capitalists have stolen everything they can rip from the earth, even cultural realities. They mined the cultures of colonized people as well as stealing their earthly goods and resources. Then, the capitalist conquerers imposed their own materialistic values on traditional cultures, destroyed the homelands of indigenous people, and appropriated cultural artifacts, herbs, and wisdoms for their own use.

Social critics who focus on issues of colonialism may lump our new animism in with this

commodification of culture. They charge that we are like suburban shamans, attempting to find meaning in someone else’s religious beliefs. These critics are also, for the most part, rationalists. They view animism as a religious institution, a traditional cultural artifact that takes particular forms and can be stolen, like an object is stolen. They may not be aware that animism is a living reality, even now exploding in new forms across the globe.

I take these charges of colonialism seriously. In responding to them, I have only my own

experience on which to fall back. I am a pink-skinned, 21st century dominator slave, like most of you reading these words. My immediate ancestors were rationalists, monotheists, and humanists, and yet I have heard the voices of the nonhumans. It is they, the trees and rocks and waters, who charge me with this work: to preach animism on the street corners of the internet, to share my vision of a living world.

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They have invited me to work with them to restore the balance to our shared earthly home. They call to me and they are calling out to you to disempower the dominator culture and create a world of abundance and peace.

My nonhuman friends won’t leave me alone. They badger me when I’m walking the trails. They

whisper to me in the night. I do not claim entitlement to the animist traditions of other cultures. I do not use the names of their gods, nor dance their dances uninvited, but I am filled with a vision of an animist reality that is simmering beneath the surface of dominator cultures across the globe, and it will not be silenced.

This is the new animism arising in the world today out of the hearts of humans who see another

possible reality in which to live. Animism is the reality expressed when a woman sits in a tree to prevent logging or when an Ishmael reading group meets. It is there when an Earth First! kid releases caged animals who have been tortured by dominator scientists. It is in the Bioregional Animism movement of Washington State and in the old hippie who loves the land on which he walks. You can read about it in a growing number of blogs and websites, in Graham Harvey’s academic writing, Gregory Sams’ exploration of the stars as intelligent beings, or Michael Pollan’s discussion of co-evolving apples and potatoes; in The Spell of the Sensuous and The Nature of Things.

Animism arises whenever someone hears the voice of a nonhuman person and listens to what

that person is saying. If you open your ears to the voices of the trees, right now, today, you might hear them crying out to humanity, “Turn away from greed, humans! Turn away from the lust for power and the fear of death and resist the Dominator apocalypse! Your grandchildren and our grandchildren will survive or die together. Their salvation is in your hands.”

21st Century Animism was written by Lilly Moss, and is copyright under a creative commons, share-alike, not-for-profit license. That means: feel free to share these ideas and quote freely, but make no money off it. Refer to this website when citing.

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