What We Lost Was Never Ours to Take

Yesterday, I attended an Indigenous gathering where only Indigenous leaders were on stage. Reverend Rachel Taber-Hamilton, a Shackan First Nations priest in the Episcopal Church, delivered the most powerful talk. She speaks to her congregation and constituents from a unique perspective, one that is non-ethnocentric, non-Western, and centred on female and indigenous anthropology. Of all her talking points, the one that shook me to my core was, "It will take ten million years to recover the level of species diversity humanity has erased in just the past century." This op-ed will reflect on my thoughts regarding this critical statement on biodiversity loss from a decolonised, integrated perspective.

Ten million years. That’s how long it will take for evolution to recover the diversity of life we’ve erased in just the last hundred years. That is not a statistic. That is the sentence we have passed on the planet and ourselves. We have not only disrupted the web of life; we have pilfered the pulse of the Cenozoic era itself. An age born in the aftermath of the dinosaurs, flowering into countless forms of fur, feather, fin, and flora, now stands on the brink of unravelling, not from an asteroid this time, but from the slow, sustained violence of our capitalistic, extractive, dominant worldview.

We have not merely accelerated extinction; we have defiled the deep time of the Cenozoic Era, leaving Earth’s once-flourishing inheritance of biodiversity in a state of mass depletion. We are not in a moment of loss; we are in a moment of theft—of theft driven by a worldview so fundamentally flawed that it cut the world into those deemed worthy of soul and those who could be used, moved, or murdered without consequence.

This biodiversity crisis is not merely ecological; it is spiritual, epistemological, and civilizational. To understand the roots of this devastation, we must look beyond greenhouse gases and habitat maps, and instead interrogate the cosmology that enabled some to believe the Earth was theirs to conquer. What belief system justified this rupture between the sacred and the profane? The same one that underpinned centuries of conquest, domination, and extractive violence: the ethnocentric, Catholic-rooted “Doctrine of Discovery.” It declared lands uninhabited if they weren’t occupied by Christians, enabling colonisers to claim, convert, and consume without guilt. This worldview didn’t merely misunderstand the world—it dismembered it, denying spirit to all that was not white, male, and Western. Forests were regarded as commodities. Whales, as oil. Orcas and dolphins as entertainment. Black and brown peoples, as indentured labour. Women, as voiceless wombs. Indigenous wisdoms as heresy.

It was not that indigenous cultures lacked spirit, but rather that the colonisers lacked the capacity to recognise it. The indigenous perceive forests as cathedrals, whales as kin, and fish as indicators of their local ecosystem's and society's wellbeing. However, the colonisers did not comprehend this sacredness of reciprocity and spiritually cohesive empathy, nor the sovereignty of those who lived in harmony with the land; instead, they reinforced their blind dominion over it. They arrived bearing crosses, professing Christ, yet they brought none of the compassion he embodied. And while Pope Francis has sought to usher in a gentler stewardship, the legacy of conquest carried out in the name of his faith is one of exploitation, not enlightenment.

The tragedy lies not only in what was taken, but in what was never seen: the soul of the living world, the kinship between all beings, the reciprocity that binds us to river, rock, and root. Early explorers who arrived on distant shores cloaked in crucifixes did not come in reverence; they came in righteousness. While Pope Francis today speaks of stewardship and humility, the faith he represents once fueled fire, sword, and slavery. The God invoked to justify the empire bore little resemblance to the god of mercy, love, or light. And those who claimed to be the sole keepers of spirit proved most severed from its presence.

This colonial worldview continues to echo through our sciences and policies. Even Charles Darwin, despite his brilliance in observation, presented us with a linear tree of life that positioned the white, Western man at the pinnacle of evolution, reducing biodiversity to competition rather than co-creation. One fictional concept relegated the rest of the living world, and most of humanity, to the lower branches, considered less evolved and less worthy. It was never intended to be a hierarchy. Life doesn’t ascend; it interweaves in solidarity. Its roots, webs, and spirals. Indigenous cosmologies recognised this: that the world is alive, aware, and relational. That the forest thinks. That every current and wave in the ocean is a gentle, loving embrace of all life. That the wolf, the bee, the fungus, and the fern all hold spirit. This isn’t romanticism. It’s truth. And it is a truth that the prevailing mechanistic, barbaric paradigm has fought to suppress, because it decentralises man, dethrones empire, and demands that we belong rather than control. But only when we see ourselves as kin, not kings, can we hope to heal what we have harmed.

We plundered the ocean not because we needed its resources, but because we believed it held no inherent value, no agency, and no reason to exist beyond our greedy consumption. We stripped and deforested not just to create farmland, but also because we failed to recognise the forests as living beings that deserved our respect. We enslaved, colonised, and converted people under the assumption that the soul was a personal possession, rather than a shared presence. Yet we still don't acknowledge this ignorance, even as we devise new frameworks to prevent biodiversity loss.

This perverse scaffolding of value, propped up by misinterpreted scripture, pseudoscience, and imperial economics, still informs how we treat the world. Extractivism is not an economic model; it is a spiritual disorder. If we do not see rivers as sacred, we dam them. If we do not see forests as family, we burn them. If we do not see non-Western peoples as equal, we displace them. And if we do not see ourselves as belonging to the living Earth, we will continue behaving like parasites upon it. Biodiversity loss is not just an ecological crisis; it mirrors our inner desolation. We severed soul from soil, and now we reap the consequences, psychic, social, planetary. But another way is possible. It has always been. Our task now is to confront our continued refusal to emulate the values and awareness required to return to ways of living in fluid harmony with nature. Envision a world where, instead of being shaped by disconnection and sociopathy, our species had evolved with connective empathy as its guiding principle. What might have unfolded if our pursuit of exploration and discovery had been rooted in conscious empathy rather than unconscious apathy?

We must return to indigenous ways of knowing, not as an aesthetic or appropriation, but as a reorientation of our moral compass. Last evening's gathering was entitled "Majestic Matriarchy", and it held space for the wisdom of female elders from the Native Nations of the Pacific Northwest bioregion. We must listen to those who’ve lived in relational integrity with Earth for millennia, who speak of plants as teachers, animals as relatives, and water as law. We must decolonise not just land, but language, science, and spirit. In Lakota, the phrase mitákuye oyás’iŋ means “all my relations,” a recognition that we are related to every winged, finned, rooted, and two-legged being. In Andean cosmology, the Pachamama is not a metaphor, but a mother. Aboriginal Dreamtime stories map the land not through property but through memory, song, and spirit. These aren’t quaint cultural relics; they are robust ontologies of interdependence and reverence. They remind us that biodiversity is not something we save; it is something we serve, something we are.

Because, as highlighted in my previous article, "The Charitable Mirage: How Philanthropy Perpetuates Debt, Disenfranchisement, Socio-Economic Inequity, and Environmental Injustice", the world will not be saved by technology alone, nor by treaties, nor by titans of industry turned pseudo-philanthropists. It will be saved by a remembrance: that we are not above the Earth, but of it. That every species lost is a story, a song, a spirit silenced. And that the only salvation worth seeking is the one that makes us more whole, not more powerful. We cannot reverse extinction with the same mindset that sanctioned it. We cannot regenerate life while clinging to frameworks built on supremacy and separation. This demands a decolonised consciousness, one that honours the sentience of soil, the wisdom of water, the spirit in every seed, and the sovereignty of those who have never forgotten how to listen to the land.

Reverend Rachel Taber-Hamilton repeatedly peppered her talk with constant invitations for us to listen.

So let us listen now.

Let us elevate indigenous voices, protect indigenous lands, and restore indigenous governance, not as a favour, but as a necessary transformation. Let us rewrite the story not with conquest as the prologue, but with kinship as the compass. Let us learn to live again, not above, but within the living systems we once plundered. Biodiversity will not be saved by dominion, but by devotion. By choosing to see the Earth not as our resource, but as our relative. The future is not forged through control; it is remembered through connection.

And in that remembering, ten million years from now, perhaps something sacred will have survived, because we did.