The Red Planet: Gendered Landscapes and Violent Inequalities

The Red Planet explores why humans went from being peaceful and egalitarian with a preference for plant food to a hyper-masculine paradigm with consequences ranging from misogyny, racism, and environmental abuse to animal cruelty, classism, and warfare. We humans have an extraordinary capacity for compassion. Much of it is in response to the atrocities we inflict on the planet, its animals, and each other. The popular explanation for this paradox is that we evolved as carnivorous “killer a...