Despite the war on poverty declared in different ways by various politicians in different countries since World War II, the rich–poor divide continues as it has been more or less the same for the last ten thousand years or so. Also, the rich–poor divide continues across revolutions and across societies that describe themselves using different labels, such as communist, capitalist, socialist, liberal-democratic, and Islamic. For example, the number of billionaires in communist China rivals that in the capitalist United States, and the rich–poor divide in Islamic Iran is even great than in most European countries. Various legitimizing ideologies are used to justify the rich–poor divide, with the rich using their power and resources to shape education, the media, religious ideology, and the various other avenues for socialization and communication. The tendency for both the rich and the poor to believe in a just world and to blame the victim is discussed in this chapter, in relation to false consciousness and legitimizing ideologies, to explain the continuity of societies with enormous rich–poor divides.

This chapter focuses on the precipitous decline of wild animals. It identifies the inception of ‘defaunation’ with the emergence of human empires as well as animals’ philosophical displacement in comparison to the distinguished human, both reaching back to classical antiquity. The chapter then discusses defaunation today – its recent causes and ecological consequences. It argues that this disappearance of animals impoverishes the world by stripping away manifestations of diverse animal minds. Divested of animals' presence and their numinous expressions, landscapes and seascapes also become disenchanted. This reinforces a notion that animist cosmologies are ‘fantastical’ and that the dominant zeitgeist of the universe as mechanical and purposeless is sensible. The chapter ends by decrying the humanisation of the Earth and calls for humanity to scale down and pull back, to allow for a resurgence of wild animal life.