Layla AbdelRahim

Note: A shorter version of this article appears in the print edition.

We are taught since early childhood that everything in the world exists in a food chain as a “resource” to be consumed by those higher up the chain and concurrently as the consumer of “resources” that are lower in this predatory hierarchy. We are also told that life in the wild is hungry, fraught with mortal danger and that civilization has spared us a short and brutish existence. As children, we thus come to believe that life in civilization is good for us, in fact even indispensable for our very survival.

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