How did we get so estranged and alienated?

photo credit: Shawn Poynter for The New York Times

Richard Powers has a new novel - Bewilderment.  The NYT interviews him here.

For Powers, our inability to confront the climate crisis is a failure of imagination as much as a political and social one, a catastrophe that stems from humanity’s tendency to put ourselves at the center of the story.

“If you look at contemporary fiction, the stories that these books tell have no agency except humans,” he said.

He wants to challenge our innate anthropocentrism, both in literature and how we live.

“The world’s breaking down, and psychology begins to seem like a bit of a luxury,” he said.

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“I was deep into the story before I realized that I was writing a book that was trying to re-engage the questions that were left hanging at the end of ‘The Overstory,’” Powers said. “Namely, how did we lose our sense of living here on Earth? How did we become so alienated and estranged from everything else alive? How did we get convinced that we’re the only interesting game in town, and the only species worthy of extending a sense of the sacred to?”