heroic humanity ?

Made in God's own image. That is western humanity's idea of itself.  Heroic ! God like! The Chosen ones ! 

 There are no limits to that belief in their uniqueness. Their greatness.  But  limits there are.  And the limits are being reached by and in the very  material culture they created and worship.   The Planet is being pushed to its limits - towards  extinction of  everything that gave the planet its very  life. The many, many forms of life that made humanity happen.  

Nature doesn't do monocultures. Not of any kind. That would be far too dangerous to the continuity of life it self.  

Homo sapiens have created a hominid monoculture: 

"From the very beginning of hominid history, the world had typically supported several different kinds of hominid at one time - sometimes several of them on the very same landscape. In striking contrast, once behaviourally modern humans had emerged from Africa the world rapidly became a hominid monoculture. This is surely telling us something very important about ourselves: thoughtlessly or otherwise, we are not only entirely intolerant of competition, but uniquely equipped to express and impose that intolerance. It's something we might do well to bear in mind as we continue energetically persecuting our closest surviving relatives into extinction." (pp. 197-198)

Our hominid monoculture has of late been fond of other monocultures, particularly in the arenas of agriculture and energy. Large chunks of the modern world are dependent on an increasingly narrow range of plants for food and a dwindling source of concentrated energy from fossil fuels. The two revolutions that have created us so-called civilised moderns - the agricultural and the industrial revolutions, which are now intimately linked in our dependence on fossil-fuel based industrial agriculture - are producing some unexpectedly unpleasant and revolutionary consequences. We're running out of the resources on which our mass-consumption "lifestyle" is based, and the production of that lifestyle has unleashed destructive forces we can't contain. 

One good first step might be to stop bragging, to resist the temptation to always telling a story about Homo sapiens that casts us as the hero. 

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201292782738360954.html