Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Extinction, climate change, invasive species. Pollution. These are just some of the bad things we hear about almost daily if we’re connected to any kind of social media or news sources. Activists implore us to support recycling and reduction of resource harvesting. They beg us to save the whales. To go solar. Buy and drive electric cars. Compost.
And those are good ideas. For sure I love whales (and sea turtles, koalas, pandas, et. al.). I would go to war to protect those species. Solar energy makes sense to me (so does nuclear). I already compost most of my household’s food waste. Reducing, I believe, is even better than reusing and recycling. I am the choir to whom such activists and concerned social groups are preaching. But all the activist energy in the world can’t stand up to the money that drives deforestation and overdevelopment. Or to Mother Nature herself.
Like it or not the world changes on its own quite a bit without our help. Anyone who has lived through middle school earth-space science knows that our home planet has endured at least five ice ages and five mass extinctions (time periods in which the number of species to die out soars). So it’s not like climate change or extinction is manmade. Or new.
Of course in the past few hundred years, many species have died out to due to the endeavors of humans. Homo sapiens excel at industrialization, hunting, and deforestation, all activities that violate and damage the planet. We have indeed pillaged our world, in some cases just so we can have plastic straws for our milkshakes. Straws that will resist decomposition for many more years than our human bodies will.
So, yeah, we’re guilty. No doubt about that. Like it or not, we humans are simply animals ourselves. Our main difference is that we can scale up our actions and ideas to an extraordinary extent. More than we realize. And that leads to trouble. We have these evolved brains but we don’t use them to imagine the consequences of our actions a few years down the road much less a few decades. What good is it for us to have science and technology and philosophy if we don’t use it to respect and protect our planet? And everything that lives on it?
Thinking about those things is frustrating but it also leads me to another conclusion. People, the animals who currently have the greatest ability to either pillage or preserve the earth, simply don’t agree on, well, anything. Some of us believe that continued use of fossil fuels (without some kind of mitigating technology) is going to catch up to us sooner rather than later. Others think everything is fine and it will all work out. In between those two extremes are literally billions of other ideas. I would imagine at least one per every thinking person on the globe. Coming to a consensus about how to improve our future is next to impossible.
And I’ve always tended to imagine it that way: that humans were manipulating the planet and essentially commandeering it. That we were sloppily and haphazardly throwing our trash, medical waste, and carbon emissions into the earth and its atmosphere and artificially creating all the bad karma that is swirling about us. We are, arguably, the top of the food chain (as long as we are safely ensconced in our urban cages). Our brains created (or discovered?) science and mathematics. We can grow our food, perform surgery, soar through the skies. And make a real mess of things.
But isn’t all the damage we do, intentional or not, actually part of our precious Mother Nature? After all, it’s not like we were dropped off here by alien invaders and left to fend for ourselves. We were all born here. We evolved here. Mother Nature (or God, Yahweh, Brahman, et. al.) invented us and nurtured us. Our presence on the planet is as natural as the birds in the air and the fish in the sea. And to me it seems, despite our many inventions, advances, and successes, that we are no more rulers of this earth than butterflies are.
So yes, we humans are unapologetic slobs. But probably any life form that can dominate a biosphere will be. That doesn’t excuse us from responsibility, of course, but it does invite a different perspective from which to seek solutions. By that I mean that maybe we need to accept that living (at any level) on our planet creates waste. And if one life form way outnumbers the others, there will be an imbalance and destruction will ensue.
Take any invasive species. Sure, scientists call them invasive but if seeds from some plant or critters from another region are able to thrive in a new milieu, isn’t that exactly Nature’s objective? Life, at its most basic level, exists to reproduce. Anything it accomplishes after that is icing on the cake. So if rabbits multiply like rabbits in Australia or kudzu spreads like wildfire in the southern United States, it’s because Nature allows it. Like it or not.
Sure, in both those situations it was mankind who literally brought the species into areas where they weren’t native. And such actions make it seem like we subverted Mother Nature and have now created an artificial and negative situation. But that’s not true (not the artificial part anyway). We are part of this world’s creatures, as surely as the dinosaurs who traversed the shifting continents or the humans who originally walked over the Bering Land Bridge. If we define invasive species as things which don’t belong, then everything that’s alive on this planet (including ourselves) fit that description at one time or another.
I don’t think humans will last forever. Anymore than the dinosaurs or the mastodons. And I don’t believe we’ll destroy the earth. It’s way too big for us puny little animals to overwhelm it. We think our technology and our brains are our salvation and that they elevate us above other organisms. But maybe they are the exact things that are wrong with us. They are the very things that separate us from nature, falsely, and give us the illusion that we have control.
I think if we really want to “save” the earth, we have to realize it’s not ours. And to understand that we’re part of a collective web of life forms that belong here. Are we really any more valuable than Orcas or squirrels? Are we better at stewarding this planet than wolves or penguins? Based on what we’ve done with ourselves and our environment I have to say: probably not.
So where does that leave us? I’m not sure. It’s not like me to just give up or to believe there are no solutions. But getting people to understand that when we build homes and towns to be nearer to nature that we actually end up destroying it is an uphill battle. Everyone thinks, oh, this neighborhood will be different. Or it’s only a few plastic bottles. We won’t overdo it. We know what we’re doing.
But humans have always said those things. We’ve always believed that we know what we’re doing. Whatever the next step toward earth friendly existence is it certainly starts with admitting we don’t know what we’re doing. Maybe we need to bring back glass bottles and nix the plastic. Perhaps we levy fines or taxes on certain disposables or fuel types. But regardless of what we do, a lot of people will be mad.
We need to regroup and stop worshipping our precious-metal dependent, resource stripping technology. And our own brains. We are part of our earth, not her ruler. We need to learn how to accept responsibility for our mistakes and to fix them.
Because we’re not going to destroy the earth. Mother Nature is way too badass to succumb to our puny threats. She’ll simply send us down the pike the way she did the glyptodon and the stegosaurus. Nature is majestic and beautiful, but she’s a hell of a taskmaster.
We better quit pissing her off.