I really hope this will be another nail in the coffin of climate change denial, but it drove home to me how we are continuing to alter, perhaps forever, the biosphere we live in. It’s becoming more clear – at least to me – that the search for a balance between humans and the rest of the living things on this planet is just beginning, and there is no end to it in sight. Short of a massive human die-off, this is going to be our permanent job from now on – trying to keep ourselves from permanently altering the world we’ve inherited.
Of course, there’s no cause to say that the changes we put on the planet will necessarily be bad. But the main trouble with humans is a matter of sheer numbers; as we can see now, when some of us start benefitting from our technology, soon everyone will be adopting it, no matter how small the environmental impact could be. Seven billion times tiny nudges in any direction could be cataclysmic. We could put millions of cars on the road that expel only water as exhaust, but then we’d have to figure out whether we’re ruining entire ecosystems by putting so much extra water vapor into the air.
Is this self-regulation really a job we can, or even really want to, take on? Should we just keep putting greater and greater amounts of work and money into preserving species that are on the verge of dying out, if the only reason we’re doing it is to keep them around so that we can save them again? I understand that there’s something to be said for trying to preserve the world the way it was before we started completely influencing every part of it, but in my worst moments I wonder if it’s worth it.
This question was brought up in an especially poignant way after Hurricane Sandy hit the NYC area in 2012. In low-lying areas of the coast that had been flooded, I heard stories of people wondering whether the government should monetarily assist people to rebuild their homes in low-lying areas that were now susceptible to being hit by another equally destructive hurricane in a few more years. How important is it that we not give up these pieces of land that nature is starting to reclaim? It’s the same thing with wildfires in California and Arizona… they’re a natural part of the cycle of the Western biome, but we suppress them and suppress them until the dry scrub builds up and when the fires finally do come, they’re devastating.
It seems like a similar problem to me. Maybe we should concentrate our efforts on sustaining creatures that directly affect our livelihood: Bees, pigs, cattle, basically anything that we either eat or that creates things that we eat. The trouble is, these are creatures that we’ve basically created through the process of domestication. Not only that, we don’t fully understand where the immediate family of creatures we rely on ends. If every part of the food chain is integral, we’re probably already chipping at a weak link and don’t even realize it.
On the other hand, it’s unrealistic to think that we have the resources to control a living, growing process like the Earth as a whole. Add an element of chaos? Sure. But even if we could figure out how to actively point these vast natural processes in the right direction, should we try to hold it in stasis, corral it into a simulation of what it was like when we first got here? Or do we find a way to let it evolve as it would have without our technological influence? And if that’s the option we take, how will we know if we’re doing it right?
Clearly, I’m in a bit of a pessimistic mood. Because preserving/saving the planet goes against every basic human instinct of survival. By this I mean that, in every instance, mankind survives by putting priority on its own short-term goals. That's how we've survived all these years, and we do it regardless of how that affects our long-term goals, never mind what we can do for the good of the planet as a whole. Ironically, this tendency is hardwired into us by nature itself.
But maybe there’s hope for progress… I look back at what humans were doing fifty or a hundred years ago and see how hopelessly naïve we were. Not only did we think that the world was indestructible, we thought that we were pretty much indestructible too – not only were smoking and drinking given no kind of social or moral stigma, but we drove around with no seatbelts and saw smog as a necessary nuisance; we tolerated abuse, sexism, homophobia and racism; we thought depression and psychological trauma were things you could just “get over”.
Maybe in another fifty or hundred years we’ll look back and think the same thing. Maybe we’ll be on well on our way to solving our current problems and have a whole new set of runaway issues to deal with. I’m pretty sure that’s the signpost to look for… a culture that looks back and says, “Yep, we figured it all out a hundred years ago, and we’ve been doing it the same way ever since” is pretty much doomed. It’s a good rule of thumb to keep in mind on a personal level too… there’s a quote I’ve seen on the Internet – attributed to Morgan Freeman, as most things are – that says that a person who believes the same thing at 50 as they did at 20 has wasted 30 years of their life.
Whether we like it or not, we've become directly responsible for the fate of every living thing we share the earth with. And we're changing things faster than we can comprehend the result of our actions. There are even factions of our society that are actively championing ignorance about this new role of ours. But when has anything good ever resulted from ignorance, in any aspect of life? True, this isn't a job that any of us want, but we've at least got to acknowledge that it *is* our job. That's the first, crucial step to deciding what to do with the power we now wield.
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