Deep Green Thoughts, Pt II

Months ago I wrote a blog about environmental ethics… and I’m finally picking up where I left off. We ended by noting that we are not in fact saving the planet, but saving the planet in a state where we can still live on it. It’s important to have your goals defined when you start in on questions like, how should we live?

I should probably state my assumption that our current state of living is a mess. I don’t just mean the energy crisis, I mean anything and everything which contributes to the destruction of the environment, and I include in that the destruction of communities, families, and personal well-being. I will save how those tie in for another blog. But let’s take a moment and see how we got here. Long, long ago, everyone lived differently. People lived in tribal societies, and each one had their own way of living. Some were nomadic and relied completely on hunting and gathering. Some farmed. Some did both. All of them had to live in a relative state of equilibrium with their environment (by which I mean their surroundings). Otherwise, they would have died back, the same way any animal species will die back if it uses up all the resources in a particular area.

And then some groups of humans figured out that if you put in hours upon hours of extra effort, you could grow more food from the ground than you actually needed to feed your tribe. This, in effect, meant members of your tribe could travel at will, without having to stop and hunt, because they could take food with them. This was a revolutionary concept, because it led to, you guessed it, the ability to form armies. Which led to the necessity to build fortifications, which led to the creation of cities, which led- well, you get the point. We called this the agricultural revolution.

Fast forward several thousands years. We have expanded our population to such quantities, and concentrated them in such small areas, that there is in fact no alternative except intensive, industrial (or, to be PC, conventional) agriculture. We could not survive with this many people without mass production. Only, we have a problem in that there are more people on the planet than there are resources, especially since in our system of mass production we forgot to include the key concepts of any functioning ecosystem: not using resources faster than they can be replenished, giving back as much as you take, and not killing off all the other species competing with you (because an area filled with one species alone is far more susceptible to disease and pests).

Now, does this make us bad people? No, I don’t think so. We’re doing the same thing any species would do given the ability to adapt as quickly as we do. And we are subject to the same laws of nature that govern every other species, ie we can use as many resources as we can get, but eventually we will run out and suffer massive die back.

But there’s a key difference between us and say, phragmites. We can make choices. We can look around and think, uh-oh, we are heading for disaster, maybe we should do something about it. And we can. But we need to realize we are not saving the planet, at large. We are saving the planet so that we can continue to survive on it.

Why does this make a difference? In many ways, it doesn’t. When you come down to it, we’re still trying to keep whales alive. But there’s a difference between trying to save the whales, and realizing that the same things that threaten whales (pollution, overfishing, global warming) are also killing us, but more slowly. It’s also a difference between some abstract, noble quest- “saving the environment”- and trying to save our own asses from certain destruction. And that makes a big, big difference when it comes to helping others to see just why we’re fighting pollution and global warming.

Does that make us selfish? No. We’re doing what any species would do- try to survive. Only somewhere, somehow, we seem to have forgotten the key piece of the puzzle that allows us to do that: living in balance with our surroundings, not just because it’s “right”, but because it would be stupid to do otherwise.

… to be continued, again.