Us vs the environment

aleggen — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:04:42 +0000

We humans and our technology always have been hard on the environment. Back about 13,000 years ago, in America, the Clovis people developed a way of making very effective spears for hunting mammoths. In a span of at most 450 years these huge mammoths became extinct. Whether Clovis hunting was the prime cause can be debated – but it certainly made at least a contribution to the demise of the mammoth – and a number of other species (Wikipedia: “Mammoth is only a small part of the Clovis diet; extinct bison, mastodon, sloths, tapir, palaeolama, horse and a host of smaller animals have also been found in Clovis sites where they were killed and eaten”). The now useless spear technology was abandoned – as was the Clovis culture.

By now we have grown so powerful, and so numerous, and so unconcerned with the long term implications of our actions that we have become a plague species. No corner of the globe is immune from our trash, pollution, and destruction. Rain forests, coral reefs, and Appalachian mountains gone, fish stocks badly depleted, vanished species, our mark is everywhere. To quote E.O. Wilson, “If current deterioration of the environment by human activity continues unabated, best estimates are that half of Earth’s surviving species of plants and animals will be extinguished or critically endangered by the end of the century.”

There now are over a billion hungry people on the planet – and the number is growing rapidly – hungry people do not have the health of the environment as their top priority! Desperation and the need for short term survival provide a recipe for maximum damage.

Before human times there were five periods of “great dying.” The “greatest dying” was 250 million years ago: Over 90% of the world’s species lost, 10 million+ years to recover, cause unknown. We now are in the sixth great dying – and this time we’re the cause. Besides our direct involvement in species loss, our environmental actions make a major contribution. Habitat destruction and climate change are happening at a rate far higher than many species can move from or adapt to. Our tall grass prairies are long gone, mostly in exchange for a mono culture of corn, grain and soy; rain forests with their enormous diversity are exchanged for palm oil plantations, sugar, soy and beef. The list of lost diversity goes on and on.

An instructive take on our situation, from the perspective of both scientists and evangelicals, is in “An Urgent Call to Action: Scientists and Evangelicals Unite to Protect Creation.”

Shifting to my fire and brimstone preaching mode: We humans have done serious and irreversible damage to creation. We will continue to do even more and even worse damage until the time comes when we either confess our sins and change our sinful ways – or the power is taken away from us. Expect retribution! There may be forgiveness of sins but there is no release from the consequences of sin. We do not know all of the forms that retribution will take, when and how it will come, but it will come. Violence, hunger, disease are some forms that are happening now. Unfortunately, it’s mostly the poor and vulnerable and the nonhuman sector of creation that are paying the price. That won’t always be the case!

….do I see some strange looking figures coming up behind us? They’re still a ways off but could it be four horsemen?

Wikipedia on Revelation: “The first horseman to appear is Pestilence, who rides upon a white horse. Pestilence conquers the nations of the world, subjugating them to demonic powers of the world. In the wake of Pestilence comes War, riding a large, wild red horse and wielding a tremendous sword symbolizing continuing war over the domination of the world, killing millions in his path with his sword. In the wake of War, due to immense destruction because of War and Pestilence, is Famine. Famine is portly – riding upon a black, sickly horse – representing gluttony and hunger. And in the wake of Famine, comes the pale rider, Death. His horse is stark pale. He is followed by Hades and carries the remaining souls to their final destinations.”

The world in transformation II

aleggen — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:30:11 +0000

The world is at a unique point in history. For the first time a single species – us – dominates the entire earth and has developed the power to make drastic changes in the environment. This dominance has been achieved in an extraordinarily short time frame when considered in evolutionary or geologic time scales. Furthermore, the forces of globalization have ensured that no place is isolated from what happens in the rest of the world – there’s no place to hide. At the same time, a number of interrelated problems have reached a critical stage.

Some problems that come to mind:

Hunger – by UN estimates one billion undernourished people before the year is out
Energy limitations (peak oil, natural gas not too far behind) -
Rapid climate change
All kinds of water related issues
Major irreversible degradation of the environment
It takes a lot of time and money to build large energy, infrastructure, etc, projects
Without force it takes a lot of time to change people’s habits
Conflict with deep rooted causes
A fundamentally unsustainable greed based global economic system

The first thing to keep in mind is a fact usually ignored: everything is related. There are no independent variables in the real world – you can’t separate consideration of oil from energy, from transportation, from food, from climate, from environmental degradation, from geopolitics, etc, etc, etc. – they’re all related, they all affect each other. Similarly, all life is related, and no living thing can exist except through a huge number of cooperative relationships with other lifeforms.

Looking at the problem list makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that there are just too many people on earth. Certainly that problem list gets much easier to deal with if there were a lot less of us around. However, it really looks to be much worse than just a few too many people, it looks like population overshoot. Overshoot happens when a population grows larger than the long term carrying capacity of its environment. In our case this was enabled by using up stores of oil, natural gas, water in ancient aquifers, deep, fertile old soils, etc, etc.

Populations that go into overshoot eventually crash – a very painful process. Their attempts to survive cause them to do maximum damage to their environment thereby lowering its carrying capacity well below what it originally was. As a result, they usually end up at population levels very much lower than they were at their peak.

The earth now is supporting almost 7 billion people – but how many of us can it support in the long run? Lots of estimates out there – an interesting one, the Earth Manifesto, makes a good case for one billion or less. But how would we get there? To be continued….

Blogs/St.Paul's Willimantic » hunger

Us vs the environment

The world in transformation II