Last week, a bear walked into a Dollar General in New Jersey. Who could blame her? She was probably hungry. While the bear roamed the aisles, visibly disoriented, she bit a 90-year-old woman, and on the way out she jumped on a dog. By the end of the day, the bear was dead. The police officers made the difficult decision to shoot her following procedure outlined to protect the public. But is that really the way things had to play out?
That bear didn’t want to hurt anyone; the smell of food lured her out of the woods and into an altercation that proved dangerous for everyone involved. It might seem like one bear is insignificant in the long run, but she represents the growing rift between humans and what we deem our surroundings. This story is not unique; it’s only the limelight in a recurring narrative in which animals face the systems humans build and come out worse for wear, or not at all.
From bears to birds to sea turtles, human activity is dooming wildlife. In fact, evolutionary ecologist John Weins suggests that “in the next 100 years, we could lose 30 or 40 percent of all species on Earth.” Meanwhile, another study suggests that human activity is beginning to induce a sixth mass extinction like that of the dinosaurs. While we should prioritize our own safety, we should also understand that, in the bigger picture, the wellbeing of the other creatures with whom we share the Earth are integral to it.
Our biosphere revolves around the contributions and replenishments that all living things come together to provide. It is an ever complex and interconnected system that can’t be engineered. Losing different species is like losing parts in a machine, and it leaves a fractured ecosystem with dangers like threatened food security and greater vulnerability to natural disasters and climate change, to name a few. To look out for ourselves, we need everyone else, because alone, we would not have the same Earth to call home.
Yet, humans have come to routinely take much more than our fair share of resources and cause outsized environmental harm. We take for granted that the land we call our own is rightfully ours, when really the Earth has never belonged to anyone; it is common ground, and we all collectively rely on it. In short, we act like an invasive species. However, unlike other anomalies of that nature, we have a choice.
Although there’s not one common definition of what it is, we all know that humans have something special that sets us apart from other animals. Some say it’s intelligence, or language, or even true consciousness. Whatever it is, though, gives us the power to live conscientiously and with awareness of our impact. Sure, Asian shore crabs are taking over ecosystems on the coast of the eastern United States, but they don’t know any better and don’t have the agency to change their behavior. We do. That thing that makes us unique? I’d say it’s responsibility for how our actions ripple out.
To truly progress, not just industrialize, we need to focus on working with the environment, not simply alongside it. We need to recognize that the environment is not simply our surroundings, but rather a whole that we make up a part of. That means prioritizing coexistence. It means we need to stop building up in ways that cut wildlife down.
What does that look like? It’s a complex picture, but here are some concrete examples. If we want to save the bears, we should store smellable food and products safely so that they aren’t attracted and never learn to associate humans with food in the first place. We should put up decals or screens on windows to prevent some 600 million bird deaths from building collisions per year in the U.S. We should commit to reducing artificial light at night to respect firefly mating and hatching of sea turtles. We should seriously minimize the area of land that we develop and transform, because it’s not ours to claim. In other words, we shouldn’t allow our modern inventions to challenge the natural order and rhythm that the Earth has honed to harmony over the span of more than three billion years, since the first traces of life.
In truth, this is not a do-what-you-can situation, but rather one where we need to rethink many of the bedrock assumptions that govern development and shift our behaviors accordingly. If that seems like it requires a lot of sacrifice, it’s because it does. But what else are we sacrificing if we continue the way we’re headed?