The other day, I came across a series of articles published by the World Wildlife Fund celebrating animals whose roles are instrumental to Earth’s self-regulating cycle of life. Bees, for one, have long teamed up with hundreds of thousands of different flowering plants to promote exceptionally biodiverse and thriving ecosystems, while bison’s grazing habits allow grasslands to flourish. It can surely seem exceptional, especially when compared with contemporary human lifestyles which are so removed from nature, that these species have such symbiosis with the world around them. Yet humans did not always live the way we do now; there was a time when our roles were not so different from other animals. In the face of our rapidly shifting planet, it is worth examining exactly what has changed from then to now.
We should first acknowledge that it is no miracle that animals’ actions are so compatible with the world around them. It is very much because they obey the Earth’s system of nature which has developed incidental, yet ingenious, intricacies over the course of the past few billion years. Each species has come to settle in a role which complements the roles of their neighbors and the greater character of their ecosystem. We must also reflect that, contrarily, we as a human race have moved beyond our primitive role in favor of a rather developed lifestyle.
Now, of course, nothing in the nature of the system dictates that we must continue to fill that primitive role simply because we used to; in fact, this planet has only gotten where it is today because every role has been inherently ever-changing. No, it is not necessary that we accept lives of animalistic scavenging, nor was it wrong to build tools or light fires or forge shelters when our distant ancestors did so long ago. In other words, exercising our free will is not wrong. Yet we must also hold that, since humans previously fulfilled a peaceful role upon this Earth, we have no business choosing another if doing so would entail stealing the lives and livelihoods of others that inhabit this planet. We are free to attempt to change our station within the natural order of things (as we have so majorly), but when we do so, we carry the responsibility of forging an equally coexistent one, for our own good as much as anyone else’s.
However, it goes without saying that we have not done that. Far from the stone tools and cave drawings of the prehistoric age, our way of life now entails widespread domestication of our once-wild planet. We traded trees for buildings, declared sovereignty over the other animals, which were once our kin, and created mechanical systems which act like wrenches to our underlying ecological ones.
Surely there is a line somewhere between innovation and transgression, but where does it lie, and how far can we stray from our evolutionary role? One way to answer this question is to entertain a case study, namely the case of the pesticide DDT. In 1939, the compound’s insecticidal properties were realized, and soon its potential to wipe out pest populations, and with it the diseases they carry, was extrapolated. At the time, this seemed like a paradigm-shifting feat of science with the power to deliver humans from the beast that was nature, and in a manner of speaking it was. In the late 1940s, Sardinia, Italy, a region previously plagued by malaria, was used as a testing ground, and the application of DDT effectively annihilated the disease on the island. With only this limited knowledge, it was deployed boundlessly. But some decades later, due in part to Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” the scientific community came to recognize the devastating and bioaccumulating effects of the chemical on environmental health, and it has been banned entirely in many countries since the 1970s. Of course, we cannot retroactively assume that advocates for DDT could have known what we do now, and surely many were motivated honorably, in pursuit of promoting public health. Yet, simultaneously, we can recognize that this attempt to dominate nature without thought of the wider ecological repercussions was reckless. More importantly, it signaled a growing shift away from simply changing our role within nature and instead toward suppression of nature itself. That shift is where humans cross the line.
Photo courtesy of Jack Wolf on Flickr
Thus, there is little question why every animal’s lifestyle seems so coexistent and symbiotic with their ecosystems while ours is so enormously parasitic; we have chosen it to be.
This experiment of human domination over the natural world has garnered results that overwhelmingly suggest one conclusion: our efforts have been unsuccessful. If we have tried to make a better life for ourselves, we have done the opposite. The damage we have done to our ecosystems and climate alike is indisputable. And in the face of this failure, is it so strange to ask whether we were meant to master our planet in the first place?
If you haven’t read Richard Powers’ “The Overstory,” or “The Uninhabitable Earth” (author’s name eludes me presently), you should.
Nature will win in the end. We’re up against forces that we cannot possibly overcome. Only with our delusional hubris can we believe that we can exchange the products of four billions years of evolution for a fleeting moment of self-satisfaction and disposable pleasure and not, ultimately, have to pay the price.