Lawrence Speight
We tend to think of ourselves as the alpha species, somewhat akin to the iconic frontiers people of the American West; a species that can forge its own destiny without reference to or dependency on others. There are grounds for this view.
We have brought much of what we have conceived in our imagination to life. By means of high-speed trains and airplanes we can travel great distances in short periods of time, smart phones enable us to see and talk to each other across oceans and continents almost as if we were feet apart. Through organ transplants we can prevent what were once inevitable deaths. We have eradicated the scourge of smallpox and are close to doing the same with polio. We can eat the choicest foods, produced in every climate, at any time, by way of our local supermarket. This is a feat beyond what the richest monarch could ever have enjoyed. We can carry out micro-surgery and study planets and stars billions of miles away. Military personnel can kill people in deserts and on mountainsides in far away countries without exposing themselves to danger. Some governments, including the United Kingdom, can commit the ultimate terrorist act and eliminate hundreds of millions of people at the press of a button.
With the exception of the poor and the persecuted, people in the early part of the 21st century have the powers described in classical mythologies. We are the personification of ancient Gods. However, we have a fatal flaw, we believe our illusions.
Perhaps our most harmful illusion is the belief that our technosphere is an entity set apart from the biosphere, that our culture is its own self-sustaining cosmos. We are so imbued with this idea that we elect governments that subsidise the destruction of the very means of our existence, believing, as politicians often say that “it is the right thing to do.” Rainforests, the site of the most varied biodiversity on the planet, described as the Earth’s lungs, are clear-felled with the help of government subsidies in order for companies to grow palm oil. Soil, which purifies and regulates our water supply, provides us with over 90% of the food we eat, along with timber, fibre and bio-fuels, is washed into rivers by poor farming methods at a rate faster than it can be replenished. Great expanses of sea have been turned into dead zones through agreements that ignore research findings on sustainable fishing. Although the link between burning fossil fuels and climate chaos is now as widely accepted as the link between inhaling cigarette smoke and lung cancer, companies are given permission by governments, and money by banks, to build ever more coal-fired power stations as well as extract oil and gas from the ground regardless of local conditions.
The evidence of how we manage our relationship with nonhuman nature suggests we have not found our niche in the web of life and are thus destined for a short life-span. Given the rapidity with which we are cannibalizing the Earth is it realistic to think that our species, which has existed for a mere 200,000 years, will see the sun rise 10 million years from now, which is the average life-span of a species? What are the chances of us surviving as long as the elephant, 60 million years, the crocodile, 80 million years, or the turtle which in the course of its 150 million years saw the dinosaurs evolve and become extinct?
I suspect most people would feel offended by the idea that many nonhuman life-forms are likely to outlive humankind and continue to evolve over the one billion years our Garden of Eden is expected to sustain life. By way of our illusions we are evicting ourselves from paradise, truly the fallen species having committed Lucifer’s sin, hubris - preoccupation with self. Taking the wellbeing of other species and the health of ecosystems into account when we make decisions, and undertaking environmental restoration work, is one way we can find redemption.
