This old mouse is worried.
We need help.
Life is on the brink of collapse. The natural systems that support life on Earth are failing, and the cause of their breakdown is human meddling.
Humans are meddlers by nature, and as long as humanity exists, it will tinker, manipulate, and interfere. Climate change, plastic pollution, environmental toxins, deforestation, soil degradation, invasive species, and plant and animal extinctions are all the result of human tampering.
Humanity can’t help itself, so what can be done about the harm that humans are causing? Perhaps, if the human instinct to monkey with things is coupled with an ethic of sustainability, humanity can pull back on its destructiveness enough that Earth will get a chance to recover.
Here’s the idea:
- An ethic is a guiding principle that measures how beneficial or destructive human actions are.
- Sustainability is acting in harmony with the world’s natural systems.
- An ethic of sustainability would assess how compatible human actions are with the world’s natural order.
An ethic of sustainability would help humanity see and understand how its actions are ruining the world. It would lend clarity to the meaning of sustainability, which, at the moment, is a catchphrase for greenwashing, and it would throw light on the false narratives that feed human meddling.
These mistaken ideas include:
1. Humanity can separate itself from the natural world.
Humans who believe this build doomsday bunkers and propose colonies on Mars, but belief won’t help them when the machinery breaks and the food, water, and fuel run out, and they're forced to leave their bunkers and attempt to survive in a world that doesn’t support life, be it Earth or Mars.
2. The benefits of altering the natural world outweigh the negative consequences.
Let’s cut to the chase and start with the consequences. They’re collapse and death. What benefits outweigh that?
3. The world is self-healing and can be reaped endlessly.
This idea worked, to a degree, long ago when human societies could move to new terrain when they had depleted the territory they were in. Left alone, habitats could heal, although some damage, like extinctions, was irreversible. In the 21st century, eight billion humans occupy all livable environments and disrupt all that aren’t. There’s no place to go, and Earth has no room to recover.
4. More meddling can solve the problems of previous meddling.
There is no technological fix that won’t create new problems that will also need fixing. Human technology is always disruptive, and the only sustainable systems on Earth are Earth’s natural systems.
Of course, an ethic of sustainability will always be imperfect. Nature is vast and complex and cannot be fully understood by humanity, and human ideas of sustainability will always be flawed. But humans have figured out enough about the natural world to make educated guesses about how to act in harmony with it, and they have the intelligence to see what is and isn’t working and to refine their choices.
It’s unknowable, in this moment, if humanity can back off enough to stop the collapse, but it’s clear that without an attempt, global failure is guaranteed. Humanity won’t go back to its pre-industrial way of life, but it can bring its systems more in line with the world’s natural systems—if that’s its goal.
If its options are business as usual and catastrophe or shifting course and surviving smaller disasters, what choice does humanity really have?
Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t human go on as best we can while the world declines.