Kirschenmann: Managing with less Part II: Reinventing the human

By FRED KIRSCHENMANN, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow

Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land. One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. — Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold recognized almost 60 years ago that the ecological damage we are doing to the land community will not stop unless we reinvent ourselves. Continuing to see ourselves as “conquerors” of the land community will always detract from appropriate land use.

Assuming that economic self-interest or government regulation will somehow lead to suitable conservation also is an illusion. Large segments of our ecological landscape have no immediate economic value, but are essential to long-term ecological health. Therefore, Leopold’s “land ethic” founded on an “ecological conscience” is essential to our survival on the planet. Technological and economic cleverness need to be guided by ecological wisdom.

Perhaps in Leopold’s day we still had the luxury of time to debate his proposition. Now we have reached a point where the time for debate is over and the time for action is imminent. Our relentless pursuit of an extractive economy has mined our natural resources, depleted our biodiversity, and overwhelmed nature’s natural sinks with our wastes to a point where it now threatens the planet’s basic functions. The resilience of our oceans (which support over 90 percent of the livable habitat of the planet, absorb much of the carbon and supply 70 percent of the oxygen we breathe) has been compromised. We are using up groundwater faster than nature can replenish it. And we are releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at a rate that threatens to dramatically change earth’s climate, inviting another period of mass extinction.

Jim Hansen, one of our most distinguished climatologists with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, pointed out a year ago that we had about ten years left to make major changes if we want to avoid that outcome. That means we now have nine years left.

All of this ecological damage, the fact that it is caused by human activity and that we have little time to change course if we are to prevent a major global meltdown, is well documented and no longer questioned by any serious scientist. Yet we have done precious little to address the problem. The reason is not that we lack the information to change course, it is that we lack the will. We have convinced ourselves that we can only maintain our quality of life by expanding our role as “conquerors” of nature, and by perpetuating our obsession with the notion that only the creation of wealth can ensure well-being.

This leaves us with only one conclusion – we need to reinvent the human. We must now transform ourselves from a species that believes it can continue to exploit the planet for our personal gain, to a species that lives in a mutually beneficial manner with the rest of the planet’s rich biotic community.

We must, in other words, recognize that we are but “plain members and citizens” (as Leopold put it) of a rich, diverse, interdependent, self-regulating and self-renewing biotic community. The well-being of this community is absolutely essential to our own well-being. Exploiting that community to enrich ourselves is a fool’s errand.

A two-fold delusion
Perhaps the greatest barrier to making this transition is a two-fold delusion that we seem incapable of shedding. First is the false belief that our extractive economy is sustainable. The second is our flawed notion that quality of life is tightly linked to wealth expansion. We persist in both delusions despite all evidence to the contrary.

Numerous studies have now shown that as our collective wealth has increased dramatically in recent decades, most indicators of our well-being actually have declined. And anyone who still believes that we can continue to indefinitely draw down our ecological capital and “externalize” our wastes without dire consequences is just not paying attention.

Ironically, we have many concrete examples of different ways to live. Gary Gardner’s new book from the Worldwatch Institute, Inspiring Progress (2006, W.W. Norton), provides us with numerous examples of how we can reinvent ourselves to actually sustain a better quality of life and begin restoring our ecological capital in the process. The key argument of his book, as he puts it, is that

… the impressive creativity of the 20th century lacked a strong set of ethical boundaries that could sustain progress over the long term and orient it toward prosperity for all. Human creativity was like a river without banks, the flow of innovation impressive but unchanneled. One missing riverbank was ecological wisdom, which might have helped us design human activities to work in step with nature. We built economies that were resource intensive, with an unprecedented toll on air, water, climate, and non-human species. The other absent bank was an ethic of human well-being, which might have helped rich and poor alike build more dignified and fulfilling lives . . . Without the guiding wisdom of ecology and well-being . . . [precisely Leopold’s urging over 50 years ago] . . . human cleverness has sown the seeds of economic and social disintegration.

News

Kirschenmann: Managing with less Part II: Reinventing the human