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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.
Fred Kirschenmann |
