Imagining the Future

 

AVID Audio Course Description (Conservation Biology)

 

 

Latest Peer-Reviewed Journal Article:

McPherson, Guy R., Beril Sirmack, and Ricardo Vinuesa. March 2022. Environmental thresholds for mass-extinction events. Results in Engineering (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2022.100342.

 

Draft script:
As Earth Day draws near, I propose we pause to consider our role on this fine, finite planet. If Earth could think, what would it think of us and our actions?

The human role in the extinction of species and the degradation of ecosystems is well documented. Since European settlement in North America, and especially after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve witnessed a substantial decline in biological diversity of native plant and animal groups as well as profound changes in the assemblages of remaining species.

We’ve ripped minerals from the Earth, often bringing down mountains in the process. We’ve harvested nearly all the old-growth timber on the continent, replacing thousand-year-old trees with neatly ordered plantations of small trees.

We’ve hunted species to the point of extinction and driven livestock across almost every acre of the continent, baring hillsides and facilitating massive erosion. We’ve plowed huge landscapes into monoculture nightmares, transforming fertile soil into sterile, lifeless dirt.

We’ve burned ecosystems and, perhaps more importantly, we’ve put out naturally occurring fires. We’ve paved thousands of acres for highways and cars and, in the process, have disrupted the movements of thousands of animals.

We’ve spewed pollution and dumped garbage, dirtying our air, fouling our water, and contributing greatly to the warming of the planet. We have, to the maximum extent possible allowed by our “intellect” and insatiable desire, consumed the planet.

That good old industrial economy just keeps on giving us toys and, in return, we keep using the toys to pummel planet Earth. Now we find ourselves staring into the abyss of extinction at our own hand.

Although insults by Homo sapiens since the Industrial Revolution are well documented and widely acknowledged, abundant archaeological evidence indicates similar actions in the more distant past have led to the rise and fall of several major civilizations. The industrial economy clearly represents the latest and worst attempt to destroy the living planet, although we’re simply echoing and magnifying events of the last few thousand years.

We spent the first two million years of the human experience living in small tribes with a soft touch on the land. We exchanged this modest, enduring living arrangement for a system that enslaves us, makes us crazy, and then kills us. The phrase coined by George Whyte-Melville in his 1858 book The Interpreter, comes immediately to mind: “too clever by half.”

I used to believe there was a better way. I used to believe we know what it is. However much we dislike civilization and all it brings with it, we know better than to cheer its demise. Even Benjamin Franklin is credited with a line that seems to support pre-civilized life over how we live today: “No European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

For far too long, we have interfered with the Tao. We’ve made the sky filthy in ways unimaginable to Lao Tzu. We’ve depleted the earth in ways unforeseeable to anybody of his time.

We’ve caused, and continue to cause, extinction of species at a rate several orders of magnitude above the historical rate. The equilibrium has crumbled. And now, more than ten million generations into the human experience, we face the accelerating collapse of the industrial economy. Some are cheering for it. Some of us know better.

Continuing human-population overshoot on an overshot planet is an unimaginably terrible idea that makes it seem as if terminating the last, worst civilization before it destroys the final remnants of the living planet is a good idea. Before it makes the air unfit to breathe. Before it makes the water unfit to drink. Before it washes all the topsoil into the sea. Before it kills us all.

But it’s not a good idea. Terminating civilized life invokes the loss of aerosol masking, as I’ve indicated many times in this space. The resulting, rapid overheating of Earth likely will take all life on Earth into the abyss of extinction, as I have mentioned repeatedly in this space.

Terminating civilized life also will lead to the implosion of nuclear facilities. As a result, stratospheric ozone will be stripped away, leading to super-heating of the planet in a matter of minutes. Nothing will survive.

Our choices are exceptionally limited. We can destroy the civilization that is killing us all. Doing so will lead to the loss of all life on Earth in the near future.

We can attempt to sustain this set of living arrangements as long as possible, thus allowing for the retention of habitat for our species and others. Doing so is hardly a get-out-of-jail free card. Although it allows the continuation of life, including human life, for a while longer, it comes with a hefty price-tag. It sustains the civilization that is destroying life on Earth.

Maintaining life, including human life, is an idea I appreciate. And it’s not merely life that you and I love: it’s life of a high quality, the kind that brings joy alongside well-being.