humans are an essential part of the ecosystem. nearly every ecosystem on earth had humans as an essential part of its function. the earth would be worse off than before if we were gone suddenly overnight. send tweet
I don’t remember dinosaurs drilling for oil and dumping trash everywhere…
very gently: yes. some humans have been doing destruction recently. yes, some humans are living in unsustainable ways. yes, the world is suffering for the actions of the humans who exploit the natural world.
however.
this has not been the case for the vast majority of time. this is not currently the case for many people on the earth right now. we evolved alongside earth’s ecosystems, as they evolved alongside us. we are part of it. we are embedded in the world. we have never been seperate from it, and the idea that we are – that our actions somehow could have no consequences for the world at large – is the mindset that allowed the current crisis to reach where it is.
it’s. hard to truly get a sense of the scale of humans’ existence on the planet– under the readmore i’ve drawn out a rough timeline for you. it is very long, so i’ll put it under the cut.
suffice it to say: humans, homo sapiens, have existed on the earth for 315,000 years. we did not invent agriculture until 11,500 years ago. the industrial revolution, the drilling for oil and dumping plastic? that has happened only in the last 250 years.
we are part of the world. we are in the world. some of us have very, very recently forgotten this fact. but we are remembering, and remembering quickly.
the earth needs us. it needs us to fix the things we’ve gotten wrong, yes. but it also needs us to be humans. to hunt, to burn, to care for the forests and the fields and the grasslands. it has always needed us. we are not interlopers here. we belong. we have simply forgotten our manners.
