I created this blog a while ago to gripe about the sorry state of environmentalism, “sustainability”, and the ability for our species to live in harmony with our surroundings.Â
Now obviously, in the grand orchestra of the biosphere there are little dissonances that simultaneously erase and sustain life: a bear eating fish, a deer eating plants, an elephant stomping on a sapling. But as a whole, ecosystems exist in relative harmony – subject to long-term shifts in climate, sure, but graceful in their responses to change.Â
What we have today with our species is a system of consumption that has grown so complex, it is beyond the grasp of our own abilities to comprehend. Our globalized economy is based on infinitely deep supply chains that rely on resource extraction and production methods far removed from the point of consumption. This computer that I’m typing on right now is made up of plastic derived from oil drilled oceans away, metal parts whose ore extraction ruins local ecosystems, electricity throughout the supply chain from plants spewing greenhouse gases and toxic emissions into the air, and human labor under conditions that I could not bear to endure or even see. But the fact that it’s all so distant from the store where I purchased the computer or from my comfy first-world home where I use it means that I don’t face the realities of its production. This allows me to implicitly support actions that I would never explicitly condone, often running counter to my personal beliefs.Â
And because these impacts happen on a global scale, some of which won’t be fully realized until decades from now, any attempts to solve it will require deep understanding beyond the spatial and temporal limits of our own biology. While modern technology gives us the power to leave monster-sized footprints, at the end of the day we’re still just Homo sapiens, upright primates with enough sympathetic abilities to care about our surrounding community and maintain social structures. We didn’t evolve to be able to care about people on the other side of the planet or many generations down the line – out of sight, out of mind. We don’t care to understand the (industrial) systems that we’ve built and how they interact with the (natural) systems that sustain us; we are unwittingly creating a world in which we will no longer be able to thrive.Â
The question is: can we transcend our own evolutionary limits to save ourselves? I guess we’ll see the answer play out...
