15.10.07
Blog Action Day!
Right. An environment-themed post. And since I try to avoid posting about my environment-related work, I'll do a philosophical one.
Is there a point in trying to protect the environment? No. It's simply against the way the world works.
Now that I've made this broad, outrageous statement, let me elaborate.
The first, and greatest, reason is the population growth. This is the first thing which, try as we might, we can't avoid, stop or change. Humans are a low-R, high-K species, and we're hard-coded to take every possible advantage to increase our numbers as much as possible, because it takes us a lot of time and effort to reach maturity and reproduce, and growing-up is fraught with dangers which cause, under the circumstances which have existed throughout most of Homo sapiens' hundred-thousand-year history, not many of us to survive. That same hard-coding has been driving us to try to decrease our mortality rate by any means necessary, and we've become extremely successful in doing that during the last sixty or seventy years. True, the population increase is slowing down, and the population decrease in some of the 'developed' countries could indicate that some kind of population control process is taking hold, but there are already way too many of us, and the countries that are likely to have the greatest impact, such as India, China and the US (the world's greatest waster of resources), still have respectable population growth rates.
The second reason is the inevitable increase in resource consumption. Try as we might, unless we return to some sort of pre-industrial state, we will continue doing things which are both unsustainable and unnecessary (in the strictest of maintaining the population size not growing, but stable), since those things are very closely related to what we (based on our biology, so that's not likely to change) consider 'success'. If you consider that the current US, with its less than 5% of the world population produces 22% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions (I think it's safe to assume the emissions of everything else, as well as the resource consumption, are somewhere in that area), imagine what it will look like when China and India eventually catch up. And they will catch up. People want to be warm in winter and cool in summer, they want their cars and computers and health care and unlimited food one need just to reach for. It is inevitable.
All this wouldn't really be a problem if we could control ourselves, but we can't. We can't help wanting to increase our numbers, that's the way we're built. The ability to waste resources is closely related to the perception of reproductive success on so many levels, that we're not likely to stop doing that, either. And finally, there's a simple fact, recognised in both biology and economics, that, at least in the short term, those who grow most quickly will always get ahead of those who hold back (for whatever reason), and drive them out of existence.
We might as well face it. Humans are a failed project. The best thing we can do, short of reducing our population by at least two-thirds and going back to the pre-industrial times (and this is not happening), would be to destroy our environment as quickly as possible and get it over with. Sure, we're going to take many others down with us, but that is going to happen anyway. If we hurry up, we might actually limit the damage.
Is there a point in trying to protect the environment? No. It's simply against the way the world works.
Now that I've made this broad, outrageous statement, let me elaborate.
The first, and greatest, reason is the population growth. This is the first thing which, try as we might, we can't avoid, stop or change. Humans are a low-R, high-K species, and we're hard-coded to take every possible advantage to increase our numbers as much as possible, because it takes us a lot of time and effort to reach maturity and reproduce, and growing-up is fraught with dangers which cause, under the circumstances which have existed throughout most of Homo sapiens' hundred-thousand-year history, not many of us to survive. That same hard-coding has been driving us to try to decrease our mortality rate by any means necessary, and we've become extremely successful in doing that during the last sixty or seventy years. True, the population increase is slowing down, and the population decrease in some of the 'developed' countries could indicate that some kind of population control process is taking hold, but there are already way too many of us, and the countries that are likely to have the greatest impact, such as India, China and the US (the world's greatest waster of resources), still have respectable population growth rates.
The second reason is the inevitable increase in resource consumption. Try as we might, unless we return to some sort of pre-industrial state, we will continue doing things which are both unsustainable and unnecessary (in the strictest of maintaining the population size not growing, but stable), since those things are very closely related to what we (based on our biology, so that's not likely to change) consider 'success'. If you consider that the current US, with its less than 5% of the world population produces 22% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions (I think it's safe to assume the emissions of everything else, as well as the resource consumption, are somewhere in that area), imagine what it will look like when China and India eventually catch up. And they will catch up. People want to be warm in winter and cool in summer, they want their cars and computers and health care and unlimited food one need just to reach for. It is inevitable.
All this wouldn't really be a problem if we could control ourselves, but we can't. We can't help wanting to increase our numbers, that's the way we're built. The ability to waste resources is closely related to the perception of reproductive success on so many levels, that we're not likely to stop doing that, either. And finally, there's a simple fact, recognised in both biology and economics, that, at least in the short term, those who grow most quickly will always get ahead of those who hold back (for whatever reason), and drive them out of existence.
We might as well face it. Humans are a failed project. The best thing we can do, short of reducing our population by at least two-thirds and going back to the pre-industrial times (and this is not happening), would be to destroy our environment as quickly as possible and get it over with. Sure, we're going to take many others down with us, but that is going to happen anyway. If we hurry up, we might actually limit the damage.
