CLIMATE CRISIS
The Great Misunderstanding
Nature is about to teach us a tough lesson
We profoundly misunderstand the meaning of natural order.
That’s the beginning of all our woes, as a species. It doesn’t explain everything, but I believe it’s a significant part of the story.
Our conceit is that we thought the Earth, our home, is ours to do with as we please, without consequences. Armed with the certainty of divine provenance and providence, humanity believed that nothing bad could happen to it, despite its increasingly severe abuses against its cradle.
God would rescue us. It might be some of us, the chosen people of the hour, the righteous few, the true believers, but the idea that at the end of all things the chosen would be saved led us to commit acts of terrible inhumanity and short-sightedness.
And if it weren’t God, it would be technology. Human ingenuity transformed us from barely coherent knuckle-draggers into explorers of space and masters of the atom. Whether it was a mysterious monolith that helped us get there, the hand of God, or our own evolving intelligence matters little. The fact is that, for all we know (and barring any hypothetical top secret knowledge of superior extra-terrestrial intellect), we are the only species that has managed to surpass its biological programming and become something more than self-perpetuating cell colonies.
And that created the delusion of some higher purpose. I’m not dismissing the idea altogether, but the fact is that if there truly is a higher purpose to our existence, even if it is just as conscious observers of the universe, then we have done a terrible job of ensuring the future of our mission.
Either because of or in conjunction with a belief in a deity looking out for us, we came to believe that we are somehow above nature. The escalating climate crisis is proving to us that this was a terribly misguided notion.
Not only are we not independent from nature, but we are only repeating the cycles of the past, as we are responsible for what is to be the sixth mass extinction event on this planet. Ever since life emerged, whether by accident or intelligent design, there have been where the majority of life on Earth was eliminated and the survivors subsequently filled the void. It took no less than five of these events for mammals to emerge as the dominant form of life on the planet, and it’s anyone’s guess what the sixth event will lead to.
So this begs the question (a series of them, actually): why did there have to be five such mass death events for the “chosen” species to emerge? Could we, perhaps, not be such a special case in the history of evolution? Could it be that, despite being exceptional, we bungled our chance at becoming something greater? Does the fact that we are the perpetrators of our own demise matter when looking at the big picture? The dinosaurs were blissfully unaware of the fact that this odd, bright thing in the sky would bring about their doom, and so have we been unaware, for most of our history, that our actions would eventually destroy us. Even when allowed us to that we in .
It’s not flattering for an intelligent species to blindly walk into a trap of its own making, but when all is said and done, the result is the same: the cycle repeats itself.
I keep thinking about the story of the . The United States Coast Guard introduced a small number of them on this secluded island in 1944, as an “emergency food source”. After it abandoned the island, the population, lacking a natural predator, grew unchecked to a staggering 6,000 in less than 20 years. Then, in just two years, the population crashed to a mere 42. Today, there are none.
In short, the reindeer, without any natural culling from predators, grew to an unsustainable number, surpassed the carrying capacity of the island, and, unable to (literally) leave for greener pastures, proceeded to consume everything they could find. Thus, they condemned themselves to death by starvation.
Our assumption about nature is that it’s some sort of wise entity that always manages to strike a delicate balance in a myriad ecosystems. Regardless of the fact that it was humans who introduced a new species into a secluded region, thus eliminating the possibility of migration, it could have been a chance occurrence, such as a harsh winter that froze the water around the island, that could have had the same result.
Thus, although one could argue that the reindeer were doomed, since they were introduced into an ecosystem where “they didn’t belong,” we should remember that all species at a certain point were in a similar position. Species adapt to ecosystems, changing them in the process, and that has been happening since the first amphibians became so after first flapped clumsily on some shore, and our ancestors abandoned the trees and started walking upright on the ground.
The point of this accidental “experiment” is that although nature does find a way, it is less of a delicate surgeon and more of a blacksmith, hammering away at imperfections with a blunt instrument. What we see as a delicate balance in any given ecosystem is almost always a result of a brutal natural selection process. It’s just that it’s usually too slow for us to understand it as such. Species adapt or die.
It’s not difficult to draw a parallel between the hapless reindeer on St. Matthew Island and humanity on Earth. It doesn’t matter that reindeer are just dumb animals that ate and procreated themselves to extinction. Even intelligent animals can fall into the very same trap, despite their ability to and the inescapable results of their excesses. Consider that for the time since humans abandoned the small island, it must have been heaven for the reindeer. Free to roam without fear of predators, to graze and mate in peace for years, their population grew by more than 200 times its original size. This “golden age” lasted about 20 years. Their huge population crashed in just two. If there were reindeer scientists, they would have predicted that their explosive growth was unsustainable. But if these hypothetical intelligent reindeer were anything like us, these warnings would be ignored.
Whether aware or unaware of their oncoming doom, species that overshoot the carrying capacity of their habitat will wither and die.
That’s how nature works. After humanity is gone or reduced to small, scattered tribes that eke out a miserable existence in a hostile world, a new balance will emerge, and the cycle will go on. Even if we turn our planet into a radioactive, frozen wasteland, some pockets of life will remain and, over millions of years, life will bounce back in one form or another.
This is even reflected in religion, with the repeating pattern of a cataclysmic event reducing the number of humans to a small fraction and starting over again. Our mistake is that we believe that we are somehow exempt from this pattern of planetwide death and rebirth, that our technology or special destiny will spare us, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The late and great George Carlin said it best: “” The planet will still be here in a billion years, but we won’t. The bottom line is that species, in long enough timeframes, adapt until prevailing conditions or a sudden shock make further adaptation impossible. Then they die.
