I started my career as an environmentalist in my early twenties when I first learned how quickly human activities were wiping out wildlife species. It was spiritual work for me, born of a deep love of nature, and the awe-inspiring diversity of life on our small, blue planet. My formal education was a multi-disciplinary, systems-based approach at The Evergreen State College that included the study of economics as part of the Environmental Studies program. Although knowing the basics of micro and macroeconomics was useful information, I viewed it as far less important than understanding living systems and learning to communicate about them in ways that made people care.
As my career advanced and I became engaged with larger NGOs, and the business and political sectors, I was immersed in the message that economic ramifications were the only thing that would get attention and action from leaders and people in positions of societal power. I desperately wanted to make a difference so I tailored my approach to speak their language and began using economic rationale to make the case for protecting and restoring aspects of nature, wild species and critical habitats.
I continued to use an economic rationale even while pointing out the insanity of an economic model based on limitless growth and the destruction of our planetary life support systems. It was a flawed approach, doomed to fail.
Recently, the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London released an update of the Living Planet Report, which assesses the status of wildlife populations across the globe. Since I was born, we have lost 70 percent of Earth’s mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish. Currently, more than one million entire species are on the verge of extinction. WTF are we doing?
I’ve seen several analyses of the economic implications of this decimation of wild creatures and assessments of how the losses might impact human activities. These pieces note the economic importance of pollinating insects to agricultural production. They tout the billions of dollars bats save farmers by eating pest insects. They warn how much money will be lost to eco-tourism when there is no more eco to watch. They describe trees, forests, wild creatures as economic opportunities. These analyses piss me off.
Earth’s irreplaceable wild beings are not economic opportunities to be exploited for human benefit. They are sacred and glorious aspects of the miracle of creation.
The gnarly truth is the current limitless-growth, consumption-driven, waste-churning Capitalist economic system is incompatible with healthy ecosystems, wildlife, and a livable future. We cannot tweak our way to a healthy planet by making policy and behavior changes from within the current status quo insane system. An excerpt from the Living Planet report reads,
We know that transformational change – game-changing shifts – will be essential to put theory into practice. We need systemwide changes in how we produce and consume, the technology we use, and our economic and financial systems. Underpinning these changes must be a move from goals and targets to values and rights, in policy-making and in day-to-day life.
What do we really value? How many times do we see situations in which another “developer” is arguing for permission to annihilate a seemingly-unimportant population of frogs or tiny fish in a wetland area they want to build in? How many more huge swaths of the Amazon should cattle barons wipe out to produce more cheap hamburgers at fast-food chains? I put the word “developer” in parenthesis to make a point. We arrogantly label everything that humans build as “development.” That is an utterly misleading description. There is a difference between development, growth, and sprawl. Development means making something better, stronger; growth just means getting bigger. Misplaced values and human arrogance will be our undoing.
Lots of political pundits and media figures are predicting a recession on the horizon. I hope so. Recessions are the only time the planet gets a break from our rapacious global economy. Shouldn’t that fact cause us to question our current way of doing things? To make this point, I’ve shared it before, but I cannot recommend strongly enough the documentary, The Year Earth Changed – here’s the trailer. This shows how fast Earth can heal if humanity gains some sanity.
I urge everyone to lean into this precious and precarious time. Ask real questions. Demand that elected officials ask real questions. Question the status quo. Have challenging conversations at every opportunity. Examine values at a personal and cultural level. Vote.
We live on the only known planet that supports life and we are allowing that life to be wiped out at breakneck speed in pursuit of economic growth. Earth will not be a great place for humans if there is no place on it for non-humans, regardless of what happens in the human economy. Economic growth is not sacred but every single, miraculous wild being is.
See below for more Life with Livvy and Lotta Dog.
Life with Livvy and Lotta Dog — Psychological and Emotional Manipulation
Olive has inspired me to create a new word:
Cuteing verb
Definition of cuteing
1. Applying charm that produces the “love hormone” Oxytocin in the one being cuted. This often leads to increased bonding.
2. Emotional or psychological manipulation to achieve a certain outcome by applying attractive, funny, often irresistible behaviors and expressions.
It’s worth noting that one of the current actual Oxford Dictionary definitions for cute is “Clever or cunning, especially in a self-seeking or superficial way.”
Am I being manipulated? Absolutely and I’m great with it. This little monkey is so darned entertaining. She often gives a crooked smile in which one side of her lips curl up. I’ve been trying, with no success as yet, to get a pic of it. It is one of her top cuteing tactics. I can’t count the number of times she has wiggled up to someone and flashed that grin and they have melted like butter, inviting her to jump on them, etc., etc. Livvy is very skillful in her cuteing. Here’s a vid of her pestering me to throw a yogurt container.
This weekend we will be doing some of her other favorite verbs like running, jumping, climbing, and racing as we compete in our second ever dog agility trial.
I get a bemused kick out of how much I am enjoying this agility stuff. I have been in anticipation mode all week, looking forward to the event. It’s a beautiful time-out from weightier things and an amazing experience of communication and love between species.
Have a lovely rest of your week and as we say in agility, “may the Course be with you.” May it also be with me and Livvy this weekend.
Peace,
Cylvia
Every wild creature is sacred. Every freshwater fish is sacred. Every bird is sacred. But human beings feel creatures and birds and fishes are not sacred, forgetting they put themselves in danger of extinction by seeing economic growth as sacred and seeing other creatures as not sacred. Thanks for strongly making the point.
Sylvia:
I share the angst and fading hope of your essay. The reality of our situation as a species is direr than anyone dares admit in public. However, I’ve learned a few things since that decade ago when I struggled for solutions, gave excessively long talks, and came away sadder but wiser. I’m convinced about how things will play out globally, and the next 100 years won’t be pretty. However, the biosphere will recover, and life will thrive as it has done for nearly 4 billion years. Perhaps a remnant of humanity will survive for a few thousand or a few million years. Perhaps not.
We are not a particularly selfish species. Every living being is intrinsically selfish. Were it not the case, life on Earth could not have endured. The question is: what is it that requires us to forego selfishness and compromise for the future? I found the answer in Harari’s Sapiens: We became the dominant species in a mere 75 thousand years because we learned to tell each other stories that enable arbitrarily large groups of strangers to cooperate. Races, nations, corporations, religions, economies, sports, rights and obligations, and different political beliefs are all stories that various groups of strangers use to cooperate and exclude other strangers or other species. The stories are all fabrications, sometimes loosely attached to tangible things like lions, tigers, and trees.
Our earlier stories enabled us to produce later ones of sciences and technologies, from which came tools, machines, and manufactured systems that allow individuals, small groups, or the human population to take actions with global consequences. The stories that gave us all our benefits produced our existential crisis.
The law of supply and demand and other market-promoting stories are neither scientific (based on bodies of evidence) nor accurate. They produced the falsehood that growth and health are necessarily linked. Individual people usually are healthy during adulthood without having to grow. The biosphere has decoupled overall growth and health and maintains health even when it catastrophically shrinks. Study how living systems separate and couple growth and health and our economic and political errors become blatantly obvious. I could spell it out, but far more fun to discover for yourself.
There are no free lunches, no final solutions about anything. Every choice, system, or story is a temporary set of tradeoffs that works for a while, then is gamed and degrades the environment upon which it depends and either evolves or perishes. The evolution of life in the biosphere supplies 4 billion years of evidence for these assertions.
Happy to discuss this further.
Ed Lee