Environmentalism

"We have such a desire to find, or have presented to us, a solution to maintaining modernity that almost none of us who benefit from modernity can imagine not having at least some of the “best” bits of it. […] All creatures, prior to civilisation and medicine, died of predation, injury or sickness. Of course, some may have had a reasonable life and may even have lived somewhere near the maximum time for their species (without medical attention), but the end was more likely to have been painful and long, then peaceful and quick."

"Many people believe that humans can have a sustainable future by using solar panels and wind turbines. Unfortunately, the only truly sustainable course, in terms of moving in cycles with nature, is interacting with the environment in a manner similar to the approach used by chimpanzees and baboons. Even this approach will eventually lead to new and different species predominating. Over a long period, such as 10 million years, we can expect the vast majority of species currently alive will become extinct, regardless of how well these species fit in with nature’s plan. The key to the relative success of animals such as chimpanzees and baboons is living within a truly circular economy. Sunlight falling on trees provides the food they need. Waste products of their economy come back to the forest ecosystem as fertilizer. Pre-humans lost the circular economy when they learned to control fire over one million years ago, when they were still hunter-gatherers. With the controlled use of fire, cooked food became possible, making it easier to chew and digest food. The human body adapted to the use of cooked food by reducing the size of the jaw and digestive tract and increasing the size of the brain. This adaptation made pre-humans truly different from other animals. With the use of fire, pre-humans had many powers. They spent less time chewing, so they could spend more time making tools. They could burn down entire forests, if they so chose, to provide a better environment for the desired types of wild plants to grow. They could use the heat from fire to move to colder environments than the one to which they were originally adapted, thus allowing a greater total population. Once pre-humans could outcompete other species, the big problem became diminishing returns. For example, once the largest beasts were killed off, only smaller beasts were available to eat. The amount of effort required to kill these smaller beasts was not proportionately less, however."

"If humans are to be successful on this planet for the long term (i.e., tens of thousands of years), we need a healthy ecosystem and we need to live off natural renewable flows rather than continue to spend our finite non-renewable inheritance. We’ve exploited the low-hanging fruit already, so cannot expect mining to continue producing a bonanza of non-renewable goods into the indefinite future. Recycling is also a limited-time prospect. Even a 90% recovery rate on a material that is recycled every 10 years is down to 10% of the original stock in a few short centuries [the number of cycles is log(0.1)/log(0.9) for reaching 10% given 90% recovery]. Long-term success can’t rely on these materials. The enduring commodities are the ones that replace themselves: living matter. Besides the fact that we have never built any alternative energy infrastructure (dams, photovoltaics, turbines, nuclear) without extensive reliance on fossil fuels, it is not clear how non-renewable materials could be coaxed to maintain a renewable energy infrastructure for the long term. Meanwhile, plants will continue to capture and store solar energy to fuel virtually all life on this planet, including our own. The natural world is built to last, and has stood the test of time (billions of years)—unlike our grossly unsustainable flash of “modernity” that has done nothing of the sort. Depictions of a gleaming future always leave out the unattractive yet inevitable rust, decay, waste, and cost to the biosphere."

"We still have too much air and water pollution and we still need to work to reduce it. But we also need to put the problem of pollution into a historical as well as scientific perspective..."

"The beginning of industrialization … allowed us to easily go to places we’d never been before. It also supercharged our impact on the biosphere and the resulting loss of productivity of landscapes all around the planet."

"I think the future is something that always has to be thought of in relatively concrete terms — and it has to be different from the present ... Only something that's different from the present and very concrete can have any sort of charismatic force. Looking at Western Europe, I would say, there are ... basically three plausible futures on offer. Number one is Islamic sharia law, and if you're a woman you get to wear a burqa. Number two is totalitarian AI à la China, where the computers track you in everything you do — all the time — and that's kind of creepy. So the Eye of Sauron, to use the Lord of the Rings reference, is watching you at all times. And then the third one is hyper-environmentalism, where you drive an e-scooter and you recycle. And even though I'm not a radical environmentalist ... if those are the three choices, I think you can understand why the Green Movement is winning — because those are the three visions of the future we have. And the challenge on the conservative or libertarian side is to offer something that is a picture of the future that's different from these two dystopian and one somewhat stagnant one."

"…it is clear that the human race is slowly progressing towards human enhancement technologies in order to improve themselves and achieve “ageless bodies and happy souls” but the process of gaining these abilities comes at the cost of the environment which by the end of the day, directly or indirectly, harms other living beings and puts them at risk."

"Over timescales relevant to civilization (which began 10,000 years ago with agriculture and cities), plots of almost anything relating to human activity look like hockey sticks: population, agricultural output, industrial output, mined materials, deforestation, species extinctions, and so on. Many of these certainly correlate to population growth, but the per capita impacts also have shot up, compounding the human footprint to a frightening degree. At this point, humans and their livestock account for 96% of mammal mass on the planet, leaving a mere 4% for all wild animals (half of this from massive whales and other marine mammals). It’s not just a footprint any more: it’s a boot on the throat of the planet, leaving non-human life gasping and silently begging for even a little mercy."

"Adults in this world, living in modernity, extract and dispose a continuous stream of non-renewable resources (including aquifer water used to grow food). Maintaining scale amounts to a burn rate of non-renewable expenditure and harmful waste, and at a magnitude far too great for Earth, despite all her grace, to accommodate."

"... in those traditional ecosystems that we chose to retain, millions of non-human animals will continue periodically to starve, die horribly of thirst and disease, or even get eaten alive. This is commonly viewed as "natural" and hence basically OK."

"… almost no one will ever want to give up the comforts of modernity, even if they claim to. So all countries will continue with trying to grow their economies and, for countries with some semblance of free elections, no politician or party will run on a platform of contracting the economy or of aiming for a steady state economy, without the rest of the world also doing the same (and without a world government, that won’t happen). As the various planetary boundaries get left further and further behind, the rhetoric about wanting to do something will increase, but the actions, if any, will be meagre and wholly inadequate for the task of getting us back to near some of those boundaries. Add to that, resources becoming harder to extract and collapse of civilisation is inevitable, at some point in the future… this [is] because humans act like any other species. There is no such thing as free will and so rational actions are not possible. We’ll just have to get used to business as usual playing out. A few environmentalists see the polycrisis for what it is but most seem to concentrate on climate change, so think that all we have to do is stop using fossil fuels… [and] that isn’t possible but, even if it is, those people’s primary objective is to preserve civilisation, a profoundly unsustainable enterprise. It would be satisfying to see the transition clearly fail (because it’s unsustainable in itself and can’t make an unsustainable civilisation sustainable) but only from an academic stand-point. Satisfying but also disappointing because, if the rest of our predicaments haven’t yet reached their outcomes, a true transition might keep the climate moderately liveable, for many or most, for a few decades longer, provided the air conditioning doesn’t pack up."

"Our ability to use fire… allowed us to become an invasive species."

"We [in the Republican Party] need to think about the environment. Teddy Roosevelt was a great environmentalist and people forget Reagan was the one who dealt with the ozone layer with the Montreal protocol."

"Modern materialist thinking which is linear and which holds that everything is for man's use and manipulation is losing credit. Man is being forced to define his attitude towards elements like the earth, the waters, the air, the sky, the rivers. Are they dead? Or, living? Are they strangers? Or, close relatives - father, mother, brothers, sisters, and friends? Are the oceans, the atmosphere merely great sinks, huge waste-dumps? Are the minerals, the plants, the great animal sister-creation there just for human exploitation? Have they no life and rights of their own. Sanatana dharma takes the view that they have their own rights and we have duties towards them. It says that we should cherish them and live in togetherness. If we violate this law and continue to injure them, we create karmas that will strike back in ways we can hardly imagine."

"The Environmental movement is, you might say, a movement of repressed Romantics."

"Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away."

"The combination of physical dexterity and brain power has allowed humans to manipulate the environment to suit their needs. No other species has this conscious capability. Hands are crucial: highly intelligent animals with fins and flippers have no capacity to reconstruct their surroundings. In little time at all, advances in science and engineering have supported the rapid expansion of the human population and made modern life luxurious by burning fossil fuels. The attendant transformation of the atmosphere has caused the surface of Earth to warm."

"At present population levels, we are putting unprecedented pressure on finite resources. We are conducting a grand-scale, unauthorized experiment on the 4.5 billion-year-old planet. The fact that we have not hit the bounds in a few generations of outrageous growth should not be taken as evidence for our long-haul prospects. We live like kings today, on the backs of [at least] roughly 100 energy slaves each (human metabolism is 100 Watts, but Americans enjoy 10 KW of continuous power). Our richness is very much tied to surplus energy availability, and that so far has been a story of finite [hydrocarbon-based] fossil fuels. But even under solar power, we can’t continue our track record of 3% energy growth per year for even several hundred years! Global physical limits—thermodynamic, energy return on energy invested, finite arable land, water, fisheries, climate change, etc.—are all asserting themselves to remind us that nature doesn’t care about our dreams."

"Our fossil fuel bonanza has left our ecosystem in a perilous state. We have destroyed vast forests and habitat, polluted water and soil, kicked off a rapid climate trend that natural systems may not adapt to quickly enough, and basically overrun the planet. […] 96% of mammal mass on the planet is now in the form of humans and our livestock, leaving a paltry 4% of wild mammals—land and sea. Roughly 70% of vertebrate numbers have vanished since 1970 (undoubtedly a higher fraction if the survey had started in 1700). Forests are also way down."

"Naturally, I am concerned by the question of: what magnificent things would we do with everlasting copious energy? As an excellent guide, we can ask what amazing things have we done with the recent bolus of energy from fossil fuels? Well, in the course of pursuing material affluence, we have eliminated 85% of primeval forest, made new deserts, created numerous oceanic dead zones, drained swamps, lost whole ecosystems, almost squashed the remaining wild land mammals, and initiated a sixth mass extinction with extinction rates perhaps thousands of times higher than their background levels—all without the help of CO2 and climate change (which indeed adds to the list of ills). These trends are still accelerating. Yay for humans, who can now (temporarily) live in greater comfort and numbers than at any time in history!"

"Pull the plug and much less harm to the natural world would ensue."

"We do not have to adapt to the environment. We will change the environment to suit us."

"This is a finite planet (though most seem to ignore that) and current resource extraction projects (also known as environmental destruction projects) won’t meet demand for minerals indefinitely. There is no indication that the world wants to stop expanding economic activity, or even just continuing existing activity (which will always require more mining without 100% recycling, which is impossible). So, eventually, the world economy would hit mineral limits and, therefore, will start to prioritise mining projects that were previously unthinkable."

"To nature, there is nothing special about life, and definitely nothing special about one particular life-form: humans. Everything is following natural physical laws. If there are observations that something isn’t following physical laws, then we haven’t yet understood the laws that it is most assuredly following. What does it mean for life to be simply following physical laws and processes? Well, that’s up to the individual. It certainly means we don’t have free will. It means that no human is better than any other human or better than any other life form, or even better than a rock. It means nothing to a rock. To humans, which may be the only life form with the physical abilities to wonder what this means, it means that there is no better way to live that the way we are living at any point. Unless, as individuals, we define what better actually means. If it means more money, then, for most humans, there are better ways to live. If it means less damage to the rest of nature, then there are definitely better ways to live. But it all depends on what each individual wants out of life… It can be humbling (though that depends on one’s brain chemistry) to understand that we are just physical things. However, it can also lead to a total acceptance of the collapse of civilisation, since it isn’t anything special. Civilisation will end. The Earth will end. The Solar System will end, as will our galaxy, the Milky Way, and countless other galaxies… [and] there is nothing spiritual about life, about humans. There is nothing special about humans, about this time. We are simply following a path laid out by physical laws, as is evolution… [and] that’s a shame. It would be great to think that my essence could go on for ever, and still able to think rational thoughts, just to see how all this develops."

"It’s usually the top income earners that reap the biggest reward and the average worker may barely notice that GDP increased and those in extreme poverty definitely wouldn’t. Lifting people out of poverty is one of the main reasons that is cited in favour of continued economic growth. In fact, in older data, whilst $2.20 might have ended up in the pockets of those under the then poverty line, in the 1980s, for every $100 added to the global economy, that shrunk to just 60 cents in the 1990s… [and] it is much worse now. All that extra growth required to lift people out of poverty is devastating for the environment."

"It’s difficult to convey the enormity of ecological overshoot in words. Words are simply inadequate to describe the wildlife holocaust; the damming, paving, plowing, logging, and excavation of the natural world; the billions of Hiroshima bombs worth of heat we’ve added to the world’s oceans by burning fossil fuels; the billions of tons of ice that has melted; the billions of tons of microplastics floating in the air, the water, the blood of every living being on Earth. Why is everyone not horrified every moment of every day by all of this? We are an adaptable species. We are comfortable. We are excellent at denial. We just want to get food on the table. So we exist with our blinders on, working hard not to see it so we can get through the day, once again. […] But we exist in a bubble that’s about to pop. We can’t do anything about it as individuals; all we can do is prepare ourselves mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and work to protect every single square inch of land and water for those beings who might outlast us so there will be something rather than nothing after we’re gone. We can’t prepare for what we don’t see coming. So let’s take our blinders off for just a few minutes, and see. We’ll put those blinders back on, so we can get through the day, but perhaps by seeing, we’ll work harder to protect what we love."

"A very small event in the microbial community can have an enormous impact on the environment."

"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

"In an age of mass extinction and climate catastrophe, [idealism] is dangerously complacent if not outright complicit in the existential threat facing our societies. But by accepting materialism, we accept that we can and must change the world for the better."

"The Truly Healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating."

"When plants and animals parted company on their evolutionary journey millions of years ago, plants became the givers and animals the takers. But plants call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without plants, there would be no animals and certainly no humans. What is increasingly lost on today’s humanity is that without them, there is nothing. Instead, humans have waged war on the planet’s grasslands and forests. In just a few centuries, humanity has destroyed all the major forests, wetlands, and grasslands around the world, leaving but tiny remnants. People are the quintessential takers. Biting the hand that feeds us isn’t enough; we murder the givers."

"As Earth's most messy, destructive and defective animal, man's record gives him little cause for pride. Our present intellectual superiority is no guarantee of great wisdom or survival power in our genes."

"Technology… is a simple term that covers a phenomenal diversity of different kinds of things. […] If someone were coming at you with a hammer, intent on doing you damage, my guess is you wouldn't focus on how to give them a different kind of hammer. You would understand that the damage is a result not of the technology but of the goals or the ethics of the person who's wielding it. And as long as our society doesn't place much emphasis on external environmental costs, remains preoccupied with the near term, considers it acceptable to have wide gap between the rich and the poor, and so forth and so on, so long as that's true, there's no technology which is going to give us a fundamental solution. At best, different technologies will buy us time to make the changes that we need to make socially and institutionally, and culturally."

"Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening."

"Earth has undergone radical changes throughout its [4.5] billion-year history, and as such, it would be curious if it had just now reached the state that is intrinsically valuable and ought to be preserved in perpetuity."

"Baconian science is at the root of the apocalypse. We have been blessed by advances in medicine, agriculture and engineering. Science has done exactly what we asked of it and now we are set for annihilation. If European science had petered out after the discoveries of the seventeenth century, we would be less numerous and [the] Earth would not be warming."

"Even when the pioneer didn't rape Nature, he divorced her a little too easily: he missed the great lesson that both ecology and medicine teach - that Man's great mission is not to conquer nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently but lovingly for his own purposes."

"Think globally. Act neighborly."

"We use energy to get things and build things, to heat things and cool things, to illuminate things and move things. (Energy interacts with things because it’s part of physics.) We use energy to clear forests, plant crops, mine materials, pump water out of aquifers, and provide goodies to satisfy global demand. Historically, we have consumed as much energy as we are able to utilize. More energy has translated into bigger (and more) houses, more cars, more possessions, and less of the natural world."

"… no species has ever been penalized for putting its own needs ahead of the needs of all other species. In fact, they would not likely have survived natural selection had they done so. Thus, it is no surprise that humans do the same thing. If more for us means less for other species, so be it (or even: all the better). The catch is that humans have reached a state of capability far in excess of any other species—largely facilitated by our ability to amplify our metabolic energy by orders-of-magnitude via the harnessing of external energy sources. So our selfishness is now deadly at an extinction-relevant scale. We are no longer playing by the rules that got us here as “fair play” members of the ecosystem. If we do not devise an intentional method of suppressing human exceptionalism, we will foul the nest to the point of self-harm (sound familiar?) by precipitating an ecosystem collapse. In this unfortunate, unwitting undoing, we will have answered evolution’s question: how far can intelligence be pushed as a survival strategy before it is self-terminating? Or worse than self-terminating: taking numerous other innocent species down with us. Let’s not be those people. The path forward is to put less emphasis on “smart” and “clever” (which got us into this mess), and more on “wise.” This looks like intentionally stepping off our throne as conquerors and masters of planet Earth, appreciating that we are all (all species) in this together, and all need each other to survive. Biodiversity is our greatest ally. Give the squirrels, newts, and nuthatches a voice. Ask what’s good for them, what measures they would vote for, what legal action they would take if they could. Would they vote for “solving” climate change by bestowing more energy and growth on the human race? Does the introduction to this piece leave them applauding in admiration, or diving for cover?"

"A human supremacist—not driven by hate, let’s be clear—thinks nothing of clearing a forest for crops; exterminating pests; enslaving animals for work or food; damming a river for energy; killing a bear who has attacked a human; animal research for the remote possibility of someday treating a human disease; scraping the ocean floor for minerals; destroying desert communities of life with solar installations; killing countless birds with domestic cats, speeding hulks (planes, cars, windmills), and even house windows. Why ever wouldn’t we do these things? One human life (especially a child) is worth any number of frogs, eels, meerkats, chickadees, or deer, in the human supremacist mind."

"The tree of life contains numerous branches and we’re at one momentary twig end. Evolution has no goal, and is never done. We are in no way “above” the rest of the tree, or at the tip of the most important branch. It is not a pyramid with a top, and we are easily outdone on any number of metrics by the plants and animals of this planet. We also absolutely cannot exist without a web of life supporting everything we do."

"What’s missing from the mainstream view is that preservation of present-day human population, material prosperity, economic health (translation: cancerous growth), and all that comes with it is doomed to fail no matter what, based on the simple fact that it is intrinsically and grossly unsustainable, built as it is on a one-time inheritance of non-renewable resources and the inexorable annihilation of ecological health—all in a relative flash of time."

"… Enlightenment science has greatly accelerated modernity's atrocities and is a net negative. The insights gained are destructive precisely because they have been "correct" (predictive). Yet, intent is a major piece here. The same knowledge in the hands of an animist respecting all life would not have the same result, but could even amplify the sense of oneness (rocks are our kin, and we could not exist without them)."

"The creator is angry. Everyone is going to be sorry for what they have done. A day of reckoning is coming. And it's going to be for everyone on the planet. It will make no distinction for religion or creed. Something is going to happen."

"Even if the Democratic administration were resoundingly successful on all fronts, its initiatives would still be utterly insufficient to resolve the existential threat of climate breakdown and the devastation of our planet’s life-support systems. That’s because the multiple problems confronting us right now are symptoms of an even more profound problem: The underlying structure of a global economic and political system that is driving civilization toward a precipice... As long as government policies emphasize growth in gross domestic product and transnational corporations relentlessly pursue shareholder returns, we will continue accelerating toward global catastrophe... We need to forge a new era for humanity — one that is defined, at its deepest level, by a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior. In short, we need to change the basis of our global civilization. We must move from a civilization based on wealth accumulation to one that is life-affirming: an ecological civilization..."

"This is the fundamental idea underlying an ecological civilization: using nature’s own design principles to reimagine the basis of our civilization... An ecological civilization is both a new and ancient idea. While the notion of structuring human society on an ecological basis might seem radical, Indigenous peoples around the world have organized themselves from time immemorial on life-affirming principles....Every year that we head closer to catastrophe—as greater climate-related disasters rear up, as the outrages of racial and economic injustice become even more egregious, and as life for most people becomes increasingly intolerable—the old narrative loses its hold on the collective consciousness. Waves of young people are looking for a new worldview—one that makes sense of the current unraveling, one that offers them a future they can believe in. It’s a bold idea to transform the very basis of our civilization to one that’s life-affirming. But when the alternative is unthinkable, a vision of a flourishing future shines a light of hope that can become a self-fulfilling reality. Dare to imagine it. Dare to make it possible by the actions you take, both individually and collectively—and it might just happen sooner than you expect."

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

"The destruction of the planet’s web of life is a screaming-ambulance-siren problem not merely because it is the other main driver of our climate crisis but in and of itself. Nobody should have to point out that it is appalling to lose a single species to human activity, let alone the current reality of over 150 species a day. Nobody should be numb to such a biological apocalypse, to such wholesale killing caused not by somebody else over there but by each and every one of us living in the toxic, genocidal, ecocidal machine we call civilisation."

"Cancer is the only thing in nature that grows indefinitely at the same pace as the human economy. It is no surprise then, that there have been a host of consequences from our political leaders’ endless pursuit of growth. Global warming is the best known, least deadly, and most over-hyped of the fallout crises – resource shortages, soil depletion, deforestation, desertification, species extinctions, agricultural run-off, toxic water courses, are just a few of the less publicised environmental crises that threaten to wipe out billions of humans long before the temperature really starts to heat up."