Environmentalism

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"… 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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Think globally. Act neighborly."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"…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."

"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."

"Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"Don't waste the Earth - It is our Jewel!"

"The Industrial Revolution still cannot be considered an unqualified success, for all the comfort and convenience enjoyed by a minority of people in the world. Where we stand now is the brink of unprecedented damage to the ecology of the only habitable planet in the only universe we know of, and I refer not just to climate change—which may or may not be caused by human activity —but to all the other insults and injuries we’ve done to the biosphere. While industrialism led to the formation of a prosperous middle class, it also plunged millions of people into the grimmest kind of regimented quasislavery in conditions that were arguably no improvement over their grandparents’ lives as agricultural peasants (or their distant ancestors as hunter-gatherers)."

"We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the form of environmental devastation. Of the earth’s estimated 10 million species, 300,000 have vanished in the past fifty years. Each year, 3,000 to 30,000 species become extinct, an all-time high for the last 65 million years. Within one hundred years, between one-third and two-thirds of all birds, animals, plants, and other species will be lost. Nearly 25 percent of the 4,630 known mammal species are now threatened with extinction, along with 34 percent of fish, 25 percent of amphibians, 20 percent of reptiles, and 11 percent of birds. Even more, species are having population declines. Environmental scientists speak of an “omega point” at which the vast interconnected networks of Earth’s ecologies are so weakened that human existence is no longer possible."

"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

"While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually, it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil."

"Consider a modern city, the product of the human-generated information used to build the housing, businesses, infrastructure and transportation networks that allow millions to live in close quarters, often with exciting results (both constructive and destructive). All that excitement leads us to ignore the fact that these cities of the industrial age are made possible only through massive expenditures of fossil energy and other resources, some of which come from the other side of the planet. Meanwhile, natural ecosystems are home to a much more expansive variety of creatures living in far more complex relationships, requiring none of that fossil energy to maintain. Natural ecosystems can maintain themselves for countless millennia using only solar flows, while cities draw down millions of years of concentrated energy in a relative blink of an eye."

"I was wondering why the water looked so clean in front of my house in Bainbridge here..."

"There’s a simple reason we’re seeing so many crises converging in today’s world—including climate change, widespread toxic pollution, resource depletion, skyrocketing inequality, and the disappearance of wild nature. During the past 10,000 years, humanity [has] developed agriculture, a slew of technologies, and, eventually, capitalism. Then, in the last two centuries, we wholeheartedly embraced fossil fuels. These additions to our natural biological powers have put us on a trajectory to overshoot global environmental limits. They also make it possible for a few people to exploit the many in truly diabolical ways. The whole modern techno-social system is unsustainable and it’s bound to crash. We’re seeing plenty of warning signs that the crash is imminent—from worsening trends in planetary boundaries and ecological footprint analyses, to the evaporation of democracy worldwide. At this point, there’s not much we can do, other than acknowledge reality, prepare ourselves psychologically, and adapt as best we can."

"Vertical power worked well for us humans in some ways, increasing our collective power and enabling some of us to enjoy great conveniences. But the costs have been incalculable. Moreover, the inadvertent environmental damage caused by the recent evolution of human physical and social power may be unsurvivable."

"Homo sapiens is Earth’s unequivocal champion at gaining and wielding power. We shoot probes to other planets and plumb the depths of the seas. Each year, our species extracts and processes 100 billion tons of natural resources that end up as consumer products and building materials. In order to obtain these resources, we move more soil and rock than are displaced by all of nature’s forces combined—including wind, rivers, rain, volcanoes, and earthquakes. We do so much mining, transporting, manufacturing, and waste dumping that, purely as a side effect, we’re also significantly and perilously altering the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere and oceans. That’s power. Moreover, we have found a multitude of ways to use our outsized human power to subjugate and control one another. We’ve generated so much economic inequality that a mere seven individuals now enjoy as much wealth as the poorer half of humanity—roughly four billion people. At the same time, we’ve developed weapons so lethal that the survival of our species depends on our never using them. We influence one another’s behavior with debt, laws, prisons, taxes, regulations, borders, facial recognition technology, property rights, advertising, hiring and firing, propaganda, internet and social media algorithms, and a thousand other means. Power is good; we can’t do anything without it. But it’s clear that we are creating some serious environmental and social dilemmas for ourselves. Is it possible that we humans, or at least some of us, now enjoy too much of a good thing? Or is our problem merely that we don’t understand power very well, and therefore tend to misuse it?"

"Using science, technology, and cheap energy, we expanded farmlands, chain-sawed forests, exploited fisheries, mined minerals, pumped oil, and flattened mountains for their buried coal. And we did these things in a way that was not remotely sustainable. By harvesting renewable resources faster than they could regrow, by using non-renewable resources that could not be recycled, and by choking environments with industrial wastes, we were borrowing from future generations and from other species."

"In the Machine Age nations and corporations were thought to have little or no responsibility either to their environments or to other organizations and individuals within them. Nations and corporations were considered to be virtually self-contained and autonomous. The natural environment was believed to be capable of absorbing any amount of use by man and of recovering fully. It was considered to be an unlimited source of every kind of resource. Ownership of property was equated to a license to do with it whatever one wanted. Developed nations and corporations colonialized and exploited underdeveloped societies and their physical environments. They were considered to be entitled to whatever they could get away with in the outside world. Laissez-faire was the dominant philosophy in both national and corporate affairs. That some should suffer the consequences was considered to be "natural" because struggle and conflict were assumed to be necessary for survival. Only the fit survived. Fitness was conceived both in terms of ability to adapt to changing natural conditions and ability to compete in society (a euphemism for "fight"). Progress was believed to be the product of the struggle for survival. Its cost had to be paid by the weak. In short, nations, corporations, and individuals gave little thought to their natural or social environments and those who occupied them. As the Machine Age began to end so did these attitudes for a number of reasons. Men began to suspect that the supply of natural resources was not unlimited and even began to fear that some might run out in their lifetimes. The quality of the environment, man-made and natural, began to deteriorate visibly, and the rate of deterioration seemed to exceed the recuperative capabilities of either society or Nature. Those in the environment who were exploited and left in a disadvantaged state began to organize themselves into effective protest groups and brought moral and physical pressure to bear on those responsible for their state. The health and welfare of environment and environmental systems were forced into the consciousness of nations and corporations by pressure groups formed around a variety of issues including ecology, racial equality, consumerism, and underdevelopment. Disadvantaged countries and the disadvantaged within both developed and underdeveloped countries began to press for a more equitable distribution of wealth."

"The Earth has been long denuded and debased by our machines—bled of its mystery by the enlightened scalpel of man—and our blood is the price we must pay for the planet’s resurrection."

"The Industrial Revolution opened up new ways to convert energy to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down tens of thousands of kilometres of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre."

"All life is impermanent. We are all children of the Earth, and, at some time, she will take us back to herself again. We are continually arising from Mother Earth, being nurtured by her, and then returning to her. Like us, plants are born, live for a period of time, and then return to the Earth. When they decompose, they fertilize our gardens. Living vegetables and decomposing vegetables are part of the same reality. Without one, the other cannot be. After six months, compost becomes fresh vegetables again. Plants and the Earth rely on each other. Whether the Earth is fresh, beautiful, and green, or arid and parched depends on the plants. It also depends on us."

"Our way of walking on the Earth has a great influence on animals and plants. We have killed so many animals and plants and destroyed their environments. Many are now extinct. In turn, our environment is now harming us. We are like sleepwalkers, not knowing what we are doing or where we are heading. Whether we can wake up or not depends on whether we can walk mindfully on our Mother Earth. The future of all life, including our own, depends on our mindful steps."

"Until recently, economists have not been particularly carried away with concern over environmental problems caused by industrial development. Just as in the other sciences, the few economists ...who have always sounded the alarm ...are somewhat out of the mainstream. These humanist concerns seem to have gone out of style after the age of classical economics. Even the conventional analytical models of contemporary economics seem to prefer to exclude these concepts by ignoring them entirely or by shunting them off into their own branch, called "economic externalities." These externalities include any “given” or windfall factor, such as the availability of transportation, technological know-how, a labor force, or resources, factors that are not themselves directly involved in the economic analysis of markets and businesses. For example, the regularly bright and sunny weather of Hollywood was considered an external economy of the movie industry there. The movie moguls, no matter how tyrannical, could neither turn on nor turn off the sun. But as the surrounding community grew and the smog thickened, the weather became an external economy. In very recent years concern over these economic externalities has grown. The environmentalists are beginning to be included in the mainstream. The literature is growing, and professional meetings include sessions on environmental economics. Attempts are even being made to extend the theoretical framework to include the changes in the environment caused by economic activity. [...] The Materials Flow of the Economy... sees the human race living on a 'space ship earth' in which all the inputs and outputs, all the original resources and all the final wastes, must be accounted for. Furthermore, when the materials are returned in the form of smoke, sewage, garbage, junk, heat, noise, and a wide variety of noxious gases, the world becomes a very changed place — and the change is seldom for the better. Implicit in this materials flow concept of the economy is that the less production that is needed to maintain an adequate level of affluence, the better. An efficient economy is one that gets big results with little effort. More industries, more mines, more businesses, more employment, and more consumer goods do not always mean more well-being... because all these also mean more destruction of our natural resources and despoilation of our surroundings."

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."

"For a long time, environmental justice was kept separate from the environment at large. It's become "mainstream" only recently, so it just wasn't something the general public–including reporters—really knew about. We see that slowly changing, and we're seeing more environmental reporters become more sophisticated in their understanding of environmental issues and how they impact communities of color. I pursued this because I was, first, interested in racial justice. I knew I wanted to be a reporter that uncovered societal harms right away, but it was only when I realized the severity of the climate crisis that I bridged those two interests together."

"When the well's dry, we know the worth of water."

"Sanctimonious slogans have a way of lulling well-meaning people, and at the same time providing self-seekers with means to frustrate the very controls that are most needed. Take, for example, a report entitled, “The Engineer’s Responsibility in Environmental Pollution Control,” submitted in 1971 to the government’s Council of Environmental Quality by the National Industrial Pollution Control Council. The report is an amorphous collection of noble generalities. It conjures up a vision of a crusading army of engineers, thousands abreast, marching in unison. The banner of this army is “cooperation.” Its mission is to “coordinate,” “unify,” “interact,” “centralize efforts,” and “pool resources.” Its weapons are “shared objectives,” “common goals,” “interdisciplinary concepts and techniques.” The cloud of pieties serves, not to enlighten, but to obscure the real truth, which is that environmental pollution control can never be achieved by the worthy sentiments of industrial spokesmen, but only by government regulation."

"We hear the term “climate” every day, so it is worth thinking about what we actually mean by it. Obviously, “climate” is not the same as weather. The climate is one of Earth’s fundamental life support systems, one that determines whether or not we humans, and millions of other species, are able to live on this planet. It is generated by four components: the atmosphere (the air we breathe); the hydrosphere (the planet’s water); the cryosphere (the ice sheet and glaciers); the biosphere (the planet’s plants and animals). By now, our activities had started to modify every one of these components. Our emissions of CO2 had started to modify our atmosphere. Our increasing water use had started to modify our hydrosphere. Rising atmospheric and sea-surface temperatures had started to modify the cryosphere, most notably in the unexpected shrinking of the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets. Our increasing use of land, for agriculture, cities, roads, mining—as well as all the pollution we were creating—had started to modify our biosphere. Or, to put it another way: We had started to change our climate."

"Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind."

"“Green" issues make headlines these days, but many seem unaware that without the "blue" there could be no green, no life on Earth and therefore none of the other things that humans value. Water-the blue-is the key to life. With it, anything is possible; without it, life does not exist."