As a thought experiment, what’s the worst we, as a species, could do to the planet right now? Well, nukes obviously spring to mind as the most destructive option. Allow me to indulge my apocalypse fetish and imagine that every nuclear-armed country shoots everything they have at everyone else. It’s entirely possible that such a rudimentary diplomatic gesture would not only lead to several world leaders losing 1-6 points of charisma, but there’s also a fair chance we could wipe out the whole human race. Even Sean Bean. People who don’t die in the initial explosions would probably die from radiation poisoning soon after, and if not that then starvation as a result of good old Nuclear Winter. A similar fate would face pretty much every other surface-dwelling multicellular organism.
The most serious, long-term damage would actually be done by the blocking-out of the sun, preventing primary producers (for non-biologists, functionally equivalent to ‘plants’) from capturing the energy that pretty much the entire ecosystem needs to survive. The thing is, though, that although there’d be a huge drop in the amount of light available for plants, it would have to be global, total and long-lasting to eliminate all multicellular life. Even if things got that serious, you have to turn up the dial by another factor of ten to have any hope of eliminating single-celled life, and even then you’ve still got loads of species surviving deep underwater, around undersea vents.
What I’m trying to get at here is that even if we collectively went completely barmy and actively tried to destroy the world, we probably wouldn’t be able to kill everything. And the interesting thing about life, as we all know, is that it will always find a way. We already know that there have been several major global extinction events in Earth’s history, and without them we probably wouldn’t be here today. Sometimes a chunk of rock the size of Texas is exactly the kick up the arse DNA needs to try something new, although I’m not sure which part of DNA is its arse – possibly the telomeres? I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent, but Armageddon would have been ten times better if the meteor had kicked Bruce Willis in the telomeres. Just saying.
I know I say ‘my point is’ far too often, but it’s mainly to remind myself that I do actually have a point. My point is, the most devastating thing we could intentionally do will not kill all life on Earth. 100 million years after the end of humanity, there’d probably be bugger-all sign that we were ever there. New species would have evolved, radiation would be back to ‘normal’, Earth and the life on it would be fine. Humans, on the other hand, would very obviously be screwed; intelligent life would be gone, perhaps from the entire universe, and if you subscribe to the idea that intelligence is something special (and I do), then you probably don’t think it’s a great idea to do anything which will wipe it out. There’s no guarantee anything as mentally capable as us would ever evolve again, anywhere, so we should probably do our best not to all die.
Killing everyone isn’t the only thing I think we should avoid though. I’m a humanist, and perhaps an idealist, and certainly an optimist. I would very much like to live in a world with as little human suffering as possible. Exploiting the environment is a short-term way to achieve this, at least for some of us, but if it’s done unsustainably then you start to face problems. It might surprise some of you to read this, even though I’ve alluded to it above, but I actually don’t really care about any species except humans. Or rather, I don’t care about any species as much as I care about humans. I don’t think we should go out and unnecessarily shoot animals and raze forests and cause suffering, but I also think there are times when such activity is beneficial enough to mankind to be justifiable. Animal testing is a perfect example. If one of my brothers was terminally ill, but I knew that killing 1,000 rats would cure him, I’d go out and kill them myself. If I had a child, and murdering every rabbit on Earth was the only way to save her life, you guys would just have to manage without Easter eggs. I know some people don’t agree with me, but I consider a human life to be worth more than any number of animal or plant lives. As far as I’m concerned it’s a logical continuation of liberal ideals, that all humans are not only equal, but also special. We literally cheer about wiping out smallpox to prevent human suffering, and yet kill something fluffy to save lives and suddenly you’re the bad guy. Well, I’m unrepentant.
Boy, this got dark all of a sudden! Anyone who hasn’t thrown their sandals at the screen in anger might be wondering why, if I don’t care about other species, am I so keen on sustainability and preventing extinction wherever possible and maintaining the Earth’s current climate. Well I’ll tell you: ecology. When you start messing with components of a system as complex as Earth, you literally have no way of knowing for certain what will happen. We can guess what effect the extinction of cod would have, we can attempt to predict how a 2°C temperature rise will change things, but we don’t know. I want to try to keep things the same because we’ve got extensive experience to suggest that the Earth as it is now can support us. This temperature, this level of biodiversity, this atmosphere, we can survive, pretty much. Start changing stuff and your guess is as good as mine of how many people might suffer and die.
So yeah: anthropocentric. It’s not really about “Save the Planet” per se, it’s about “Save the Humans by Saving the Planet”. When I bang on about climate change, I’m not worried about life ending or the Earth burning to an uninhabitable crisp. I’m worried that our kids, and their kids, and their kids will have to fight to survive, fight to find food, fight to find water. Every day we increase the probability that our progeny’s lives will be brutal and short – surely that’s a much better reason to find another way to live than “We’ll never see another wild dolphin”. Conservationists, for want of a better term, frequently have the criticism levied at them that they put nature before people. Well not me: as far as I’m concerned, caring about people is the only objective reason to care about nature.
It worries me that the environmental movement always seems to focus on people’s emotional attachments to nature. That works fine for some people, but people like me need concrete, logical explanations for things, and I think there’s a lot of headway which could be made with the ‘save the humans’ angle. Or perhaps I’m just a robot.
eugnathostomata 