No Regrets Essay: Nature Will Not Be Silenced - Thoughts on Ecology

No Regrets Journal Essay

Nature Will Not Be Silenced: Thoughts on Ecology

Clayton Medeiros January 2019 

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NATURE WILL NOT BE SILENCED: THOUGHTS ON ECOLOGY Clayton Medeiros Arrogance will be our most likely downfall. We are overconfident about our own importance in the scheme of things. We fail to see how our actions connect with the actions of all other beings, with nature, with the earth and with the cosmos.

We ignore nature’s voice at our peril.

The universe is structured through initial conditions, nature’s constants and the patterns of natural processes that allow for life including human life to be created and evolve. We are organized patterns of energy and being that interact with all of the other organized patterns of energy and being that are on and of the earth.

Everything connects with everything else. We and all else are signatories to an ecological agreement that assures balance and continuity if natural laws are respected.

For some time we have been in the anthropocene, an era in which the earth was and is reshaped by human efforts to control and utilize the natural world and its resources. The anthropocene era of human dominance is defined in various ways. It is best exemplified in the ever increasing influence of carbon pollution in the transformation of weather patterns, associated droughts and floods and the changing nature of storm systems with hundred year floods becoming annual events. The nineteenth century industrial revolution is often cited as a beginning of this era.

The anthropocene has centered around exploiting the earth for human use without consideration of the broader needs of the natural world of which we are a part. The earth’s ability to regulate itself is increasingly at risk. Human interventions outweigh historic nature’s ability to cope with and manage change.

The biosphere, dominated by humanity, changes so rapidly that many species and landscapes can no longer be sustained. The rate of change far outweighs historic patterns and continues to accelerate.

Species depletion increases ever more quickly with much of the change focused on common flora and fauna that is not being measured. A recent study in Germany showed a decline of 78% in common insects. The likely suspects in the decline are pesticides, herbicides and the loss of habitat.

This is an ecological disaster, but it does not have an immediate economic or environmental impact. On the broader level, carbon pollution, development without short or long range environmental considerations, deforestation, the thoughtless introduction of nonnative species, the destruction of predators, soil erosion and other issues have decimated many ecological systems to the point of collapse.

In “Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm” by Isabella Tree, the combination of banning the use of herbicides and pesticides and returning the park to permanent pasture and forest dramatically transformed the farm. Insects and wild life returned and increased as did the health and stability of the oak forest. Insects and animals not seen in years became residents.

Species specific protections alone, for polar bears and whales for example, do not work. The environment, within which species live, must also be protected.

Species cannot survive when their ecological support is destroyed. Many land based nature preserves do not have sufficient territory to successfully preserve their flora and fauna. The same is true of many of the recently created ocean preserves. Environmental destruction and species extinction go hand in hand.

When a species disappears, a world disappears with them.

Climate change needs to be retitled to more clearly define what is going on with our environment. Climate change is carbon pollution. Carbon pollution harms every aspect of the natural world, harms cities and countrysides in which humanity resides and harms the oceans. Seasons are in flux, every temperature record has been broken, glaciers shrink, ice sheets melt, islands erode in the face of sea level rises and the increased intensity of storms, the oceans warm and acidify and are invaded by massive floating dumps of garbage.

We tend to consider ourselves superior to nature and the rest of its inhabitants.

But animals, plants, bacteria and other flora and fauna also have cultures.

They communicate, crows and elephants mourn their dead, chimpanzees use tools and bacteria can send messages for miles across the landscape. Trees share information through their root systems and through the other creatures that reside in those root systems.

Ecology Ecology deals with the relationships between and among groups of living things and their environment. Ecology, from the Greek “oikos”, means household, home, a place to live. Our place to live is the earth. We live with others as members of the human race. The human race exists within the world of nature that was created from the earth and from the universe within which the earth spins.

Ecological thinking is required in our relationship with one another and with the the earth. There is no aspect of the human condition that is not ecologically driven. There is no aspect of the status of the earth that is not ecologically driven. Ecological thinking and doing assume that we share the biosphere. The biosphere is a system that allows life to exist. We are interdependent and our interactions can be structured to take place so as to build a balanced, healthy community. Since we and everything else are descendants of exploding

star dust, we should be able to establish common ground. We must consider a move from a focus on our own trajectory through the world to the interface of all trajectories.

As a species, we do not currently have an effective ecological relationship with our earthly home and its varied lifeforms and landscapes that share this home with us. Our history shows human civilizations distinguishing themselves from the natural world as if we are somehow separate and unconnected from the lives of animals and plants and separate from the lands and waters that created and support life.

Value Religions often set humanity above the natural world. Some Judaeo Christian biblical interpreters believe they have a God given dominion over nature which was created for their use and profit regardless of consequences for plants, animals, oceans and the landscape. There is another interpretation that can lead to a commitment to stewardship rather than exploitation. In Genesis, God creates the world and sees that “it was good.� Later, God makes a covenant with Noah, his offspring and all of the creatures of the ark. In describing the rainbow as the sign of that covenant, God specifically states that it is between Him and the earth. This interpretation provides a reasonable Judaeo Christian religious case for the divine nature of the world and our role as stewards of its many resources. Similar interpretations have been made in other faiths as well.

Environmental science also supports the need for stewardship.

Where and how we live, the spaces we occupy and the things those spaces contain offer a mirror of who we are, of what we value. Just as we manifest our individual character, our living space, our possessions, our cities, our factories provide further insight into the human character.

There are false assumptions in western civilization’s take on the world going back to Aristotle and Descarte and on into the Twentieth Century: -We are the pinnacle of evolutionary purpose with our complexity, language and ability to reason.

-Nature is inarticulate, irrational and subservient to human interests and desires The natural world in the 19th Century was perceived as chaotic, out of control, wasteful and in need of improvement. Forests must be turned into farms.

The tricky part of traditional religious, scientific and political environmental presumptions of human sovereignty and the right of exploitation is that nature is neither irrational nor mute. Nature operates with an ecological

deftness that incorporates language, often a wordless language, that we generally chose not to understand or relate to. We ignore its themes to our detriment and eventually to the continued survival of our species. As Freeman Dyson points out, “Nature never loses and she plays fair.”

Religions often distinguish us from nature through the idea of a soul not present in nature. Science distinguishes us from nature through a combination of consciousness and rationality. Religion and science have collaborated with politics and capitalism to justify exploitation and the commodification of the natural world for the sake of short term profit.

Nature resists, and has historically resisted, our desire to subject it to our needs as if there is no intrinsic reciprocity inherent in the relationship. Nature has laws as well as needs that must be respected if we are to sustain the earth as a place in which human beings will survive. We explore the laws of nature with physics and other sciences. There is virtually unanimous agreement among scientists that action to limit carbon pollution is critical.

On the other side, the history of world wide disasters indicates that, with or without us, the biosphere and life will continue. Nature and evolution will adapt to create life forms that can be sustained in the face of anthropocene generated ecological collapse.

Nature’s laws and evolutionary drives are not about progress. Nature’s drive is to successfully adapt to the environment as it changes. The natural world continually evolves in its ecologically complex interaction with living and inanimate worlds, neither of which stay silent for very long.

The human social project confronts and is confronted by nature and by the earth we occupy. We are creatures of the earth and we are creatures of the society we build within which we live our lives and around which nature and the earth continue to respond.

Our lives are contained within the anthropocene social structure and its creations, farms, towns, cities and countries with their rules and expectations.

Nature also has its structure and its own rules which regularly conflict with human interventions. We have a history and rhetoric about conquering nature, we speak about controlling the natural world. To that end, we have won many battles, but we are losing the war.

Ecology comes in many forms: systems evolutionary physiological behavioral

population.

There are also ecological communities of food chains, or trophic pyramids with the community built on multicellular creatures and their consumption through the chain to herbivores and carnivores. In the case of the Ocean, the base of the pyramid is built on krill and the top of the pyramid is whales. All of these relationships are challenged by environmental degradation including carbon pollution.

Although there is no common agreement on the beginning of the anthropocene, the human age, there is no question that humanity is fully responsible for the dramatic changes taking place on the earth including rampant, rapid destruction of species in the plant, animal and bacteriological kingdoms, the relentless intensity of carbon pollution, the turmoil in ecological relationships and the warming and acidification of the oceans.

Conclusion Without regulatory oversight, capitalism is neither rational nor sensible. It is focused on short term profits rather than on long term consequences. It is intrinsically incapable of effectively providing public goods. The market place does not place a value on public goods like the environment or the biosphere.

The sense that either western, unfettered democratic capitalism or China’s unfettered autocratic capitalism can be sustained is untenable. Our human cultures cannot be sustained with these tools. The earth will be continually degraded. The natural world that successfully existed and evolved to meet disasters and new conditions for millennia transforms ever more rapidly. Our current trajectory is a form of ecocide. There is no credible projection for the future that allows capitalist exploitation and profligacy to go on unabated.

Global nature has been reorganized throughout history. Early capitalism took the form of European colonialism and the exploitation of entire populations as slaves or workers with no rights. The colonies were the suppliers of cheap raw materials to support financial growth and industrialization. Spain grew on the destruction of the Aztec and Incan Empires and on the backs of Latin American miners and farmers.

Colonies fed England’s industrialization through the exploitation of slaves in the Caribbean and America and the subjection of India among other countries. Control of African and other colonies supported France and 

Belgium. Alexander von Humboldt, in his travels in the 1800’s to South America was aghast at the destruction of native cultures and people along with the environmental disaster of deforestation and monoculture farming. He abhorred slavery.

America’s economic miracle was built on slavery and Native American genocide.

America took over the failed colonial efforts of France with the Louisiana purchase and went to war with Mexico to take over Texas and the Southwest.

Colonies were unnecessary. There was the frontier and Native American lands to be exploited, forests to be logged, gold to be dug.

The issues of ecology are driven by our societal values. Our values are inherent in our political structures. Our political structures contain our ethical principals as we manifest them in the cultures we create. From the perspective of the natural world or the interactions of humanity, things are not going well.

Civilization itself will eventually bow to ecological principles. Merriam-Webster defines principles as “a comprehensive and fundamental law.” Although we distinguish between the human world and the natural world, our creations are part of nature. Nature incorporates our cities and farms into the natural laws that determine the life and death of species, forests and people. Nature currently speaks out in no uncertain terms with climate change and its many manifestations.

Alexander von Humboldt “Man can only act upon nature, and appropriate her forces to his use by comprehending her laws.”