PART 1 of 2 — THE PROBLEM
HUMANITY’S TWO FACES
The complement of capabilities, competencies, and goodness that humanity exhibits are extraordinary.
Yet, humanity has severe shortcomings and blind spots that unless remedied will be fatal.
Today, not in some distant future, humanity is on a crash course with reality as a consequence of its lethal interrelated mix of problems, aggravated by population growth.
Despite being, broadcast daily in media headlines, these problems — such as those noted below — growing in scale and complexity, are ignored by most people while others are at a loss as to what remedies they can provide:
Climate change . . . doomsday glaciers . . . rising sea levels . . . record-breaking heat waves . . . unprecedented rains and flooding . . . the destruction of rain forests . . . the extinction of countless plant and animal species . . . water scarcity . . . nearly all fish species threatened with extinction . . . unprecedented out-of-control fires . . . superstorms . . . pollution of the food chain . . . pandemics . . . destruction of biodiversity . . . freak floods . . . droughts . . . ocean acidification . . . destruction of coral reefs . . . famines . . . starvation . . . racism . . . mass migrations at an unprecedented scale . . . social upheavals . . . supernatural beliefs . . . political impotence . . . and on and on.
The disturbing list of problems, ominous and staggering in scope and severity — and far from complete — is sadly at least as breathtaking as humanity’s achievements.
Make no mistake about it, all these critical global issues are interconnected.
Most people, fully occupied just trying to make a living, attend to the needs of their family and friends, and get on with life, are understandably unaware of what humanity is doing to the web of life and consequently to ourselves and other species. Who has time to keep up with all of this? It’s overwhelming.
There are many others, however, who are fully aware of our perilous direction and choose to ignore or continue to contribute to it for one reason — typically self-serving — or another.
Then, there are those, also fully aware of our plight, who are intensely, passionately, involved in measures to thwart our demise.
Meanwhile, humanity’s self-driven unabated march towards extinction continues to spiral out of control perceptibly and imperceptibly.
What’s the problem?
What’s the solution?
CHALLENGES HUMANS FACE DAILY
It’s not just the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet and changing our climate and its myriad of related ongoing and projected dire consequences, the number of which already exceeds what you can count on your fingers and toes.
Besides the vast number of human-generated environmental problems, here’s a short list of realities humans face every day they get out of bed (if they have one):
- People fight with each other every day, everywhere, over everything, in every way imaginable.
- While this fighting is ongoing, natural disasters are a part of life: earthquakes, hurricanes (known also as typhoons and cyclones), volcanoes, tornadoes, tsunamis, forest fires, floods, droughts, and other severe weather phenomena. This is all very normal when one lives on one of these things called planets, even when one exists in the “habitable zone” of a solar system.
- There are an extraordinary number of illnesses that we contract and from which we suffer.
- Countless accidents and injuries occur regularly.
- There are all manner of addictions and substance abuse and related deviant behavior.
- All kinds of criminal activities go on every day, everywhere, in every way conceivable.
As if all of this is not way more than enough to deal with — which it is — on top of it all, as a consequence of having so many people (nearly 8 billion with the addition of in excess of 1,500,000 weekly) on a tiny planet with a fragile ecosystem — and us not understanding our reality and its behavioral demands — humanity has created an interrelated web of life-threatening environmentally related problems.
HUMAN-CAUSED DAMAGE TO THE BIOSPHERE (THE SUM OF ALL ECOSYSTEMS)
While humans have always altered the natural environment, today’s unprecedented scale of disruptions is beyond ominous.
Humanity, in depleting its resources — forests, fisheries, range lands, croplands, and plant and animal species — is destroying the biological diversity on which evolution thrives.
The ongoing 6th Great Extinction — the first caused by other than a natural event like an asteroid striking the planet or climate change — is caused by our species. Climate change, incidentally, caused four out of the five Great Extinctions.
We are draining our aquifers and lowering our water tables.
We are polluting our air, water, and our soil and, consequently, our food chain. We now have microplastic contaminants in our food and water. That is a result of dumping about 14 million tons of plastic garbage into our oceans annually!
We are depleting the stratospheric ozone that protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation.
We are experiencing many symptoms associated with global warming and consequential climate change such as heat waves, devastating droughts, destruction of croplands, dying forests, accelerated species extinction, destruction of coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, coastal flooding, more rapid spread of disease, acidification and poisoning of the oceans, famine and starvation, human migration, heat deaths, economic collapse, social conflict, and potential wars.
The above is far from an exhaustive list of environmentally related problems. And further, problems of these magnitudes interact with each other to cause ominous, unpredictable, and unprecedented synergistic compounding problems termed multi-hazards, the complexity of which progressively undermines our ability to respond.
As a consequence of all of the above, the scale of human migration, already at unprecedented levels, is growing dramatically.
Life is fragile and perilous. It always has been. It always will be.
Violations of life’s equipoise come with severe consequences.
HISTORY OF DEVASTATION
Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.
Now, parasitic-like and swarming, we are destroying life itself.
With astonishing speed, we have upset an extraordinary array of life that took billions of years and endless experiments to produce.
What aggravates the crisis and inhibits our ability to respond properly and with urgency is that we are not adapted to recognize far-reaching environmental threats beyond our immediate surroundings.
In other words, unless we are impacted personally, most of us do not take threats of our imminent demise seriously.
Environmental problems cross the boundaries of nation states, academic disciplines, political and cultural ideologies, and religious theologies.
They affect the affluent and the impoverished, developed and developing nations, individuals and whole societies.
Many scientists agree that we have a narrow and rapidly closing window to arrest and reverse our destructive and unsustainable momentum.
How is it that we can simultaneously be so competent and incompetent to the extent that we are destroying the web of life that enables us to exist? How?!