Healthy Ecosystem

Was the world made for us...or were we made for the world?

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The process began with the inception of our incredibly-greedy culture ten thousand years ago in the Near East, but with the rise of industrial capitalism, "extraction of natural resources" has become definitive for all human activities in our now-global culture. In other words, our cultural mentality has us collectively processing everything, whether it's physical resources (land area, water, oil), biological resources (our food and our health), or social resources (relationships and our own emotional experience), as a factory assembly line of extract-process-consume-waste. This one-way process is inherently ignorant of the holistic reality upon which the the manifest universe is founded.
Ecological destruction comes down to one thing. The withdrawal of energy from ecological systems, in order to grow our economic system, creates a net loss in complexity of the ecological systems from which the energy is drawn. The process of growing our economy is called "development." The loss of ecological complexity is called "loss of biodiversity." One is the direct product of the other.
There is a loss of ecological energy in the world, manifesting as a tremendous loss of diversity (equal to loss of complexity) within the ecological systems of the world. We are moving from a planet of millions of species toward a planet of humans-plus-human-food. In the process of "development," thousands of entire species are vanishing each year, at least a hundred times and up to ten thousand times faster that the normal coming-and-going of species.
Physical complexity is also being lost, as watersheds decline, oceans acidify, wetlands are drained, forest cover becomes open range, and minerals are converted into products or burned and then dumped into the sky.
Social complexity has been reduced, for 95% of the people on the planet, to one single option: getting money to exchange for everything we need.
The four horsemen of development are:

1. habitat destruction. Acre by acre, decade after decade, modern society has been converting all possible areas of the planet into resources that can be extracted for economic value. All species that do not provide economic value are eliminated.
2. overharvesting. Stripping the soil bare each year and replanting only high-calorie food crops, stripping a forest each generation just before it reaches maturity, or stripping a coral reef by scraping off everything and dumping back unwanted materials - all of this is repairable by nature, in time. However, our economic imperative does not provide this time. Each year, there is a net loss of diversity because these biotic communities are not given enough time to recover before they are stripped again.
3. invasive species. Between carting living organisms all around the planet and then also creating super-species that outcompete all others in their area, our agricultural systems are continuously attacking balanced biological communities with stronger invaders.
4. pollution. After we're finished with the "resources" that have been extracted from biological communities, we must be rid of them with as little expense as possible. This often means simply dumping them into holes, into rivers, or into the sky.

The resource-extraction attitude has been superimposed on all activities of our industrial society. Fishing is now practiced as strip-mining by factory trawlers, with the "waste" creatures thrown overboard and decimating hundreds of species as "collateral damage" in the hunt for select high-value species. In this sense, industrial-commercial fishing is no different than the extraction of other "resources," such as ore or oil; in its wake there is waste, entropy, destruction. Whether it's called "bycatch," "slag," "tailings," or "collateral damage," (in the case of extracting military "human resources" from the "labour pool") is really irrelevant.

This extractive process and mentality is guaranteed to destroy biotic systems - whether it be the body of a cow whose milk production has peaked and gone into decline, or an entire ecosystem - because no biotic system (consider your own human body) can survive being stripped for specific "high value" parts. Imagine stripping human bodies of their kidneys, livers, limbs, lungs or hearts.

Just as the extractive process and attitude destroys biological systems and damages physical systems (such as the climate or watersheds), it has devastated the wonderful diversity of human adaptation. Imagine if your province was stripped of all "high-value" social resources: plumbers, farmers, clergy, doctors, teachers, artists, millwrights, and computer dweebs. We are living in a time when most human societies have been stripped of their high-value components - their healers, parents, teachers, handy-persons, children and shamen - and it has devastated not only those societies, but humanity itself. Sure there are billions of us, but how many of us are living meaningful lives, comfortable in the world and not concerning ourselves, day by day, with mere survival? How many of us have options other than getting money and buying everything we need?

Converging Crises
All things come to an end. There is a finite amount of energy in the universe, and a finite amount available on the planet Earth. Our economic system has extracted a tremendous amount of energy from the physical, biological and social systems of the world. At this point, the economic imperative to grow 2-7% per year is meeting accelerating difficulties:

• climate change,
• energy descent,
• economic turmoil,
• water shortages and pollution,
• food insecurity,
• overpopulation,
• rising crime and genocide with diminishing individual safety,
• decreasing resistance to disease,
• global tension,
• and the great dumbing down of our children

Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of "The Upside of Down," says that many of these are potential "deal breakers" for humanity. Like a lot of scientists, he believes that many of these problems are tractable, but the options are closing.

Over the next generation, we will learn - once again - that nature rules, not humanity - and certainly not the elites of Western society. The laws of the universe rule our lives from moment to moment and from generation to generation and they always will.
Those who are supposed to deal with these problems (you know, The Government, Science, and all the others who are looking after us) look at best at only one of these problems at a time, even though they are each and every one a direct product of a single paradigm. Because we live in a reductionist culture, we're unaccustomed to seeing the interconnections between all these tremendous problems. Each in itself is a highly complex situation, and together they boggle the mind. We need to see the whole picture, though, if we're going to come up with anything resembling a solution to the converging crises.