A New Environmental Policy

I am sure that when I am older than my young 29 years that I will think that "long term plans" and "patience" are really effective ways to achieve positive social and political change. In the meantime, however, while the political machinery drudgingly clanks forward (if it does at all), people starve to death, people are murdered, the environment is increasingly raped, and the negative influence of self-serving corporations becomes both more apparent and harder to circumvent.

In the past, I've argued that it's pretty much over for the environment, mostly because humans are incapable of observing long term change in basically anything. For example, if I were to make a gear train of 10 gear sets, each with a 1-7 turn down ratio, then if the first gear was turning at 1 revolution per second, the second would take 7 seconds to rotate once, the third 49 seconds, the fourth nearly 6 minutes, the fifth would take three quarters of an hour, and the sixth would take half a day. The tenth gear would take more than 9 years to rotate a single time. Yet each of these gears is constantly, smoothly moving. Human perception is just incapable of seeing it once it drops below a certain point.
The same goes for the environment. The influence of humanity is too broad, too slow, too imperceptible to be detected and monitored with the naked eye, or even with a single person's diary. And the unchanging appearance of nature runs counter to the mountain of scientific evidence that does effectively seek long-term data relationships.

In any case, here we sit on a planet that is increasingly likely to not be saved. By "saved" I mean "returned to a biosphere diversity level nearly equal to that of 5,000 years ago. Tastefully named Alexis Madrigal agrees with me:

There is no turning back on the enormity of human civilization's impact on the globe. Now is the time to recognize that even the wildest Amazonian and Mayan jungles are feral landscapes that have been permanently and massively altered. "We've got to stop trying to save the planet," Ellis wrote in a WIRED Science article. "For better or for worse, nature has long been what we have made it, and what we will make it."

My italics. The point Alexis and I are driving towards is that in order to realize immediate, beneficial decreases in the harm humans cause their global biosphere we must stop worrying about the harm we're causing local environments and reinvest that energy attempting to achieve global environmental neutrality. Sure, a desert tortoise species might go extinct due to the installation of a giant solar mega-complex. Conversely, the human species might go extinct if we cannot control our wanton destruction of the biosphere.

Yes, it sounds cataclysmic, but we need to start pushing towards a slow-down and eventual stoppage of our negative impact on the Earth. If we need to push a few species aside to achieve that, then so be it. Hell, if it ends up just us and the cockroaches by the time we achieve a "net zero" global society, fine. There have been biodiversity bottlenecks many times in Earth's history, for many reasons. After each source of mass extinction disappeared, the diversity came back. Not the same species, certainly; extinction is a one way ticket. But new species spread into vacated ecological niches.

I'd prefer this mass extinction event ends not with the disappearance of humans, but rather the disappearance of our environmental recklessness.


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