Before I came to Cornell to study
environmental science, a man I know from the same field gave me the following
advice: “Basically, the only thing you need to know is that we’re all screwed.”
This does seem to be the mindset of the discipline these days. We read page
after page of depressing publications, lecturers admonish that we are changing
the world at an unprecedented pace, and activist groups all scramble to
convince us that their crusade is the most important. Maybe we are all doomed
to a future on a desolate planet, in a dismal world entirely of our own making.
If it’s true, we may as well just give up now and live as hedonistically as we
can, exploiting the world while it still has something left to give us.
Just
the other day I sat through hours of presentations about everything that is
going wrong with the world right now. Oceanic pH is dropping, and soon no
shell-bearing creature will be able to survive. Temperatures are warming, and
corals will all be bleached to death within 50 years. Butterfly ranges are
shifting north, insect pests are thriving, the hardiness zones of garden plants
are being rearranged on the map, the list goes on and on. With the cynicism of
one much older, I can probably say that this semester I’ve heard pretty much
every environmental doomsday prediction that there is. But I’m not ready to
give up on our world. And I don’t think that humanity should either.
If
you stop to think about it, many of the predictions that environmentalists make
are just seen as “bad” because they are different. They never actually explain
to us why shifting butterfly ranges are bad. They just leave it up to the
audience to know, by this point, that change is bad, without offering any
reason to justify their stance. Who’s to say that organisms won’t just slowly
move to better environments and adapt to suit the changing climate? While heat
stress and shifting ranges can be used as evidence for climate change, they are
not “bad” things in and of themselves, and we need to distinguish between
things that reflect actual environmental harm and things that are just a bit
different than the way they were before.
The
Earth is far more resilient than people seem to realize. In fact, I think that
laymen have the edge here. Perhaps their blind belief that the Earth is too big
for humans to wreck is actually a form of wisdom. Those who devote their lives
to studying the environment sometimes act like overprotective parents, fearing
that any and all injury will automatically result in permanent disability. To
quote Darth Vader, I find their lack of faith disturbing.
The
Earth has survived 5 mass extinctions, each time managing to rally and create
newer and more fantastic life forms than had existed before. To those who argue
that our current rate of extinction is unprecedented in global history, and
that industrialization and population explosion are to blame, I would point to
the megafaunal extinctions that began during prehistoric times. Or to the
desertification that has taken place around the world since the dawn of agriculture.
Some of our most destructive days took place before even our most primitive
technology came to be, and yet the Earth still survived, productive and
habitable as ever. Sadly, humans seem to always find a way to alter our
environment, no matter what our level of development. Perhaps it is just in our
nature. But my point is that doomsday predictions, placing all of the blame and
guilt on our current generations, and talk of hopeless futures are overblown
and do nothing to further our cause; in fact, they inspire resignation and
defeat.
I
believe that hope for humanity lies in the demographic transition. The
demographic transition is perhaps my favorite thing in all of environmental
science. It’s intuitive, it can be seen all over the world, and it explains a
lot. And it is in the demographic transition that our salvation rests. As
countries become more developed, we live longer, healthier lives, and
eventually come to reproduce less. This can already be seen in many
industrialized countries, especially Japan. The United States would be in a
similar situation if not for the continued supply of fresh immigrants. As we
reproduce less, our populations shrink to a more sustainable level. We use
resources more efficiently, and increased affluence allows for more care to be
taken of the environment, with stricter regulations being put in place and more
sustainable ways of doing things to be undertaken. Most countries of the world
are at some point in this transition, and in time, God willing, all countries
will progress through this transition so that our population will reach a
sustainable level.
The world is
beginning to make a turnaround. Deforestation in the temperate zone has
decreased to the point that forests are actually increasing at a rate greater
than they are being cleared. CO2 emissions in the United States are
dropping. Population growth is slowing. These environmental concerns that we
face will not continue to spiral out of control indefinitely; we are beginning
to see their end. This fact, combined with continued technological
improvements, mitigation and restoration strategies, and ever-improving
efficiency, are reasons that we can still hold out hope for the future of
Earth. Don’t underestimate the resilience of nature. It may just surprise us
with its recovery.
