Basic Question: Do you ever think about what you have done to Earth?
Every generation rediscovers. Here’s an example: “Humans have ‘large, negative impact on wildlife,’ researchers find.” That’s the header on an article by Erin Blakemore for the Washington Post.* You bet they do; humans, can’t trust them with your wildlife.
Not that this is a profound observation by the researchers Erin cites. I don’t have to go out on a limb here to say that my driveway, house, sidewalk, and landscaping have altered the ecology of critters who used to live among the trees I had to clear to build on a wooded plot of land. Multiply that effect by my predecessor 100 billion humans over 200,000 to 300,000 years, and you realize that Erin and “researchers” have come late into the Anthropocene, the “Age of Man” (and yes, man is a synonym for human, for the PC crowd). From the first fire to the most recent fireplace, we’ve been altering the planet and altering the distribution and type of life our environs house.
It All Started Long Ago
Where are the megafauna of the past 55 million years? The Megatherium or giant sloth that weighed between two and four tons? The Paraceratherium that, at more than 30,000 pounds would dwarf a modern elephant at 12,000 pounds? Or the giants of the elephant family like the mammoth (Mammuthus)? Probably many of them dead because of spear points. Some, it seems, also died because of natural changes to their ecologies, but to argue that the warming of the present interglacial period was the cause of those extinctions ignores the role of humans. Many of those species of megafauna critters had survived through as many as 11 or more cycles of cooling and warming during which the ice advanced and retreated over 2.5 million years.
And birds? What happened to the Dodo? The Elephant Bird? And not just flightless birds: Our windmills kill the fliers. Our cats do, too. And then there’s the buckshot that brings down ducks and geese, speeding cars that hit low-flying birds, and infiltrating pesticides that poison their nestlings. We’re in the business of altering life. We make extinctions; it’s what we do; it’s what we have always done. And only of recent have we garnered the willpower to form policing agencies to lessen our impact on all the wildlife we encounter on land, within the sea, and in the air. Goodness! The windows on my house have killed a least a dozen birds in each of the last five decades.
What’s Your Alternative?
Own or rent? It really doesn’t matter, does it? The place where you live, even if it’s a cardboard lean-to on a San Franciscan sidewalk, is a manifestation of the Anthropocene’s main characteristic: Humans altering the natural environment. You can attempt to diminish your ecological footprint, but you cannot eliminate it. And since you have eight billion contemporaries, the cumulative effects are staggering. In just a century or two of the Industrial Age, we’ve done more than those previous 100 billion humans had done over 200 or more millennia. We’ve impounded and redirected more water, displaced more rocks for the resources they contain, and poisoned more land than our predecessors collectively did.
So, how does Erin’s story about the negative effects of humans become news? Anyone who has gone to a museum to see a mammoth, Dodo. or giant sloth recognizes that the diversity of species has changed. Why does Erin seem to suggest that the researchers have discovered something profound? It’s old news; it’s obvious news.
Policing, the Only Alternative
Face It: We kill more than birds. We kill one another quite regularly and frequently and in great numbers during our wars. There are even those among us who would unleash nuclear weapons in sufficient numbers to threaten our own species’ existence. And in all our actions there is a potential for collateral damage.
Because of our actualized and potential effects, the prevailing question is “To what extent do we police ourselves?” I know that we cannot police windows as we police hunting with licenses and game wardens. My house will continue to kill birds that see my many trees reflected by the glass. I’m not, however, going windowless like a mole in a burrow or a Hamas terrorist hiding in a tunnel.
Human activities require some kind of policing because our very existence depends on some level of environmental exploitation, but not on over-exploitation. And whenever self-policing fails, then some degree of imposed policing appears to be necessary to keep today’s wildlife from going the way of those extinct megafauna.
That need for policing is where we humans balk. We want a world with other life-forms as long as they don’t interfere with personal needs and desires. We know we can’t eliminate needs like food and water, so our only control is over desires. And in that control we prefer self-control over other-control. Not many of us would accept a world in which windows are banned for the sake of bird safety. Not many of us are willing to go without enhancements like air conditioning and paved roads.
Of Crows and Roads
When I first moved to the countryside in western Pennsylvania, I was able to see a yearly migration of thousands of crows that arrived in October and disappeared in the spring. They went to cornfields during the day and settled in trees at night. Their migratory paths changed over the months as they moved from roosting spot to roosting spot in the area and from field to field. And then, in the late 1980s the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission began work on the Mon-Fayette Expressway, a four-lane toll road that paved over those farms that the crows visited each day. Today there are just a few crows that fly around my woods. The thousands that returned as regularly as the swallows return to Capistrano no longer come to the area.
We change things. That’s what we do.
But policing, as I say, is a touchy thing. No one spoke up for the wild crows during the planning for the road. I venture to say that no one on the PA Turnpike Commission was really aware of the annual migration to a rural township. The new road was the focus, not the birds. Every road alters the nature of Nature, even the dirt paths we made 200 to 300 millennia ago, the Appian Way during Roman times, and the Inca’s Atacama Highway.
The Environmental Dilemma
What might have been a more interesting headline for Erin and the Washington Post is, “Environmental policies that negatively affect the environment.” Want to build more windmills? Expect to kill more birds. Want expensive energy alternatives? Expect more people to die in cold and suffer more in heat as energy becomes more expensive and less available.
A World without Barns
Life adapts, doesn’t it? But most adaptation has been a relatively slow process, requiring generations because species evolve; individuals don’t.
A friend of mine who lived in the nearby mountains said that as he and his wife sat outside one night surrounded by the forest, she asked about the “barn swallows.” He was surprised by her question: “Where do you suppose the barn swallows lived before there were barns?”
Barn swallows, a widely distributed species, lived mostly in caves before humans provided them with alternatives according to Cornell’s “All about Birds” website. ** That means some human activities are supportive of and not detrimental to wildlife. And surprising estimates reveal the deer population of North America to be greater today than it was in 1800, maybe as much as 30 times greater than it was when America was a young country. Not everything we do is detrimental to wildlife. And that fact raises a question about ethics.
Are All Changes to the Environment Unethical?
Should you feel guilty about your contributions to environmental change?
There appear to be two major ethical approaches to Nature, one which is anthropocentric and the other which is biocentric, that “bio” representing all life that is not limited to human life. Environmental ethicists can argue over which approach is “better,” “more ethical or moral,” or more rational. On one extreme lie the proponents of the hierarchy of life that ranks humans above all other life-forms. On the other extreme are those who rank all life at equal value, believe in equity, and even suggest that not only do animals have rights, but also the land has rights.
It’s not necessarily an Either/Or. Picture a sliding scale or spectrum of perspectives between anthropocentricity and biocentricity. Where on the scale do you put yourself?
Dams
In western Pennsylvania, long wall coal mining has disrupted the surface features through almost instantaneous subsidence of the overlying ground. The subsidence in some instances has caused some previously free-flowing streams to pond behind surface “wrinkle” dams that alter the local ecology. With different organisms occupying the altered trophic niches and spaces, that question about what would happen if we eliminated barns becomes one centered on returning the landscape to its former state. Does one eliminate the pond and the organisms in that pond in favor of restoring stream flow and introducing previous occupants, or allow the new ecology to flourish?
Do we do our best to restore mammoths to their dominance by merging mammoth DNA found in frozen mammoths to modern elephant DNA? Would restoring all of Nature to its state of some 300,000 years ago be “good”?
The Equity Argument
I don’t have pets, but my children and grandchildren do. And, as would happen in family life, pet stories abound. Fido did … Among the stories that intrigued me recently was of dog observing the owner packing for a trip. The dog began tossing the clothes out of the suitcase as the family member put them in. The best guess is that the dog associated the practice of packing a suitcase with a family member’s frequent business trips. It might be pure projection and anthropomorphizing on our part, but we suspect the dog did not want the person to leave for that short trip. Does that seeming awareness elevate the dog on the hierarchy of life? We know that people ascribe human feelings to their pets and interpret pet actions as mimicking human behavior. Should we apply the equity we afford pets to wildlife? To domesticated species? To predators?
How Do You and I Answer for Our Actions?
You and I have daily decisions to make with regard to our use of the planet. But we shouldn’t conflate our needs and desires. You need fresh water. You need food. You need shelter. You can’t have any of the three without some exploitation. It’s only in our desires that we have a real choice. It’s only in regard to those desires that we challenge our ethics.
Maybe the question I asked at the outset should be: Do you ever think about what you have done to Earth that you didn’t need to do (or didn’t need to do to the extent you did)? Or: How have your desires changed the planet?
Every generation rediscovers. Here’s an example: “Humans have ‘large, negative impact on wildlife,’ researchers find.” That’s the header on an article by Erin Blakemore for the Washington Post.* You bet they do; humans, can’t trust them with your wildlife.
Not that this is a profound observation by the researchers Erin cites. I don’t have to go out on a limb here to say that my driveway, house, sidewalk, and landscaping have altered the ecology of critters who used to live among the trees I had to clear to build on a wooded plot of land. Multiply that effect by my predecessor 100 billion humans over 200,000 to 300,000 years, and you realize that Erin and “researchers” have come late into the Anthropocene, the “Age of Man” (and yes, man is a synonym for human, for the PC crowd). From the first fire to the most recent fireplace, we’ve been altering the planet and altering the distribution and type of life our environs house.
It All Started Long Ago
Where are the megafauna of the past 55 million years? The Megatherium or giant sloth that weighed between two and four tons? The Paraceratherium that, at more than 30,000 pounds would dwarf a modern elephant at 12,000 pounds? Or the giants of the elephant family like the mammoth (Mammuthus)? Probably many of them dead because of spear points. Some, it seems, also died because of natural changes to their ecologies, but to argue that the warming of the present interglacial period was the cause of those extinctions ignores the role of humans. Many of those species of megafauna critters had survived through as many as 11 or more cycles of cooling and warming during which the ice advanced and retreated over 2.5 million years.
And birds? What happened to the Dodo? The Elephant Bird? And not just flightless birds: Our windmills kill the fliers. Our cats do, too. And then there’s the buckshot that brings down ducks and geese, speeding cars that hit low-flying birds, and infiltrating pesticides that poison their nestlings. We’re in the business of altering life. We make extinctions; it’s what we do; it’s what we have always done. And only of recent have we garnered the willpower to form policing agencies to lessen our impact on all the wildlife we encounter on land, within the sea, and in the air. Goodness! The windows on my house have killed a least a dozen birds in each of the last five decades.
What’s Your Alternative?
Own or rent? It really doesn’t matter, does it? The place where you live, even if it’s a cardboard lean-to on a San Franciscan sidewalk, is a manifestation of the Anthropocene’s main characteristic: Humans altering the natural environment. You can attempt to diminish your ecological footprint, but you cannot eliminate it. And since you have eight billion contemporaries, the cumulative effects are staggering. In just a century or two of the Industrial Age, we’ve done more than those previous 100 billion humans had done over 200 or more millennia. We’ve impounded and redirected more water, displaced more rocks for the resources they contain, and poisoned more land than our predecessors collectively did.
So, how does Erin’s story about the negative effects of humans become news? Anyone who has gone to a museum to see a mammoth, Dodo. or giant sloth recognizes that the diversity of species has changed. Why does Erin seem to suggest that the researchers have discovered something profound? It’s old news; it’s obvious news.
Policing, the Only Alternative
Face It: We kill more than birds. We kill one another quite regularly and frequently and in great numbers during our wars. There are even those among us who would unleash nuclear weapons in sufficient numbers to threaten our own species’ existence. And in all our actions there is a potential for collateral damage.
Because of our actualized and potential effects, the prevailing question is “To what extent do we police ourselves?” I know that we cannot police windows as we police hunting with licenses and game wardens. My house will continue to kill birds that see my many trees reflected by the glass. I’m not, however, going windowless like a mole in a burrow or a Hamas terrorist hiding in a tunnel.
Human activities require some kind of policing because our very existence depends on some level of environmental exploitation, but not on over-exploitation. And whenever self-policing fails, then some degree of imposed policing appears to be necessary to keep today’s wildlife from going the way of those extinct megafauna.
That need for policing is where we humans balk. We want a world with other life-forms as long as they don’t interfere with personal needs and desires. We know we can’t eliminate needs like food and water, so our only control is over desires. And in that control we prefer self-control over other-control. Not many of us would accept a world in which windows are banned for the sake of bird safety. Not many of us are willing to go without enhancements like air conditioning and paved roads.
Of Crows and Roads
When I first moved to the countryside in western Pennsylvania, I was able to see a yearly migration of thousands of crows that arrived in October and disappeared in the spring. They went to cornfields during the day and settled in trees at night. Their migratory paths changed over the months as they moved from roosting spot to roosting spot in the area and from field to field. And then, in the late 1980s the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission began work on the Mon-Fayette Expressway, a four-lane toll road that paved over those farms that the crows visited each day. Today there are just a few crows that fly around my woods. The thousands that returned as regularly as the swallows return to Capistrano no longer come to the area.
We change things. That’s what we do.
But policing, as I say, is a touchy thing. No one spoke up for the wild crows during the planning for the road. I venture to say that no one on the PA Turnpike Commission was really aware of the annual migration to a rural township. The new road was the focus, not the birds. Every road alters the nature of Nature, even the dirt paths we made 200 to 300 millennia ago, the Appian Way during Roman times, and the Inca’s Atacama Highway.
The Environmental Dilemma
What might have been a more interesting headline for Erin and the Washington Post is, “Environmental policies that negatively affect the environment.” Want to build more windmills? Expect to kill more birds. Want expensive energy alternatives? Expect more people to die in cold and suffer more in heat as energy becomes more expensive and less available.
A World without Barns
Life adapts, doesn’t it? But most adaptation has been a relatively slow process, requiring generations because species evolve; individuals don’t.
A friend of mine who lived in the nearby mountains said that as he and his wife sat outside one night surrounded by the forest, she asked about the “barn swallows.” He was surprised by her question: “Where do you suppose the barn swallows lived before there were barns?”
Barn swallows, a widely distributed species, lived mostly in caves before humans provided them with alternatives according to Cornell’s “All about Birds” website. ** That means some human activities are supportive of and not detrimental to wildlife. And surprising estimates reveal the deer population of North America to be greater today than it was in 1800, maybe as much as 30 times greater than it was when America was a young country. Not everything we do is detrimental to wildlife. And that fact raises a question about ethics.
Are All Changes to the Environment Unethical?
Should you feel guilty about your contributions to environmental change?
There appear to be two major ethical approaches to Nature, one which is anthropocentric and the other which is biocentric, that “bio” representing all life that is not limited to human life. Environmental ethicists can argue over which approach is “better,” “more ethical or moral,” or more rational. On one extreme lie the proponents of the hierarchy of life that ranks humans above all other life-forms. On the other extreme are those who rank all life at equal value, believe in equity, and even suggest that not only do animals have rights, but also the land has rights.
It’s not necessarily an Either/Or. Picture a sliding scale or spectrum of perspectives between anthropocentricity and biocentricity. Where on the scale do you put yourself?
Dams
In western Pennsylvania, long wall coal mining has disrupted the surface features through almost instantaneous subsidence of the overlying ground. The subsidence in some instances has caused some previously free-flowing streams to pond behind surface “wrinkle” dams that alter the local ecology. With different organisms occupying the altered trophic niches and spaces, that question about what would happen if we eliminated barns becomes one centered on returning the landscape to its former state. Does one eliminate the pond and the organisms in that pond in favor of restoring stream flow and introducing previous occupants, or allow the new ecology to flourish?
Do we do our best to restore mammoths to their dominance by merging mammoth DNA found in frozen mammoths to modern elephant DNA? Would restoring all of Nature to its state of some 300,000 years ago be “good”?
The Equity Argument
I don’t have pets, but my children and grandchildren do. And, as would happen in family life, pet stories abound. Fido did … Among the stories that intrigued me recently was of dog observing the owner packing for a trip. The dog began tossing the clothes out of the suitcase as the family member put them in. The best guess is that the dog associated the practice of packing a suitcase with a family member’s frequent business trips. It might be pure projection and anthropomorphizing on our part, but we suspect the dog did not want the person to leave for that short trip. Does that seeming awareness elevate the dog on the hierarchy of life? We know that people ascribe human feelings to their pets and interpret pet actions as mimicking human behavior. Should we apply the equity we afford pets to wildlife? To domesticated species? To predators?
How Do You and I Answer for Our Actions?
You and I have daily decisions to make with regard to our use of the planet. But we shouldn’t conflate our needs and desires. You need fresh water. You need food. You need shelter. You can’t have any of the three without some exploitation. It’s only in our desires that we have a real choice. It’s only in regard to those desires that we challenge our ethics.
Maybe the question I asked at the outset should be: Do you ever think about what you have done to Earth that you didn’t need to do (or didn’t need to do to the extent you did)? Or: How have your desires changed the planet?
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