Is "The Environment" Now Obsolete?
Kurt Cobb | Jan 20, 2014 12:04AM ET
For millennia the presence of humans on planet Earth hardly made a dent in its ecosystems. Humans were at the mercy of their environment as much as any other creature. But with the advent of agriculture, humans began to influence the planet in major ways. Some scientists posit that the clearing of large swaths of land for planting over the past 10,000 years released enough carbon into the atmosphere to delay the next ice age.
Of course, in the past two centuries the pace of those carbon releases has grown exponentially with the industrial revolution through the burning of fossil fuels. These emissions now threaten to flip the planet into a warm state far beyond anything experienced by humans in their relatively brief time on Earth. The question we must now face is whether humans still live in "the environment" or whether they now are "the environment" by virtue of their actions.
The distinction mattered little as long as we didn't live in what economist Herman Daly calls "a full world." The introduction to his piece "save it" as actors from beyond.
But, we can decide which values we want to defend. With apologies to some of my geologist friends who understand rightly that the human project on planet Earth will just be a blip in Earth's history--please stop identifying with the rocks! Rocks are an excellent area of study; and, we have geologists to thank for much of what we know about Earth's systems. But, the time has now come to realize that that knowledge has political implications for what we as humans will actually do from here on out.
The advent of the Anthropocene has wiped out the distinction between human history and natural history. And so, my minor temper tantrum over geology applies to all the other natural sciences. There is no distinction between us and the natural world. There is just the thin membrane of life and life processes clinging to the Earth's surface which we call the biosphere and of which humans are merely a part.
It has always been thus. But now, it is imperative that we understand this if we wish to salvage anything we call human in the century to come.
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