We are witnessing dramatic outcomes in our relationship to the environment. While the loss of resources is well documented, why do we ignore information available on irreparable damage? How can we live with the knowledge of environmental damage and let it continue?
The answer lies in our attitudes to the natural world. Our values conflict with our reasoning. That is why our values and cultural ideas need re-examination to face the specific threats of environmental degradation that leads to environmental collapse.
Until recently, cultures around the globe viewed the natural world as sacred in the sense that it was entitled to reverence. It was the source of life-giving resources, human heritage, culture, and identity. It not only lends meaning to our lives, but the means to sustain it. Western culture has diminished this relationship of balance. Carl Jung, the great psychologist observed: “Man feels isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning to him.”
Our disconnection to the natural world is leading to a sense of urgency. In 2005, the United Nations released the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Conclusions of 1,360 scientists were: “…Nearly two thirds of the services provided by nature to humankind are found to be in decline worldwide.” Rapid temperature rises are threatening the entire animal kingdom. The large predator fish populations in the sea have been reduced by 90 percent since the onset of industrialized fishing. Coral reefs are in trouble everywhere with 30 percent already dead and another 20 percent degraded from warming waters.
We are witnessing accelerating rates of extinction, including drowning polar bears due to melting sea ice and vanishing salmon populations because of dams on spawning streams. Habitat loss to bird and butterfly populations and tropical rainforests is due to unsustainable logging and agriculture practices each year. A long list of environmental harms continues from over-harvesting and inefficiency as waste dominates over sustainable uses.
Our values reveal consumption reigns over restraint. Aldo Leopold, one of the founders of the modern ecology movement, described the problem this way. Where wolves were killed from over-hunting, deer populations soared. The deer then denuded the landscape through over-grazing. Without the wolves to trim the herd, vegetation disappeared. With scare vegetation to feed the growing herds and the deer died of starvation, leaving washed out soils and dust storms. This example signals how earth's natural services, its “natural capital” is imperiled.
Business as usual leads to other consequences. Unrestrained production of toxic wastes from industry and homes puts tremendous pressure on the environment, too. Smog and pollution now cover all major cities around the globe. Annual production of synthetic organic chemicals from 1940-1991 grew from 2.2 billion to 214 billion pounds. Not only did industry pollution rise, but nuclear waste as well. Taken together these pollutants have caused a dramatic rise in disease. Here in Colorado at Rocky Flats, death and illness from nuclear contamination are well documented.
Undermining understanding of ecological consequences for our health and that of the planet is the privatization of resources. Cooperative and social endeavors are often drowned out by unrestrained competition. Lin Ostrom, a Nobel Laureate in Economics writes ”… for thousands of years people have self organized to manage common pool resources and users often do devise long-term sustainable institutions for governing these resources.” Today, we are a long way from sustainable governance. As ecological and environmental losses mount, it is clear our values must change. We are headed in the wrong direction. Sustainable management is a priority to change our behavior.
“We face a challenge of complexity, scale, and urgency,” Lester R. Brown writes. Our competitive system is playing a leading role in the environmental crisis. As corporations grow in size, so does their appetite, always hungering for more.
A value system that honors only maximum extraction and profit naturally results in exploitation of the environment, leading to a sense of scarcity impelling people to take more than they need. Only social values of sustainable management and conservation of resources can lead to a sense of abundance and sustainable levels of consumption for the long-term.
According to John Beddington, U.K. science advisor, the world is facing a “perfect storm” of food shortages, water scarcity, and costly oil by 2030. We have created a system of relating to the natural world that is incompatible with sustainable use of our resources. The result has been the destruction of paramount natural resources and harms to human communities. If we are to learn to adapt, it will require that we recognize the true value of nature, both in terms of an economic sense and in the richness it provides to our lives.
Author: Jeff Evans | Source: Grand Junction Free Press [February 18, 2011]