Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [11]
Living with Losing
BEN GADD
You are not going to like what I am about to say, but it’s the truth.
We have lost. Those of us who have tried to save the world from the depredations of our own species have lost.
Abbie Hoffman knew this. He put it in his suicide note. “It’s too late. We can’t win. They’ve gotten too powerful.”
Aye, too powerful. More than that, too many. Just too many people in the world. Thomas Malthus was a rather nasty fellow, I’m told, but he was right:
The spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling breath of want. The hateful passions that had vanished reappear. The mighty law of self-preservation expels all the softer and more exalted emotions of the soul. The temptations to evil are too strong for human nature to resist. The corn is plucked before it is ripe, or hidden away in unfair proportions, and the whole black train of vices that belong to falsehood are immediately generated. Provisions no longer flow in for the support of the mother with a large family. The children are sickly from insufficient food. The rosy flush of health gives place to the pallid cheek and hollow eye of misery. Benevolence, yet lingering in a few bosoms, makes some faint expiring struggles, till at length self-love resumes his wonted empire and lords it triumphant over the world.*
This is what we conservationists are up against. This is why we cannot make things better. This is why our well-reasoned letters to politicians, our appeals to the greater public, our appeals to the greater good—this is why it all fails. The human population has built up to the point at which we are behaving like rats in a crowded cage, and nothing is going to improve until our numbers get fewer.
Which they will, one way or another. “Fewer” could very well be “zero.” Alas, I’m pretty sure that the required population cut won’t occur until we have inflicted far worse on the world than we have thus far.
The environmental movement has been slow to grasp this. Hardly any of my colleagues in the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society or the Alberta Wilderness Association head their list of must-dos with “Reduce population.” They don’t seem to realize that even if we were to change our ways and become thoroughly green, at current population levels the world’s ecosystems will still collapse. The salient studies are many, but I need cite only one: NASA has found that we now appropriate 20 percent of the earth’s annual plant growth to supply ourselves—just one species among many millions—with food, fiber, wood, and fuel.* This cannot last.
We should also recognize that our destructive behavior is built right in. We are naturally habitat-modifiers, like beavers and elephants. We probably cannot do otherwise, dependent as we are on tools and intellect rather than on fangs and claws. Unlike the food-gathering equipment of other species, ours is technological and not self-limiting. It goes out of control as easily as our birth rate does.
Nonetheless, let us assume that through education and legislation and enforcement we could reduce our individual impact significantly. Yet in our billions we could not do so enough to allow normal survival rates for other species, on which we depend to give us breathable air, drinkable water, and a climate more hospitable than that of Venus.
These arguments are academic anyway. The world’s troublemakers are too busy laying waste to think about this kind of thing at all. Reasoning is for university professors, not for presidents ramping up the next war. They will never understand, and they are in charge.
Thus are we stuck. We need to de-crowd the world in order to stop perilous crowded-world behavior, but perilous crowded-world behavior is preventing us from de-crowding the world. I can’t think of any way