We have played major roles in the elimination of species from the earth. Recently, we have seen heroic efforts for this to be halted. We have grown more aware of the benefits of diversity and have begun to protect the animals and plants we took to the brink of collapse. This is to be celebrated, but catching the knife as it falls still doesn’t address the dropping of it.
I considered myself a diehard environmentalist for all my life. I sat with the fears around climate change constantly in my stomach. I thought about how much less vitality in the world there could be to show my kids. I felt the helplessness of problems larger than a nation and longer than a lifetime. I tried to open my mind to solutions that got around the problem.
If money moves the world, how could I capture it and throw it at the evil suits to stay out of the little nature we have left?
I sat with conflict and hypocrisy as I saw how everything around me was a product of what I was railing against. I would sit at a meal talking about problems of industrial agriculture while benefiting off its production. I would think about pollution of cars and destruction from oil as I sped off to work or to see friends.
For the longest time I couldn’t see a solution. I couldn’t even comprehend how to hold this conflict in my head. I would either numb myself with the distraction of day to life and a chronic stream of entertainment in my ear or I would move to an extreme viewpoint. I’d say that we just aren’t any good. I’d take solace in the fact humans would end up destroying ourselves and then the Earth could build back to a better place. I no longer accept this belief.
Ecosystems don’t desire our absence
We have evolved with nature not from it. Just as our bodies and minds adapted over thousands of years to become better survivors of ecosystems, our ecosystems have adapted to us. The elements and species of our ecosystems are not weak and idle players in the game of human life. We have the opportunity to steward our ecosystems toward a place of mutual alignment. This does not have to be a zero sum game.
There is evidence throughout human history that our actions change ecosystems. Most of these involve destruction. Disappearance of species, lowering of water quality, beauty and abundance becoming barren. We don’t look at it this way but New York City, a suburban cul-de-sac and Yellowstone are all ecosystems. Each of these have been guided by the hand of humans and felt the response of the rest of the ecosystem to their current state.
It’s not that we don’t have to have this separation of ourselves from nature, it’s that we cannot separate ourselves. Our power is in the ability to bring intention, stories and technology to the stewardship of our world. It’s by no means easy, but we do have the power to not live in a black and white world where there’s a clear line between where the natural world ends and human progress begins.
We can decide if we want our ecosystem to be a manicured lawn with a flower tree from 3k miles away or concrete walls with pigeon populations being managed by rats or forests we know nothing about because the only way they could stand was for the public to be banished from them.
We are not separate from our environment. We end up not living in an aligned way because it’s not easy to right now. We lived for thousands of years with predators and famine and disease. It’s beneficial to our survival to escape the world we knew. But, at the point we are now, I think that our increased chance of survival is hitting a plateau in utility. We are not going to make significant change by reverting people back to some type of rudimentary standard of living. We have to carve out a new way forward. We have to lead our ecosystems and each other into a new era.
We can’t create replicas of a past world we’ve found in archaeological sites and travel journals. We absolutely must learn from them, but the world isn’t the world that existed then. We have to make a new system where we can get what we need and give back what we should. These systems will and should look extremely similar to previous times but unless we want to eliminate the considerably larger population we have now or continue to live in this conceptually separate manner from nature, we will have to make a new world. A world where we utilize our ecosystems to our advantage not through conquering but through intention, insight and alignment.
I know it’s unlikely we can move forward without extraction of minerals, oils and gasses, and it’s unlikely that we can feed billions of people without industrial agriculture anytime soon. Even without the physics, chemistry and ecology problems, there’d still be the political problems to deal with. Despite this, I’m still trying to find a way to move forward towards a new relationship with our surrounding world. I’m trying to find out how we can take all our accomplishments and comforts and merge them with the ecosystems we evolved beside to forge a new way forward. This is why I started Quest End.