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People Feature
Swap meat
We're told to get married, have children and deny ourselves nothing in terms of sex -- and the conservative suburbanites of "The Lifestyle" have always played by the rules.
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Nothing Personal
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People Feature
"I Was a Teenage Dominatrix"
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[04/20/00]

Nothing Personal
The making of Ziggy Jr.
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[04/19/00]

People Feature
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By Joan Walsh
[04/19/00]

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Again, it's not going to result in the destruction of the human species. But the worst-case scenario is that by the end of the century we would be living in a still changing and increasingly hostile physical environment. We would have an impoverished world with great inequities remaining in quality of life and an enormous opportunity cost for what we've done in the 21st century.

By opportunity cost, I mean that whole libraries of potential scientific information disappear with each species. And a wide range of products -- many of our future pharmaceuticals, new crops that are badly needed especially for marginal areas, new sources of fibers and other products that will come from biotechnology and gene transfer in agriculture and animal husbandry -- will be lost. And therefore there'll be a very substantial economic opportunity lost in destroying the environment.

But there's a lot more to the ill effects of habitat destruction than just opportunity costs. There's also the opportunities that the ecosystems give us for free.

Such as?

Such as the cleansing, availability and continuous supply of water, and the renewal of soils. This is an art that 3 billion years of evolution has perfected, but that we haven't even begun to think about properly as a single dominant species modifying everything. And providing the very air we breathe, all free of charge.

It's very important to keep in mind, while considering ecosystem services, just exactly what is happening to the world and what the essence of environmentalism is. This planet is not in physical equilibrium like the other solar planets. It's in a shimmering disequilibrium that comes from vast arrays of species and plants and animals and microbes living on a thin film. The biosphere that envelops the planets is so thin that it cannot be seen, edgewise, from an orbiting shuttle. This film modifies and holds the physical environment of the world in a very special equilibrium. It does this by maintaining quite complex and sophisticated cycles of energy and materials transport. And the human species is exquisitely adapted to that particular environment that the biosphere had in place when we first came along.

We did not descend into the biosphere as angels to occupy it. And we are not visitors from outer space who have colonized Earth. We are an animal species, very special, but an animal species nonetheless, that evolved in the biosphere. This is the cradle to which the human species was born and to which we are very finely adapted physically and psychologically. So when that special environment is modified in any way, the Earth becomes very much more fragile and unstable, and the future of the human species is increasingly at risk. This is the naturalistic view of how the world works that most scientists who are concerned with the environment share. It puts things in perspective.

The truth of the matter is that all the changes we make render the planet less suitable, not more suitable, for human beings. It's a fundamental distinction to be made between scientific environmentalism on the one hand and nonscientific, ideological- or religious-based anti-environmentalism or indifference on the other. This is what arguments about the environment -- as they are still with us at this Earth Day -- basically consist of.

If the spiritual impulse is central to reversing this state of affairs, we need to understand it more. Why is it so central to who we are? Why do we have so many religions?

That it exists is beyond any doubt. But exactly why we have these deep feeling and tendencies to render sacred the things most important to us is far from settled by evolutionary psychology, biological or social studies of the human mind.

But we can make some guesses: for instance, that we are intensely religious because we are intensely tribalistic. If there's anything characteristic about the history of humanity going back into deep time, it is that human beings have lived in tight clannish groups, whose members are often related to one another -- and their relationship is kept close record of -- and they are in competition with, and often hostile to, neighboring groups.

So to have the deep-seated biological, neurological impulse to draw together into the clan, particularly in times of stress and conflict, is highly adaptive. It also provided added likelihood that the group, and therefore the individuals in the group, will survive difficult times. So tribalism is surely a major element.

Next page | "To make sacred is the end product of evolution in our moral and aesthetic reasoning"