In the last three posts I have outlined why I think we are all connected to nature. But that connectedness lies along a continuum of liking it for its pragmatic personal needs to loving it intrinsically as a part of who we are. I really do not believe that anyone gets up n the morning and thinks, “I going to screw the natural world today.” I do, however, believe that many people involved in obtaining profits from resource extraction harbor a callousness towards the natural world, merely perceiving it as ‘something to be used.‘ Yet, these same people are willing to buy expensive mansions set in spectacular natural settings with spectacular views. If many of these people happen to be in controlling aspects of government and business then trying to sell an idea that the Earth is Gaia is going to fall on death ears. (The Gaia idea presupposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.) To appeal to people from the middle to the far end of the spectrum away from believers in Gaia we must use more pragmatic communications to convince them to behave kindly to the planet.
One of the greatest problems of course is the spread of humanity and the ever-decreasing amount of wild lands. We are literally transforming the planet from diverse biomass to increasing human and human selected biomass. (e.g. we transform old growth forests into monocultured tree plantations, or plantations/farmland with just our crops.) Hence one of the reasons for the 6th mass extinction event now occurring. And we do it for economic benefit and human preference with barely a second thought to the biodiversity that once existed in that region. In just the past decade, the advent of new farming and forestry techniques that will one day lead to even greater sustainable resource management is taking off all across the planet. It is curious that the countries least involved in this new sustainable thinking tend to be the ones most invested in old ways of thinking and profit making – i.e. the MDCs.
What seems to make more of an impact on the MDC hierarchy is the smell of money and survival when it becomes so obvious that we need the natural world as it is that a blind man on a dark night can see it. While I need to do some posts on modern medicine and why we need to transform that, let me point out that the pharmaceutical cartels have recognized that many species of plants are being found that can provide novel medicines. We don’t want to drive these species to extinction without ever discovering their uses. Ten of our top 25 drugs come directly from wild plants; the rest we developed because of studying the chemistry of wild species.
Another pragmatic perspective is that the MDCs like to travel a lot. All nations can benefit from healthy ecofriendly and responsible ecotourism, which can be a major contributor to a developing country’s economy—especially for developing nations rich in biodiversity. One only has to look at Costa Rica as a prime player in this economic arena. Some decades ago, Costa Rica found itself, like most other nations in that tropical zone of the planet being developed with plantation farms, primarily to benefit the MDCs. If you drive through Costa Rica today you will be stuck by some odd inconsistencies. Miles and miles of banana and palm plantations all over the country. But once you get through those areas you find yourself in vast areas of old growth rain forest. A conscious decision by the country many year ago was to develop a new form of tourism that relied on its rainforests and wildlife – ecotourism. This form of economic development is not without its problems, but lessons learned over many years have brought it to a place where not only the forests and the tourists benefit, but also the local people get benefit from the economic boom. In too many areas, the corporate tourist system make all the gains, the tourists get their fill of wonders, but all the local people got was a poorly paid job in the tourist service industry and an erosion of their culture as the areas became overly developed resorts rather than something the locals could co-create with help from the tourist industry.
It has been found that rich people in the MDCs, and around the world in general, foster the poaching problem with their greed for endangered animal parts (e.g. Rhino horn, animals skins, etc…). Poaching is a lucrative, if not dangerous, business for local people seeing an easy way to make lots of money that does not benefit anyone but themselves and local gangs. As I have said, ecotourism has seen its problems, but affluent tourists pay good money to see natural settings that allow viewing of wildlife, novel natural communities, and protected ecosystems. For instance, it has been estimated that an African lion living to age 7 generates $515,000 in tourist dollars and only $1,000 for its skin on the black market. An African elephant generates $1 million in tourist dollars that is much more than its tusks are worth on the black market.
While we are aware of the problems of poaching and economics of poaching and why that happens, in ecotourism, we do tend to focus on the macro fauna and spectacular scenery. What we miss is all the micro fauna that is so important to an ecosystems health. All ecosystems, once they reach a dynamic climax community, are relatively stable and resilient systems. Their resilience is their ability to bounce back from major changes (like floods, droughts, cyclonic winds, etc…) and remain the same dynamic system it was before the devastating event. Human activities are perhaps the most crucial ecological insults that are threatening them overall. It is clear that we as a species are pushing a 6th mass extinction on the planet – at this point mostly vertebrates, but it is the unseen fauna and flora that have many ecologists concerned. The mass extinction isn’t coming quickly as a consequence of a large asteroid impact or super volcanic eruption, but slowly and insidiously as humans continue to push their higher hyper-consumer lifestyles and the many industrial processes that support that lifestyle system, which continually erode the resilience of natural systems.
So what can we do? Be aware of your lifestyle and how it impacts the natural world. This was a central part of many of the assignments I gave my students in my classes as an academic. I have no wish to change your politics or tell you what to do. But, I do encourage you to be more aware of how you live and what it is that you use in your life to support the lifestyle you take for granted. We cannot live without the totality of the natural world, yet we act as if it is simply an inconvenience or there for us to use without any regard to consequences. Get people you know to also become aware – that is a first step. It’s a series of steps in getting people to come along the continuum to loving nature in a more spiritual way and hopefully moving towards one in which they see themselves and the planet as one system – A Gaian system.
We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go. Anon.
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed. – Mahatma Gandhi
Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten. Cree Indian Prophecy
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