Ed. note: This piece from the series Essays from the Edge, occasional reflections from Gus Speth on the systemic crisis and the next system.
Here is a topic miles away from the 2024 elections, though it should not be. Its political salience is just about zero, but it concerns the future of life on Earth. I could be referring to the recent surge in spending on nuclear weapons, but the devastation I will write about is slower yet no less problematic.
If you are of a certain age, you may remember the children’s bookThe Wump World. It first appeared in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. Its message was clear. The bountiful, bucolic world of the Wumps, with its lovely bumbershoot trees and plentiful grasses for grazing, was denuded and impoverished by the Pollutians, who had colonized the Wump’s planet because they had destroyed their own. The Wumps hid underground for a long time, and eventually the Pollutians left, blasting off in search of another planet. Slowly, the Wumps came up, looked around and seeing the biotic impoverishment “wondered if there was anything left for them.”
Bill Peet, creator of the Wumps, leaves them with a bit of hope. Eventually, they found a small meadow of grass not scarified by the Pollutians’ ferocious, belching machines. But in the last sentence of his fable, Peet notes that “the Wump World would never be quite the same.”
Now, a half-century later, we see that Peet’s message is still entirely too relevant. Major studies of Earth’s biological diversity by top scientific groups keep appearing, and despite decades of environmental action and many international agreements to protect species and ecosystems, these reports offer grim findings and forecasts.
The authoritative NatureServe group reports that species are going extinct today faster than any time in human history. The immediate causes include habitat loss and deterioration, dams and waterbody alteration, poaching, and climate change. They calculate that an alarming 34 percent of plant species and 40 percent of animal species in the United States are at risk of extinction and that 41 percent of US ecosystems are at risk of range-wide collapse.
It is not just here in the US, of course. Taking a global perspective, European scientists recently found “a widespread global erosion of species, with 48 percent undergoing declines.” Their findings, they note, are “a further signal indicating that global biodiversity is entering a mass extinction, with ecosystem heterogeneity and functioning, biodiversity persistence, and human well-being under increasing threat.”
The Living Planet Report 2022 is a comprehensive study of trends in global biodiversity and the health of the planet. This flagship World Wildlife Fund publication reports an average decline of 69% in species populations since 1970.
Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are gone. Half the world’s wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. Half of the large predator fish are gone as well as more than half the elephants. The list goes on.
Such tragic, tearful losses are being worsened by increasing global warming, ocean acidification, and other impacts of fossil fuel use. Climate change will speed and spread biological impoverishment while impeding the potential recovery of diminished ecosystems.
Plowing recklessly ahead
A phenomenally large and sophisticated enterprise has been working hard for many decades to save the Earth’s biological wealth, now spearheaded by impressive groups like the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy and by feisty newcomers like the Center for Biological Diversity. In this cause, awe-inspiring films, beautiful books, and profound personal reflections have reached and often moved perhaps billions of people. Yet, despite decades of warnings and these tremendous efforts, the human enterprise plows recklessly ahead, doing to Earth what the Pollutians did to the Wump’s world.
This tragedy points to two overall conclusions. One is that the human enterprise on the planet has thus far been devastating for other life forms and for their habitats. Second is the plausible prediction, if history be our guide, that this devastation will continue for a considerable amount of time, leading to a planetary condition of widespread biotic impoverishment.
I do not want to exaggerate, but I believe we are on the cusp of a ruined planet.
It is just as if species had no rights and we had no duty to honor them! The great cultural historian Thomas Berry pointed out that humans had grasped the concept of rights—and then given them all to themselves. He saw our misguided values and flawed consciousness as the root of ecological devastation and called for a profound reorientation.
Berry sought a new “communion of subjects.” to bring humans and nature together.
“The deepest cause of the present devastation,” he wrote in The Great Work, “is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all rights on the humans. … We see ourselves as a transcendent mode of being. We don’t really belong here. But if we are here by some strange destiny then we are the source of all rights and all values. All other earthly beings are instruments to be used or resources to be exploited for human benefit.”
A vital assignment
Here is some good news: There’s now a vibrant movement working to secure the rights of nature.
I would like to flip the normal chain of being which puts humans at the top and pose a question. Can you imagine Earth without people, not today’s Earth but a pristine Earth that evolved to the present without us? If you can contemplate such a world with satisfaction and pleasure—a world with forests of majestic old-growth trees, with oceans brimming over with fish, with clear skies literally darkened by passing flocks of birds, thriving with abundant diversity of life and landscape but without people—then you not only have a keen ecological consciousness but, more to my point, you are ready for a vital assignment.
Imagine further that you live on a different planet from this pristine Earth, and now you are the captain of the spaceship Voyage of Discovery. Your home world has become depleted, polluted, and overheated, and your people, billions of them, must find a new planet. You are the leader of the expedition to find such a place.
As the Voyage of Discovery enters the solar system, its sensors immediately home in on the pristine Earth, with all its biological and material wealth—wild, whole, and beautiful. As you settle into an orbit around Earth, you and your crew begin to closely study Earth. You first become intrigued but then amazed and awestruck by what you see, even fascinated by frogs.
You and your crew discuss how to settle Earth in a way that allows all of you to enjoy a decent standard of living while having the smallest possible impact on Earth’s environment. As the discussion warms up, a woman from the science team quiets the group with her intervention: “Whatever the odds of achieving a truly sustainable development on Earth, they are improved if the people and nations we would bring here are well-informed about science and policy choices, if they share deeply the values of social justice and environmental protection and care about the future as well as themselves, if they have a tradition of working together cooperatively to forge common goals and solve mutual problems, if they are democracies rather than dictatorships, and if they love peace. Do the nations of our world meet these tests?” She lets the question hang there.
After her talk, there are some moments of reflection and discussion, but soon, at the urging of the captain, a decision is taken: leave Earth alone—save it and all its amazing beauty and diversity and let it evolve on its own uninterrupted path. There are smiles and quiet applause as Voyage of Discovery speeds away.
I want to end with some questions for us all.
We can’t fly away like the Voyage, leaving Earth to recover before we finish off the rest, so what is to be done in its stead? How can we recognize and respect the right of all of Earth’s life to flourish and accord intrinsic value to that life and life’s systems, nature for her own sake?
What are we prepared to sacrifice to save others, in this case, the life that evolved here with us? What are we prepared to do without our aggrandizement or the wild things to whom we are close kin?
How do we try to compensate for our destruction of so much of Earth’s life? By curbing ourselves? By deep societal change? By bending heaven and Earth to protect what is left, before it is too late?
