Humans Are Good For The Earth
As controversial of an idea as it may be today, the vast expanse of history provides overwhelming evidence that you, as a human, are actually a force for ecological health and balance.
We really only started causing a lot of damage in the last couple hundred years, and ecological devastation really only began in earnest in the last century and a half. That’s a small blip in the time we’ve been here.
During the rest of our time here on earth, we humans have mostly lived in harmony with our ecosystems. Even more than that, we lived fully integrated into our local environments. We helped our ecosystems. We WERE our ecosystems. (We still are, btw.)
The abundance of California two hundred years ago is legendary: Salmon ran in numbers so great that people claimed that you could cross the rivers on their backs and never get wet; Herds of deer and elk and antelope numbering in the thousands roamed lush grassland parks that were bedazzled by an endless sea of wildflowers. Bears were so populous that places like Los Osos were named for them, and we honored them on the state flag. The Great Central Valley was one of the largest and most abundant wetland ecosystems in the world, home to a teeming array of birds, waterfowl, and creatures of dizzying diversity.
California was not like this because it had been preserved for all time from human influence and became this verdant wonderland of biodiversity in our absence. California achieved this incredible state of natural abundance because of the humans living here. They used their deep ecological knowledge, gained from thousands of years of living within and observing their ecosystems, to enhance the landscape through thoughtful management. This California of legend was actually a kind of landscape-scale permaculture food forest. (See Tending The Wild, by M. Kat Anderson)
Europeans have become the easy target for today’s ecological devastation. But a few hundred years ago even they lived largely in a similarly abundant perennial polyculture that they made possible. Again, through careful, ecological management, people all over the European continent lived in and ate from a landscape that they actually enhanced in abundance, and they did this for thousands of years. (See Max Paschall’s The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe )
This is why there has been a backlash against calling the modern age the “Anthropocene.” This term implies that we had no influence over the world prior to this time, and when we finally began to influence the world the results were negative. Embedded in this idea is that idea that we are inherently detrimental to earth, and perhaps that the world would be better off without us. But the evidence for the vast majority of our time on this earth would suggest otherwise.
We have shown recently that we can cause immense harm, and we can do it very quickly. But to redress that negative impact, we need to understand that we are capable of so much good. Our current ecological ignorance is an aberration in our history, not the norm for our species. Remembering that gives context to how we begin to solve it.
Once we stop blaming our entire species for our problems, we can begin to start asking better questions that will move us closer to the solutions:
What other erroneous beliefs prevent us from finding solutions? What is the source of our sense of disconnection from nature? What ideas or perspectives on the earth enable us to enact environmental damage? What systems strip us of our ecological intelligence and disconnect us from our intrinsic connection with the natural world? What thoughts prevent us from seeing ourselves as one of the earth’s most powerful tools for ecological restoration and regeneration?
Let this Earth Day be the beginning of new way of seeing your role, as a human, in creating Earth’s health… as you have done for millennia.