What Have We Done?

maintain that we are not causing this change. But the business people most concerned, the insurers, think other wise. And we will have to learn to cope with these changes because they are irreversible.

Other natural resources, like oil, are exhaustible. And we cannot replace them with our cleverness. We can produce partial substitutes, like fuel from coal, at ecological cost. There are also those resources that are slowly naturally replenishable, like forests, which we are using at an alarming rate. I need not go on, as I am sure readers can think of many others in each category. In short, there are too many humans consuming too many natural resources. We are like a plague in that respect. Morrison entitled his book ‘Plague Species’ with good reason. But we go further; we produce enormous amounts of gaseous, liquid and material wastes. Some of these wastes do little harm. They just fill dumps. Others, however, are devastating the environment and even changing the climate. Many are also harming our health in insidious fashion. Nature has a remarkable recycling capability but that does not extend to most of the waste our industrial system generates. In fact, there is emerging evidence that human activities have upset natural checks and balances. Lovelock, of Gaia fame, certainly thinks so.

This brings up another misleading term. Many talk about how good we have become in ‘recycling’ our wastes. They ignore the ecological cost of this ‘recycling’ that is not really recycling but just extending the life of the material. Nature does a good recycling job but we have failed lamentably to be able to emulate nature in this regard. In fact, there are very few natural processes that we can effectively emulate.

We are starting to understand another area in which we have unknowingly created many problems. Clever people have created chemically many products that supposedly add to our lives by easing tasks or augmenting capabilities or making us look better. Many of these are foreign to the natural systems, which are unable to cope. The dramatic increase in cancer is just one example of the deleterious impact of chemical products. There are even signs that our use of such products is changing the ratio between female and male births. The EU is belatedly introducing measures to ensure that companies establish that products they plan to put on the market are not harmful.

In summary then, we humans are each an ecological debit during our lifetime, some much more than others. My debt to the ecology would have been about average for those in developed countries. I thought it great, at the time, to drive many kilometers in Europe, North America as well as Australia. I gave no thought to the fact that I was using up more than my fair share of an irreplaceable natural resource. Those with splendid homes and many cars and other symbols of a luxuriant lifestyle have become even more indebted to Gaia, but they will not have to pay. But their grandchildren will. There is a general claim that market forces ensure the distribution of these goods and services. It is a pity that these forces act in the wrong direction. They drive consumption. They drive the destruction of the material foundations of society. They are killing civilization’s body.

Today’s wealthy people have enjoyed their free lunch and their descendents will belatedly abuse them for it. Contrast our ecological indebtedness with that of the kangaroo or the elephant or the lion or the whale. And what do we do to earn ecological credit – nothing. We may do things that human society value but we do not improve the environment. We invariably degrade it to satisfy our wants as well as our needs. The consequence of our exuberance is that the foundations our global society is dying. That is an immutable fact. It is dying more rapidly in some regions, like Africa, than in others but that is because developed countries have better developed their techniques of importing natural resources from other regions.

I find it quite disconcerting that so many knowledgeable people can be so selective about what they consider to be the worst symptom of the malaise that humans have inflicted on Gaia. There is appreciable uncertainty about when the peak rate of extraction of oil has or will occur. It will quite likely cause a major recession in due course. But so many are focused on the energy situation that it is likely that remedial action in that area will actually exacerbate the holistic problem.

There is little uncertainly that climate change is already underway. This is another major symptom and one we should already be using some of our remaining resources on mitigating operations. That will not be done until misleading terminology is cast aside and reality faced. Decreasing ‘emissions’ is really decreasing the ‘rate of emissions’, that is,

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