Today is World Environment Day but the word "environment," never mind the real thing, has been contaminated so bad that it's unrecognizable.
Take a moment.
What do you see in your mind when you think of "the
environment?"
You probably see trees, rivers, mountains, lakes, sky, maybe some birds and animals. You probably see summer, not winter. What you probably see is what you would call "the natural environment," a place untouched by humanity. Most importantly of all, you likely don't see yourself in the image. You're a viewer, standing separate from your ideal picture of the environment.
That's part of the problem with "the environment" - it's over there. Even when you go hunting or fishing or hiking in the wilderness, you're a visitor, you're passing through, a tourist getting "the environment" experience before returning to your real life.
That view of the environment is wrong on several levels.
Even when sitting at a computer in an office tower, looking out of your plane window at 35,000 feet or lying in your bed at night, you're in "the environment." That air you're breathing, that rain you're avoiding, that sun you're loving is, for the most part, the same air, rain and sun as everywhere else. Beneath the thin layer of pavement and wood and metal and rubber of our shoes, our homes, our cars and our streets is dirt and rocks, just like everywhere else.
Not only are we always in the environment, there is no such distinction between the "natural" environment and the "unnatural" environment. Why is your home "unnatural" but a beaver dam or an ant hill or a bird's nest is "natural?" Probably because you honestly believe that any alteration you or any other human being make to the landscape is "unnatural," even though most other animals do it, too.
In other words, not only are we humans part of the environment but our interaction with the environment is little different from animals. We look to our environment for sustenance and safety, just like all the other critters, and we're willing to alter the space we occupy, not only for shelter but to improve our lives, for ourselves and others in our clan. When we see ourselves this way, two things happen.
We become smaller, as we realize how tiny we are. Even with more than seven billion of us living on Earth, we cover only a tiny percentage of the land with living space. As a species, we are surrounded by incredible diversity. An alien biologist would see a planet populated mostly by beetles and other insects. Although we have conquered the land, the oceans are a still a mystery to us, both in size and depth. Our pilots and planes, from Amelia Earhart to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, can disappear into them, never to be heard from again.
We are particularly small in our dependence on the resources within such a thin skin of water, soil and air that covers our planet and our vulnerability to so many large variables outside of our control, such as storms, earthquakes, floods, drought and new infectious diseases.
Looking out beyond our environment, we are nothing more than molecules of activity on a pebble floating in a cold darkness so vast that light is unbelievably slow at crossing it and the stars creating the light outnumber all the grains of sand on our pebble home.
As small as we are in space, we are even more miniscule in time, our arrival as a species on Earth happening a minute ago in the age of the world and our lives as individuals a blink of an eye compared to the mountains and even Big Tree in the Ancient Forest.
At the same time, we are much too big.
There are too many of us consuming too many resources too quickly, driving too many other species to extinction as we adapt the entire world to satisfy human needs. There is no "other" place to go to for fresh water, clean air, nutrient-rich soil and biodiversity once we exhaust what's available in our environment. Our intelligence and our ability to retain knowledge has become so impressive that we can craft increasingly clever ways to exploit and alter the environment for our own pleasure while also being fully aware of the damage we are causing to the sustainability of our species.
We cannot destroy the environment but our environment can destroy us, if we don't wipe ourselves out first. The environment was here before we arrived and it will exist long after humanity becomes a footnote in the biological history of this planet. We can, however, alter our environment just enough to end its ability to sustain our species as a viable entity in the biosphere.
It's that thought that should occupy our minds every day, not just on World Environment Day.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
