Biodiversity – living within and not apart

There’s a big problem with conversations about biodiversity. As we speak, we often forget that we are just a component within the biodiversity mix, not merely the audience to natural theatre taking place elsewhere.

Humans have undoubtedly become the dominant species within nature. Gifted with mental and physical dexterity, if not superior strength, our species has been able to adapt by changing the landscape, building tools and, to a large extent, mastering the food chain.

In contrast, other species have had to find the means to adapt to environment change within themselves, swept along by the currents of change, rather than diverting and harnessing the flow to their advantage.

Within the natural course of environmental change, there are always animals at the top of the food chain, but inherent in their dominance is a vulnerability to the success those flora and fauna that reach from within the earth to the apex. The predator’s destiny is determined by the success of those on who it preys.

It is no surprise then, that in the natural world, consumption is driven by need, not by desire or greed.

Think about the crocodile. It has survived since the age of the dinosaurs, principally because its environmental footprint, its consumption of resources, made it almost uniquely adaptable among reptiles to survive the near-extinction event of about 66 million years ago, which most believe was precipitated or at least accelerated by an asteroid hitting near what is now the Yucutan Peninsula in Central America.*

The behavioural contrast between the crocodile’s frugal consumption and survival over an estimated 95 million years and the mass consumption of human society could not be greater.

There is considerable scientific debate about Earth’s carrying capacity for human population, with projections range from around nine billion to in excess of 20 billion.  But in his best-selling book, Lifespan, Dr David Sinclair asks whether we’re grappling with the wrong problem. He discusses it in the context of extending human life expectancy and its impact on population and proposes that Earth’s capacity is not limited by population, but by our approach to consumption.^

Our behaviour is based on a construct unique to our species – that the Earth’s resources are there to deliver benefits to humans way beyond survival. In pursuit of self-actualisation we have chosen pathways to wealth, prosperity, comfort and gratification beyond measure. We have aspired to live beyond the realm and accountability of the natural world.

This is the blocker to sensible biodiversity strategy. We have to stop thinking of protecting our biodiversity as an philanthropic gesture to nature – a means of assuaging our own pillaging of the Earth’s finite resources to the detriment and, if necessary, ultimate demise of all else that lives and breathes.

We need to collectively make the cognitive leap to understanding our long-term survival depends on reintegrating into the natural order rather than standing aside and above it. The consequences of not doing so are renditioning before our eyes. The climate is changing, weather patterns becoming more severe, biodiversity declining.

Humans have ever-growing capacity to reimagine and reshape their environment to ensure their viability. Indeed, some see increasing technological capability and exponential growth in knowledge, possibly augmented by artificial intelligence, as a free pass to future sustenance and growth.

This may be assuring, but consider where it could take us. Complacency about our transcendance of natural interdependency could wipe out the foundations for millennia of planetary stability and habitability.

Future human effort would be almost exclusively assigned to dealing with the ramifications – an inhospitable climate and chemically altered atmosphere, unknown changes to solar radiation, sterile and possibly toxic oceans, destitute landscapes demanding drastically modified crops and manufactured food sources, dislocated populations warring over arable land and potable water and undeniable impacts of these on health.

This dystopia is extremely unlikely, with destiny lying somewhere short of it. But human arrogance about its rights and privileges among species has put us somewhere on this trajectory.

Stepping off this path, changing the curve, requires a more benevolent and humble perspective on our place within the Earth’s biodiversity and our reliance on its retention, from the top to the bottom of the food chain.

As a civilised and prosperous society, we must recognise the huge responsibility we bear to ensure the welfare of all the ecosystems within which we preside — and of which we are now we are effectively architect and master.

*There is some scientific conjecture about this. While this impact may have been contributory, dinosaurs had been in slow decline for a while and there had also been an increase in volcanic activity around that time.

^ David A Sinclair PhD with Matthew D LaPlante, Lifespan – why we age and why we don’t have to, Harper Collins 2019.