I believe that much of the effort expended to save the many endangered species of this World is wasted – probably not a popular view – since without their habitat they can never have a long term future. It seems to me that the most pressing issue is to protect habitat if we want to maintain our planet’s biodiversity, a diversity of which we’re part.
Most of the Earth’s species have evolved to occupy relatively constrained environmental conditions in terms of temperature, rainfall, acidity, or specific food sources. Change the local conditions and that particular species cannot survive there any more, it doesn’t meet their needs. On the other hand, we’re immune from this kind of danger, nature has given us the ability to adapt rapidly.
Except our freedom from the shackles of habitat dependency is illusory.
But we’ve gained that big brain that allows us to manipulate the environment, bending it to our will by the application of technology, it’s given us access to virtually every environment. And to some degree this is true, except we fail to notice that defining habitat, like most things, is subject to picking the right scale. When you look at habitat on the scale of the human species you find that paradoxically our own development is destroying ours.
You see I’m not referring to the destruction of the natural world alone, the topic that Environmentalists harp on about until everyone’s immune to the effects, but the fact that our uncontrolled population growth and it’s attendant unrelenting hunger for resources is making our own habitat –Earth– less friendly to exactly the kind of environment we aspire to live in.
Consider what happens when the resources needed to produce our energy, plastics, medicines, transport, homes and all other products upon which of our lifestyle relies have become so expensive that few can afford them. Sure we can do without all the mod-cons, but water, food, fuel or even the ground we’re standing on?
The usual response to this question is that technology will have moved on, and these resources will be replaced by new and plentiful ones, or become infinitely recyclable, and our lives will have successfully adapted again.
But technology rarely makes materials redundant, we’re still using materials that would have been familiar to our ancestors in our everyday lives… only in much, much greater quantity. We live in a closed system, and whilst we can recycle materials there’s no inexhaustible supply. At best a little is irretrievably lost on each recycling loop, and more people means a growing demand.
Let me be controversial and use an analogy to Locusts. When swarming their numbers rapidly obliterate their local environment, so they move on. But what happens when they reach the extent of their natural habitat? Nature takes it’s course, they starve in their millions, turning on each other in order to stave off this fate, but eventually they’re gone.
Fortunately for the Locusts, being grasshoppers they’re dependent upon rapidly renewing vegetation to build a viable habitat, but what about a species that is reliant on resources that may never grow back, what are their prospects?
Imagine that our original Swarm managed to strip all the vegetation from the whole planet, never to grow again. It’s an ugly, but mercifully brief, picture if you’re one of the newly emerging grasshoppers in the aftermath of this swarm phase.
We possess no special relationship with our habitat, ours is just bigger than most, and maybe that’s why we’ve allowed ourselves to become too complacent. The World’s not as big and limitless as we once thought and the upkeep of our habitat relies upon resources we‘re likely to find in increasingly short supply as we enter our own overcrowding induced swarm phase.
What’s worse, by the time this becomes obvious to all, we’ll have used the very resources we needed to engineer a way out of the hole we’re in, all we’ll be able to do is fill it in. By accepting, or refusing to address, the effects of population growth we’re making everything more expensive, except life, that’ll become increasingly cheap.