PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME, “WHAT IS THE MOST URGENT ENVIRONMENTAL issue confronting us? Is it climate change, species extinction, toxic pollution, or deforestation?” The only honest answer is, “All of the above and more are serious ecological issues, but no one knows which one might trigger an irreversible and catastrophic collapse in the planet’s life support systems.” There is no single act that will somehow avoid the looming ecocrisis.
I believe the overarching crisis resides in the modern, urban human mind, in the values and beliefs that are driving much of our destructiveness. Throughout the history of our species, human beings have understood that we are a part of nature, in which everything is connected to everything else and nothing exists in isolation. Rachel Carson pointed out that insecticides sprayed to kill pests inadvertently end up affecting fish, birds, and human beings. So every deliberate act carries the responsibility to think beyond the immediate issue and consider the whole system.
Today it’s difficult to recognize our continuing connection with and dependence on nature. So try this thought exercise: Imagine that scientists have created a time machine and we travel back four billion years, before life had evolved on the planet. Instead of unlimited resources and opportunity, we discover a place inhospitable to human life. The atmosphere is poisonous, rich in carbon dioxide and devoid of oxygen. Because there is no life, water is not filtered of toxic materials by plant roots, soil fungi, or microorganisms. There is nothing to eat in the prelife world because every bit of our food is composed of plants, animals, and microorganisms. Even if we have brought a stash of food and seeds in the time capsule so that we can stay a while, there is nowhere to grow food because soil is created by the mixture of molecules from life-forms with the matrix of sand, silt, and clay. There is nothing to burn to create heat because all fuels—coal, gas, oil, wood, and peat—are created from life. Even if we have brought paper and wood to make a fire, the absence of oxygen precludes flame anywhere on Earth. So the four sacred elements—earth, air, fire, and water—that traditional people tell us sustain all life, are created and cleansed or replenished by the web of life that we tend to call nature.
The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are our biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity—then we will treat each one with greater respect. That is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.