There is no Shortage of Resources, Only a Shortage of Knowledge.
We often hear the claim that humans are destroying the planet through consumption, capitalism, energy usage, and impact on nature. I believe that’s false and here’s why.
Most recently, the documentary Seaspiracy has gotten people enraged because they see it as yet another proof that man is in the process of destroying the planet we live on and that we are depleting the planet for its resources.
The documentary has subsequently been heavily criticized even by some of its contributors for exaggerations, being misleading, and alarmist. This is not unlike the documentary, Cowspiracy which was also filled with misleading and false claims after the uproar it created back in 2014.
For many though, it doesn’t change the fact that they basically feel humans are bad for the planet and that we are to blame for hurting the environment and its many species. It’s hard to argue against emotions so I won’t.
I will instead try to provide a different perspective. A perspective that should illustrate why our impact is not as destructive as it may sometimes seem. In fact, I would argue that impacting nature is the only pro-human thing to do.
The 99.9%
It’s estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. Nature has been through 5 mass extinctions long before humans even evolved.
They went extinct because they either lacked the ability to adapt to competition from other species or that they fell victim to super-volcanic eruptions, asteroids, or changes in the climate. They did not have the ability to solve the existential threat they were facing and were sacrificed at the altar of evolution. Nature takes no prisoners.
For hundreds of thousands of years, humans survived at the mercy of nature and the climate, without any ability to do much about it. If a harvest went bad, we starved, if we got a simple infection we could die, if a woman gave birth, she or the child could die. Life was hard for everyone, young and old, man and woman, farmer and soldier. Even kings weren’t safe from the long brutal arms of nature as the medical field still at its inception. And so through most of our history, we only just survived.
All this changed in the last 300 years. Especially after the industrial revolution, we have been able to increasingly gain control over nature which now allows us to stand our ground in ways that were impossible to even imagine before.
Today we produce enough food for most people in the world, even though we are now 4 times as many as back in the 18th century. That is — back when there was plenty of fish in the oceans, but most people barely made ends meet or had to work hard for them to do. We transport water into big cities through pipes from far away, so we can live more people in denser areas, and we lead sewage water out of the city and filtrate it to reduce epidemics and general discomfort. We communicate globally in milliseconds, develop vaccines to pandemics in 48 hours, build ever bigger cities, pull people out of poverty, travel around the world in hours, transform nature into high yield farmlands, transform the oceans through aqua-farming, build space stations and explore Mars remotely from the earth. Not bad for a species who once lived in cages.
We have done all this by transforming our surroundings into resources using knowledge and energy —a lot of energy. In fact, there is a direct causal relationship between how much energy we’ve used, and how much of the planet we’ve been able to transform into a modern, safe, and liveable place for humans.
Adding to that, the more energy we have been able to use by outsourcing a lot of the work to machines, the more time we have been able to spend on activities other than securing food, the richer we have become, the longer we lived, the more problems we’ve been able to solve, the more we can produce, and the more people we’ve been able to pull out of poverty. In other words, there is also a causal relationship between our energy use, knowledge accumulation, and our wealth. It is this surplus of wealth that allows us to acquire even more knowledge and it is this knowledge, which allows us to develop ever more effective solutions to the problems we are constantly facing as a species.
However, our energy consumption does not only have positive externalities, it has negative externalities too. Among others; pollution, the ability to wipe humanity out with nuclear warheads, and potentially affecting the climate in the long run.
This has many people calling for a radical change in the way we live. Calls for the dismantling of the fossil fuel industry, meat-free days, veganism, de-growth, reduce consumerism, carbon taxation, drastic reduction of flying, and rethinking capitalism. All in the name of reducing CO2 and impacting nature less. A common line of thinking is that unless we do something drastic, we will destroy ourselves and the planet will be unlivable within the next 100 years, depleted of resources.
This view, although pushed by many politicians, large parts of the media, and environmental organizations is false. And not just false in a debate club kind of way, it’s profoundly false.
The 0.00001%
The potential consequences of the human-induced impact on the planet are real, and they will always be real. We will always be impacting the planet by our very existence. Furthermore, the richer, more numerous, and advanced we become, the bigger the impact.
But there is a reason why only 0.1% of all species that have ever lived are still around. It’s not because of humans, but because the planet didn’t care about any species at all and don’t care about the 0.1% who exist today. Of that 0.1% which represents an estimated 8 million species, only one of them cares and stands a chance to be the exception to the rule in the long run and that’s us.
No one else cares and we will always be faced with problems of existential nature. Whether it’s a supernova, a pandemic, asteroid, volcanic eruption, human-induced or natural climate change, and all sorts of other things we can not even imagine yet. Eventually, the sun will swell and consume the entire solar system.
The universe does not negotiate with its inhabitants and no amount of renewable energy, the dismantling of fossil fuels, meat-free days, veganism, anti-consumerism, or our love of nature is going to change that. Nature doesn’t love us back. Every day could be humanity's last.
But every day is also a new opportunity to develop new knowledge that can help us solve the existential risks we encounter. It’s what sets us apart from all the other species. We can be the exception to the rule if we choose to. Not by scaling back our impact on the planet, but by increasing it.
To do so we need to produce more knowledge. That requires scientific advancements and technological progress, which require more growth with require consumerism, which requires more (much more) energy usage. We will invest the freed-up time into coming up with solutions to solve not just the naturally occurring existential risks but the challenges our solutions will always create.
We especially need to keep inventing more efficient forms of energy such as nuclear, thorium, and in time, fusion may be something even far more powerful. But that also means we need to use the energy we have readily available to continue to power the effort to get there. And yes that means fossil fuels too and yes that means reducing the negative externalities of using them.
If we do this and with conviction, we will ultimately create energy resources that allow us to transform our solar system into a much safer environment, get rid of pollution, and if we want CO2 emissions. Who knows—maybe we will one day spread out through the universe, transforming distant planets into habitable environments too and increasing our chances, as a species, of surviving.
There is literally no limit to what we can do whether creating new types of materials or converting seemingly useless material into valuable resources. We know because we’ve already done it several times. We turned limestone into iron, dead animal goo into energy for machines and refined it further into plastic, medicine, electronics, windmills, and solar cells just to name a fraction of the products. We turned uranium into nuclear power, and x-ray technology, and medicine. Most of what we today call resources used to be useless materials. Knowledge changed that. And with that change, we increased our ability to prosper despite the harsh conditions of the universe.
However, if we don’t do that —if we decide to focus on anti-consumerism, anti-fossil fuel usage, anti-growth if we keep thinking that humans' impact on nature is bad and that nature itself is morally superior to us. we will be certain to end like the other species that no longer exist today; we will not be able to create enough new knowledge, convert the planet and our solar system, make it safer, grow our economies, and continue to build more of the knowledge that enables us to better deal with the ever-present dangers ahead.
There are no guarantees that we will make it. The probability of us joining the 99.9% is high regardless. But we humans have a chance that is better than anyone else before us. That chance will radically diminish if we begin to doubt that we are doing the right thing if we begin to doubt that growth is ultimately good despite some of its externalities and if we believe that it is wrong to transform the planet and nature to better suit us.
That chance will also be diminished if our solution is to try and use less energy or introduce energy solutions that make energy more expensive and thus wealth and knowledge creation more difficult.
If we truly want to survive in the long run we have no choice but to soldier on. No one is cheering for us.
Nature did not give us a friendly and safe environment we chose to make unsafe. It gave us an insecure and dangerous environment we have made safer through the use of energy and knowledge.
And so I implore you to revisit the idea that human impact is bad for the planet. The human species is the first shot the planet has ever had at breaking the vicious cycle of extinction that’s been so prevalent on this spaceship we call earth.
We can replant trees, we can increase the number of fish and coral reefs in the ocean. We can invent cleaner and more effective forms of energy. All this through growth, wealth, and knowledge creation.
There is no shortage of resources, only a lack of knowledge.
