Is it possible for Humans and Nature to co-exist together?
Well, there’s a lot of weird thoughts in the middle of a pandemic like this. But, it just happened a week ago, I think that I had one of my darkest thought ever in my life.
Is it possible for humans and Nature to co-exist together?
Yes, this is not an absurd question, and I had a time when I concluded that “there is no way possible that human can co-exist together with nature and our effort to achieve sustainable life is meaningless, we will be running out of time because of the politics” here’s why,
Before we get down to the hypotheses, we have to understand the brief history of homo-sapiens in this planet. From the geological epoch we know that the age of the earth is 4.6 billion years, if we put it on 24 hours timescale, humans only existed one second before midnight. All of the universal languages that we know, countries, empires, cultures and dreams all of those have happened “one second before midnight”. Yet, in a very short time, humans have impacted Nature at the scale it has never seen before.
Since the dawn of civilization, the impact of humanity has become so pervasive, profound and permanents, that we have destroyed most of other life in the earth. From all the biodiversity that existed on the planet, humans only account for 0.01%. However, in our quest to pursue wealth, we have wiped out 60% of animals’ population, part of it is 83% of wild mammals and 50% of all plants all around the world.
The leading cause of the enormous loss is that we create farmland that eliminates natural habitats, almost three-quarters of all land on earth is now significantly affected by human activities. We literally can find a human to the corner of the world.
Bio-diversity is critical for humanity; without it, we would not be able to grow our crops, maintain the food chain, feed our livestock and certainly, more and more diseases will appear.
But today, we are still walking with our eyes closed to the edge of the cliff and directing ourselves to sixth mass extinction.
And not to mention, humans also put new things that never existed in the world before, like plutonium and plastic, and reintroduced all the carbons to the atmosphere that has been kept in the ground for eons. All of these have led us to climate change that breaking havoc in our environment. In fact, we are now in the front seat watching the effect in play; Massive Fires in Australia, Extreme Floods in Indonesia and Long Droughts in many places.
Now, the situation has become so bad, it is not ethical to not use bad words.
Yeah, we’re fucked up.
Humans are so good at exploiting resources, but we never think about how to cope with our waste, how to be responsible for the things we exploit, take, killed, etc. That’s why the first reason why we can’t co-exist with Nature is the economy.
Economy
Let me say this first, we need to redefine the economy.
Today, we have to admit that our economy is based on exploitation and extraction we are so good to extract the economic value from Nature, but in contrast, we are so bad to renew or regenerate the resources that we deplete.
If you think about it, all human imagination and creativity are nonsense without natural resources. The phone that you hold right now has a bit of gold, the shirt that you wear probably came from oil and cotton. You get the point, not a single thing in your house right now that is not made by Nature, period.
The fundamental problem of our economy is too individualistic, many of us will not realize the economic value of anything until we are close to a disaster. And since the future is uncertain, the economy put a special place on the present relative to the future. That is why people willing to pay interest so that they can have something today rather than saving up money and buy it later.
Take water, for example, almost three-quarters of the earth is covered by water. But, guess how many that we can use as a freshwater? Only 2% and most of it is trapped in the frozen ice.
We tend to open our faucet and pretend that the water is infinite; the truth is by 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity. In the future, we will realize that we ran out of water and it is impossible for the economy to continue with a finite resource.
Nevertheless, what we decide to do right now, will definitely change the fate of our future, for either better or worse. If we want to ensure a long run sustain life, a society that driven by economic self-interest will simply not going to do the job. Then, how long can we survive with this kind of economic mode? Scientist says until 2050, that is assuming that we don’t have any others pandemic in between. Extremely short time to radically change the course of a huge economic boat that we use today.
But there’s a catch, we already have the technology that we need to avoid the storm. For example, if we want to transform our energy needs from dirty to clean energy, we just have to build a solar farm with the size of Spain. Or, if we want to reduce the utilization of agricultural land, we can use vertical farming.
So, we have all we need to change the world, why not doing it now? Let’s be honest, to create a sustainable ecosystem may not make business sense. Because as you might think, most of the people are often overwhelmed by the enormity and complexity of the task to hand. How do we reverse a soil loss that keeps Jakarta from sinking? How do we slow down the over-mining that erodes the natural habitat? Are we going to rely on Big Corporate or Big Government to solve the problem?
Believe me, nine times out of ten, the interest of profit will overshadow and conflict with the interest of the people and planet. Just like the famous saying of a Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Thus this capitalistic model that valued its business over “quarterly earnings report” is simply broken. Still, this model has shaped our economic framework, tax regimes and even our business-school curricula.
Let alone our economy today will not change, the market economy is a powerful place. But now more than ever, it needs guidance and this should be a perfect time for the government to regulate and direct the compass to the promised land, right?
Politics
“Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy. In the meantime, the corrupt politician will thrive as a concealed broker between the two”
— Irving Fisher
For the past couple of years, there has been a lot of global initiatives to renewed and developed the effort to tackle climate change. Unfortunately, nothing much has been done to reduce CO2 emission as we are now still in the second hottest year for global average temperatures.
Moving forward, the condition will likely get worse as the populist and far-right figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro are withdrawing from the climate agreement. They are trying to revive the dirty energy industry and clearing the amazon forest for industrial construction.
In a critical time like this, why are there people who still deny the facts of the environmental crisis that we face and trying to gain benefits from it? I’m not going to talk about the political detail here. However, we have to acknowledge with the record-breaking world inequality that we experience today, there will be a lot of populists who appears to regard public concern. But in reality, they are dividing the society into two groups of homogeneous and antagonistic people.
It will all be too late when people began to realize that significant changes are needed. By that time, Jakarta is already underwater; the series of rough current broke North Jakarta’s sea wall, water breach and covers half of the city, then the rainy seasons create extreme floods and the government cannot create any more lakes or dams because all the land are already filled up with buildings. In the dry part of the country, wildfires are devastating thousands of people, burning their homes and the smoke spread suffocating people’s lungs. At the same time, the politician will still be arguing who is responsible for this. So many of the destructive process that we are feeding into, in the end, Nature wins
The Answer
The answer finally comes to me,
“is it possible for humans to co-exist with nature?”
“No”
Three days of believing that our effort is meaningless, I drowned into despair. Human Nature is an immutable thing.
Maybe, the pandemic of COVID-19 will bring us together, or we will still see people fighting over toilet paper and racist attacks to Chinese. We, humans, are a complex species, capable of the very best and the very worst.
But, after reading my way through to a couple of articles, I came up with one quote that changed my mind;
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself.
Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies.
We are witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
— Alan Watts
And I realized that we are not IN the universe, we are the universe itself. We are the focal point where the universe becomes conscious and a medium for the cosmos to know itself. Hence, If humanity disappears tomorrow, who is going to consciously feel and connect with the earth?
Then the question hits me again,
“is it possible that human co-exists with nature”?”
“We have to.”
There is only one answer because its the only way for the universe to know itself. We are a medium for the universe to feel the winds, to hear the tides, to smell the rain, to explore the vastness of the milky way. We are all connected through one frequency, all the things that existed vibrate and connect us together.
So it’s done, you have the mission the make the world a better place, we have all we need from the knowledge, technology and economy. It is the time to speak up and raise your voice because the power has to come from the People, not the government or corporations.
For young people out there, never stop to educate people around you and show them what is right and truly valuable. Because it is our literal task to keep the universe humming.
