The greatest threat to the human race is the human race itself
The history of our universe goes back 13.8 billion years to the occurrence of the Big Bang. Our relatively young planet Earth was formed “only” 4.5 billion years ago, with the first complex animals emerging 500 million years ago and homo sapiens appearing only 300,000 years ago.
It would be useful here to repeat an exercise some of us might remember from school: Were we to squeeze the entire history of Earth into 24 hours, humans would appear just a little before one minute to midnight.
Therefore the development of complex forms of life on Earth predates us humans by almost 500 million years, yet in just the past 50 years we have managed to eliminate almost 70 percent of wildlife, according to the Living Planet Report published in October by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Zoological Society of London.
The destruction we have wrought on our planet goes far beyond this tragic statistic
— it extends to the destruction of entire ecosystems, the pillaging of our planet’s finite resources and the emission of so much toxic waste that we are killing ourselves and disrupting the Earth’s climate with alreadydisastrous consequences.
Just a few weeks ago, we passed the milestone of 8 billion humans on Earth. A billion were added in the past 12 years alone. We have noted before that if all humans consumed resources at the same rate as Americans, we would already need more than five Earths to sustain humanity.
Inevitably, in our crazed race of overconsumption we have lost more than a third of arable land to erosion and pollution over the past 40 years.
We have seen desertification expand to more than 25 percent of Earth’s land mass and threaten the livelihoods of more than one billion people. Marine life has declined by 50 percent, with plastic soon set to outnumber marine life by weight. And the poisons we release into the air we breathe kill more than 7 million people every year.
As historian Yuval Noah Harari outlined in his landmark book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” we humans stand out through our remarkable brains, which arm us with an intelligence that has allowed us to achieve the unimaginable. The progress we have made over the past two centuries — the past two millennia, also — is simply remarkable.
Although we try to forecast everything from the weather to every kind of market or even geopolitical realignments, we seem utterly unable to take in the minute-by-minute destruction we are wreaking on the sustainability of life on Earth. Humans have become the single largest threat to the very existence of other species, to our planet and, of course, to ourselves.
Nothing illustrates our willing ignorance of our ongoing daily destruction of the planet that sustains us more clearly than the forced global standstill during the COVID-19 pandemic. Confined mostly to our own homes, the usual traffic of cars, ships and airplanes was vastly reduced, as were the emissions from industry and general pollution.
Suddenly, we glimpsed animals wandering through our towns, we were able to see stars in our skies that we had not seen for years, and we breathed air in cities so fresh we had to do a double-take to check where we really were. Mother Earth sent us a clear message through the coronavirus and we saw how our reduced activity was benefiting the planet, all while not stopping the Earth from turning.
Indeed, for those of us who follow the
Earth’s daily ticker, there is not much good news to be found. We can no longer claim that we are in any way in control; we are simply sliding ever further into the darkness.
Humans have proven themselves in so many illustrious domains, yet humanity as a whole seems unable to recognize its own failings in a way that could precipitate the vast changes necessary to make life on this planet sustainable again.
I cannot leave you with any solutions, only a warning expressed by a prescient Albert Einstein: “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”