“Until economists are brought into line by ecologists, we face ruin.”
We must take up John Muir’s battle cry over a century ago to put ‘Earth first’.
The centenary of John Muir’s death on 24 December should give us pause for thought. This pioneering Scottish conservationist fought battles that unfortunately still need winning today. Central among his passionately held beliefs was the conviction that we should not seek to control nature or selfishly sweep it aside, but learn to respect its incomparable value.
Muir realised that we need wild places and championed the aesthetic and spiritual worth of nature. The problem is that while nature can be a tremendous joy, it also collectively represents the largest source of revenue on Earth. Take farming, forestry and fishing for starters…
Harvesting nature can make some of us rich for a while, but Muir was one of the first to see clearly that its wanton exploitation ends up making all of us very poor indeed. Today we still haven’t got the message. Nature isn’t ours to own, abuse or destroy, hiding behind the justification that humans are more important. We’re not: life is.
In the long term, biodiversity doesn’t have a hope if we maintain our rabid anthropocentrism, always putting what we perceive to be our species’ interests before those of all other life. Developing a more biocentric world view (“Earth first” in Muir’s words) is essential if we wish to preserve a great enough variety of life for our communities, ecosystems and the biosphere itself to be sustainable.
Arrogant short-sightedness manifests itself in individuals through to our entire species, or at least its governance. And unlike previous generations we know that ‘things are going wrong’ – the list is all but endless, from chronic deforestation and overfishing to vanishing fossilfuel reserves, melting glaciers, insane agricultural practices and acidifying oceans awash with plastic.
We can all see the effects, and feel them. You don’t need to be a scientist. But still our blinkered elected representatives plough a furrow towards an apocalypse, driven by idiotic short-termism.
Our most singularly stupid objective is an obsession with economic growth. How many times do you hear that mantra? In broad terms, economic growth means ever more consumption, using more resources, with more people wanting the benefits and fewer of those resources left.
A child can see the lunacy of this ambition. Until economists are brought into line by ecologists, we face ruin – we cannot continue to put ourselves first, ahead of the natural resources upon which we depend. These need to be sustainably generated by the planet’s ecosystem services, the products of healthy, functional communities of bacteria, fungi, plants, animals… and us.
So whether it’s the person getting rid of rats in their garden, a local council building on the last fragment of green space at the bottom of your street, a county council putting new homes on England’s best nightingale site, governments pushing exploitation of fossil fuels over renewables, or the lunatics who still deny that we have impacted upon the global climate, putting our interests before other life can’t be considered reasonable any longer. Our children won’t thank us for carrying on regardless.
This is one of those environmental imperatives that’s so easily seen as being beyond our control as individuals. After all, how can you or I have any effect on global attitudes and policies? Well, there are only two options: give up, become apathetic and moan as Earth goes to hell in a handcart; or believe that we can win by fighting every last little battle.
Do I think we can win? Yes, we can. Because ultimately we have no other choice. John Muir persuaded a US president that nature matters. In 2015, let’s take strength from that victory – and keep fighting.
“UNTIL ECONOMISTS ARE BROUGHT INTO LINE BY ECOLOGISTS, WE FACE RUIN – WE CANNOT CONTINUE TO
PUT OURSELVES FIRST.”