Concerns about the environment are a matter of much discussion now, as young people are increasingly suspicious that the guardians of their world--the older generation--have been grifting, trying to abscond with as much money as possible while the world burns. Many young people today realize the devastating impact that such a mercenary way of thinking has had on the natural world, and they are prepared--some of them--to put their lives on the line when it comes to environmental protection. Although they might not identify overpopulation as a root cause of many of the environmental problems they see, they recognize that amassing wealth is negligible when compared to clean air and water, safe food, and a place to live. We require the basics of a stable climate, dependable food production, a life free from toxicity, and the maintenance of the natural world around us.

The common thread hovering behind environmental concerns--whether it is deforestation, biodiversity loss, food toxicity and agricultural practices, climate change, overfishing and collapse of ocean biodiversity--is the question of human interactions with the natural world. Some attempt to deflect from the climate change discussion, for instance, by saying that the Earth’s climate has always changed and therefore it is merely part of the natural order. That is true, but the pace of the current change is one factor, the known agent in the form of carbon dioxide and methane is another, and the fact that our fingerprints were found at the scene is what gives the rest of us pause.

We are not overly concerned about environmental changes which happened in the dim past, for climatic shifts millions of years ago have very little to do with what is going on now unless it was caused by a rapid release of carbon dioxide. Similarly, the only people currently upset about the Chicxulub meteor which hit the Yucatan peninsula and likely ushered the dinosaurs to their demise would be children raised on iterations of the film Jurassic Park.

Most adults are more concerned about the current extinction, because we believe--how accurately who knows--that a human-caused environmental problem can be ameliorated if we changed our behaviour or there were fewer of us doing the damage. In that context, the exclusion zone of Chernobyl can provide a useful example.

After the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in 1986, the local authorities evacuated everyone from thirty kilometres around the reactor--what they came to call the exclusion zone. Their rationale was that the landscape was so radioactive it would be unhealthy to remain in the area. The plants and animals had no such recourse, however, and in subsequent years the exclusion zone has come under much study. Many plants[1] and animals live in the zone, and seemingly thrive: “Researchers have found the land surrounding the plant, which has been largely off limits to humans for three decades, has become a haven for wildlife, with lynx, bison, deer and other animals roaming through thick forests. This so-called Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), which covers 2,800 square km of northern Ukraine, now represents the third-largest nature reserve in mainland Europe and has become an iconic--if accidental--experiment in rewilding” (“How Chernobyl has become …”). Although on the surface, this appears to belie the notion of the area’s toxicity, in fact the animals thrive in spite of the radiation.[2] It appears as though having human neighbours, with all the changes we bring to a landscape and our persecution of animals, is less concerning than toxic radiation. Now the inadvertent rewilding project which is the exclusion zone is one of the most biologically diverse parks in Asia.

We increasingly recognize that biodiversity is a benefit to all, that wild lands should remain undeveloped, and that the corporate “development of resources” is merely shorthand for devastating extraction technologies which only serve the elites’ bottom lines. This doesn’t mean that we have suddenly become idealists, but rather that we would follow a science which suggests that those who are eager to strip the world of wealth refuse to accept the implications of their actions in terms of sustainability. Humanity needs places to live, we need biodiversity and a life free from toxins, and claims we should sell those essentials in order to make money is short-sighted and more based in fantasy than science.

Many today are hopeful that environmental problems created can be fixed and there are a number of natural agents working to ameliorate environmental concerns. Some are activists who dedicate their time and much of their energy to ensuring that our world is a safer place to live for all species, and we have seen news stories about a few university-funded people researching heavy metal uptake in catalyst-heavy machinery, ways to combat pests invading other ecological niches, and some corporations building solar panels and electric cars, but we forget that there are many others as well.

In our anxiety we forget that the natural world is also working on the problem. Every change in an ecosystem has a reaction to the change, and at present there are bacteria evolving to eat plastics, plants which naturally absorb toxic chemicals, and heavy metals in their structures, birds learning to sing with higher notes to be heard in an urban landscape, and predators learning to seek out different prey. There are also financial instruments, for the economists are correct in some ways. The market responds to the new reality and changes people’s living, spending, and waste habits depending on how much that will cost them--or rather, how much it will cost the corporation. This is not to make light of the environmental catastrophes facing us, but it is a reminder that there are systems arrayed helping to combat them.

When we encounter questions about the environmental wellbeing of our planet, we find that humanity often falls short when dealing with issues which seem to be both distant and overwhelming. Perhaps some of the environmental crises we face are so disheartening because they happen on such a huge scale and their impact in our own lives--as well as our impact on such systems like climate and pollution--seems negligible. The actions of a lone individual couldn’t possible have an impact on global warming, so goes the logic, that I might as well fly to another country for the weekend. Other environmental issues happen over vast time scales--some plastics will persist in the environment for many thousands of years--and therefore we--limited by a lifespan or no more than eighty or ninety years on average--can’t really imagine anything we could do to change such tenacious persistence.

Still other issues seem to impact us economically, and we are frequently told we must choose between personal wealth and a healthy environment. This is a particularly fraught choice when we remember that the ineffable value of the natural environment is almost impossible to quantify for someone who only cares about numbers on a spreadsheet.[3] In our commodified world, the natural environment is seen in terms of resources.[4] Trees become board feet, waterways hydroelectric dams and bottled water, fields grazing for animals to be slaughtered, clean air a loss of face-mask sales, and fish a product to be harvested. Not surprisingly, in this system, animals are only prized for their flesh, horns, bones, fur, and tusks, as though they were merely parts on the hoof in the corporate machine.

Advocates for public parks find themselves having to rationalize the economic outlay which will cover the lost income of not letting the park be parceled into mining or housing estates, and when disasters are discussed the loss of human life is mentioned alongside financial damages. The many people affected by the disaster are not entered into the spread sheet until they die, usually at the site and moment, but for our commodified world a proclamation about how many millions were lost in the hurricane or earthquake is seen as a measure of importance. Recycling is dependent on the cost of the infrastructure, and trash disposal on its effect on property values.

Some twenty years ago I saw David Suzuki contrast the central tenet of economics--a field predicated on the movement of capital--with environmentalism. In his view, “modern economics makes no ecological sense” (Suzuki 49) since it ignores the environment, despite the fact that the environment--with its externalities and resources--is fundamental to the field. Instead, economics will calculate the minerals in the undeveloped mine, the oil still under the ground, and then by a magic of commodity prices and future markets--what Greta Thunberg called “fairy tales of eternal economic growth” (Thunberg. “Speech before The U.N. Climate Action Summit.”)--claim that growth need not concern itself with limits. Suzuki argues that our “planet is being ravaged for economic returns. But any farsighted economist must recognize that there are ‘services’ performed by nature itself that have to be factored into the economic equations” (Suzuki 49). Not all economists possess the foresight to include ecological concerns in their more pecuniary calculations, however.

This mentality is exemplified by the figure of Julian Simon, the “Dr. Pangloss of the environment” (Leakey and Lewin). Simon’s confidence of the capacity of technology to fix any of our problems, whether social or environmental, was so profound that he was prepared to extrapolate that possibility into the future. This overweening confidence led him to make such a patently false and moronic claim that the fact that he subsequently doubled down on the statement would make one question his sanity: “We now have in our hands the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever growing population for the next 7 billion years” (Quoted in Leakey and Lewin). The foolish hubris of such a statement is clear to anyone, even without recourse to a spreadsheet which would confirm that human population would overrun the inner solar system if our present “ever growing population” kept the same doubling speed.

Simon becomes an easy target for Leakey and Lewin, and although he does not necessarily represent the field of economics in general, his unfounded optimism betrays the economic blindness that Suzuki identified. As citizens in the west we are constantly bombarded with conflicting messages. The economy must grow so that we may continue to strip wealth from the land, limitless growth is possible despite the planet’s resources remaining stable, and the natural environment is merely the credit card we can reach into every time we need inputs for our ravenous industrial system. The minerals in the ground, plants in the forests, and wildlife in the wilds, are viewed as our inheritance, and their disposal as our right.

That way of thinking about the world is changing now. New generations are viewing with a clearer eye the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with its accompanying unpredictable weather, toxins in the water and land, the mass extinction that has been underway ever since we overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity, and they are asking for an economic calculation which would include what the economists have always considered to be dependable externalities.[5] We have a more accurate view of how a staggering eight billion people--using resources and steadily increasing in population--might affect the natural systems upon which we depend. Birds will go to great lengths in order not to foul their nests, and only now are we realizing that we need to learn that lesson anew.

When we were few, such problems didn’t concern us. We belong to this planet as surely as any of the other animals, and in the early days of life on the planet our effect on the environment was negligible. Caught in our contemporaneous runaway train of culture, bearing down an increasingly rickety track and fearing an imminent smash, we often forget how ponderous and slow the development of our modern systems have been. Only recently has societal change been visible to the naked eye, and even so, elements of that change seem almost glacial. Our technological achievements, which we point to as representing the pinnacle of western culture, are relatively stable. The car has changed little from its inception a hundred years ago, and housing has survived almost unmodified for a thousand years.

For a less biased view, we must cast our vision back a million generations, back into the dim world of our pre-ancestors, where incremental change was not measured in years, or even lifetimes, but rather crawled with the pace of epochs.

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