Protecting Nature Because We Want To, Not Because We Have To

There’s an old George Carlin bit in which the legendary comedian ridicules the popular environmentalist calls to “save the planet.” “The planet is fine,” he declared. “The people are fucked.”

I find myself recalling this famous Carlinism frequently, as various scientists and advocates warn that humanity is degrading the planet’s ecological “life-support systems.” When these folks talk about the “existential” nature of the climate and biodiversity crises, they are not, by and large, suggesting that Planet Earth or all its flora and fauna will cease to exist. Rather, like Carlin, they are saying that humanity will alter nature beyond nature’s ability to support humanity’s existence. By despoiling ecosystems, overturning landscapes for material production, and driving species extirpation and extinction, we are, this line of thinking goes, unwittingly chipping away at the ecosystem services that undergird our economy and our very presence on the planet.

I was most recently reminded of Carlin as I read Leigh Phillips’ new piece on extinction and the naturalistic fallacy in The Atlantic. “To say that the planet needs saving may be a fallacy,” he writes, “but we do need to save the version of it that makes us possible.”

But, to put it mildly, this is not how the contest between humanity and the rest of nature has played out so far.

The human species has been altering its ecological surroundings for eons. Of course all species carve ecological advantages for themselves, but the scope and scale of humanity’s carving is unique. The dawn of agriculture and civilization came long after human use of fire to remake whole ecosystems for our benefit. Pre-Holocene humans hunted megafauna like mammoths and glyptodons to extinction. Farming, of course, represented a radical reduction of local biodiversity for the sake of intensive crop cultivation.

Humanity’s impacts skyrocketed with the dawn of modern industry and agriculture. And while technologies like the steam and internal combustion engines, the electric motor, and the Haber-Bosch process made humans less dependent on pre-modern fuels like timber and whale oil and agricultural nutrient sources like seabird guano, they also radically upgraded our technological capacity to invent and exploit natural resources. So where smaller, impoverished populations of humans relied on wood for heating and cooking, a growing post-industrial population relied instead on oil and coal. This shift drove demand for wood upwards, not for its use as a fuel but for other applications like shipping and construction. Likewise, while the discovery of petroleum in the 19th century was associated with a decline in whale hunting, petroleum-fueled ships ultimately proved disastrous for whale populations in the 20th century, as post-industrial societies exploited whales less for heating oil and more for lubricants and margarines.

Put simply, human wellbeing has come largely at the expense of non-human nature. So if nature makes human existence possible, then how could humanity possibly thrive on such a degraded ecological bounty? This is known as the “environmentalist’s paradox.”

The paradox is easily resolved, though, by understanding the decoupling of human well-being from ecosystem services. As humans moved from mastery of fire to agriculture to industrial steam and electric power and petroleum locomotion and atomic energy, we depended less and less on the beneficence of ecosystem services for our material security. Indeed, in wealthy societies today, most economic activity occurs in the postmaterial knowledge and service sectors, the sign of a profound dematerialization of human well-being. The “ecological economics”assertion—that nature, not knowledge or technology, enables economic growth—is simply wrong.

Fortunately for the rest of creation, this decoupling not only reduces humans’ dependence on nature but also reduces human pressures on species and ecosystems. Consider that the two examples above—timber and whales—have both experienced an absolute decoupling from economic productivity. Global timber harvesting has declined despite rising human populations, and whale hunting has decreased dramatically since its peak in the 1960s. Other decoupling trends can be found in water usage, agricultural land area, carbon emissions, and more.

These positive trends indicate that human societies can protect nature even without the existential threat of failing to do so. But they also suggest a somewhat unsettling reality: humans don’t need nature.

Now of course this is an overstatement, and not true in absolute terms. Humans need the hydrologic, photosynthetic, and greenhouse effects of the natural world. But on the margin, humans have done quite well as a species while paving over much of nature.

Now, it’s entirely conceivable that some future Earth would make humanity less possible or even impossible. As Phillips points out in his essay, Earth’s dazzling multiplicity of species provide material benefits to humanity in addition to their nonmaterial existence value, including “protecting coasts, building fertile soils, pollinating crops, and filtering air and water.” But if past is prologue, it’s equally, if not more, conceivable that human societies could expand in number and in material security on a planet increasingly denuded of non-human life.

For Phillips, this would not necessarily be a tragedy. As he rightly describes it, extinction is a universal and ultimately generative aspect of ecology, leading over the epochs to an ever-larger assemblage of species. Contemporary extinction and extirpation are bad not in some cosmic moral sense, he argues, but because they threaten human well-being here and now. “We should be worried about the transformations we’re causing and all the destruction of ecosystem services that they entail,” he writes, “not because extinction is inherently bad, but—first and foremost—because these transformations might well destroy us.”

Phillips is self-conscious and affirmative about the anthropocentrism of his arguments. “Anthropocentrism gives us a much firmer ground on which to make the argument for conservation,” he remarked on Twitter. Humanity’s unique threat to the natural world, in this view, is the flipside of humanity’s unique ability, and incentive, to prevent nature’s destruction.

But we can think of this as a kind of weak anthropocentrism, in which humans are unique within nature but inextricably coupled to its wellbeing. A strong anthropocentrism, then, recognizes that humans are increasingly, if never fully, decoupled from nature.

In my view, that’s even firmer ground for conservation than weak anthropocentrism. It’s the “eco” in “ecomodernism.” Making more room for nature through decoupling won’t necessarily ensure that our most treasured elements of nature will be protected. We have to choose to care. Growing more food on less land, using more modern sources of energy, and living in denser cities will reduce the tradeoffs between human and natural wellbeing.

But ultimately, the choice of how and where to protect nature will be a human one, driven not by what we have to do to survive, but what we want to do to thrive on an ecologically vibrant planet. It doesn’t get much more anthropocentric than that.