Planet Earth is No Longer a Garden Spot
Early in our history it didn't make any difference how we viewed our environment. Over the years, models of our relationship to the environment have been based on religious views, with the world provided for us to dominate and subdue as described in Genesis and philosophical views, seeing wisdom and virtue in nature as described by Thoreau.
But by far our most prevalent view of nature derives from a rudimentary human desire for more. This is the basis of the economic model that currently directs our relationship with one another and with our environment. It has produced stupendous human population growth and dramatic, deleterious effects on nature. Recognizing these effects, efforts have been marshaled to change the self-serving economic model with notions of Earth "stewarship", eloquently advanced decades ago by the then - Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, and most recently, to infiltrate the economic model with "eco-system services" by assigning monetary values to functions performed by the Earth that are beneficial to people.
All of these views are fundamentally and dangerously flawed, because all are anthropocentric. Basically, they begin and end with humans. This is not the way the Earth works.
The Earth has its own set of rules, solidly grounded in laws of physics and chemistry and emergent princliples of geology and biology. Completley unlike our economic model, these are NOT artificial constructs. They are real, and they govern. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic erruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, 100 year floods, massive wildfires and certain disease epidemics are all dramatic examples of parts of nature, neither all service nor all harm, creating and destroying, and governed by rules that are indifferent to humans. It seems with our anthropocentric economic model for interacting with the world is proving to be incompatible with Earth's rules - looks like we are headed for a direct collision.
To achieve a more accurate model of our relation to nature, we need to see ourselves as part of nature, governed by nature (not economics), beholden to nature for ecosystem services and subject to nature's disturbances.
We need to view our existence in nature as dependent on numerous functions we are unable to perform ourselves, and without which we couldn't survive. And we need to recognize that we now have the power and the reckless inclination, driven by short-sighted anthrpocentrism, to disrupt these fuctions to the degree that Earth will become UNINHABITABLE for us.
In the end, the physical, chemical and biological rules of Earth most certainly will win, and we will either be on the winning side or we will be vanquished. There is no choice: the Earth wins!
How about a terracentric model? Stewardship needs to progress from a condescending view of humans tending their "garden" to an effort to become part of Earth without disrupting its vital functions. Ecosystem services need to advance from servicing humans to recognition of services to our planet. We need to find ways to avoid changing Earth in irreversible directions. My favorite platform, sustainability - we need to think beyond of our brief lifetimes. In this new light of a terracentric model, we need to acknowledge that there is nothing more important than preserving the viability of planet Earth.
Using human ecologist, Garrett Hardin's metaphor, Earth is our only "lifeboat" in a sea of empty, cold blackness. Our lives, and those of other organisms, are allowed on this boat, only because of a quasi-steady environmental state created by a unique balance of physical, chemical and biological conditions and processess governed by Earth's rules. The central task of ecology is to understand the conditions, processes and rules and thereby understand the qualities and dimensions of this steady boat.
Unfortunately, before we truly understand ecology, humans are causing changes in atmosheric chemistry in radiation through the atmosphere, fundamental changes in ocean chemistry and changes in the whole planet's energy budget - its balance of energy in and energy out. We are testing it with pervasive, potentially irreversible, long-term pollution of Earth's fresh and salt water by using a vast assortment of man-made chemicals that often possess biologically hazardous and ecologically unpredictable properties. We are testing it with relentless, massive, wholesale conversions of ecosystems, channeling their products exclusively into our own limitless consumption. There is also the aspect of the global spread of biological species, causing complex, hugely damaging homogenization of Earth's biota.
Recent measurements of unprecedented, directional changes in the vital signs of Earth suggest that we may have already staved in our lifeboat's hull, causing changes beyond the ability of Earth's biogeochemical forces to maintain balance. We are in direct conflict with the Earth's rules.
The anthropocentric economic model is fundamentally incapable of providing more than temporary fixes for our massive environmental problems. Recently world leaders were unable to come together to solve the global environmental issues. Replacement of this failed model with an economic model that recognizes Earth's rules and embraces terracentricity as its essential focus is the primary step necessary to bring reality into our collective thinking and behavior, and provide an accurate conceptual basis for the hard decisions ahead that will determine the fate of life on our planet.
{This is an excerpt from a Los Angeles Times newspaper article written by B.E.Mahall & F.H Bormann}