We Humans Are Incompatible With The Planet

I love to write angry essays about how climate change will wreck our world and destroy our life support systems, but there’s a more insidious killer lurking in our human closet. The killer is us, and we’re responsible for driving a massive extinction of flora and fauna.

Why? Because we’re over-consuming and we have exceeded our carrying capacity severalfold. We are incompatible with our earth, nature, and the environment. We are viruses that are consuming resources with abandon and not giving a shit because we’re Amazon Prime members.

Carrying capacity

For the longest time, I’ve been wondering just how many of us humans can live on this planet. How many of us are “too many?” This is often referred to as the carrying capacity of the planet. How many humans can the planet sustain without destroying itself in the process?

It would appear that I am not the first person to wonder about this. Thomas Malthus and his population model first looked at how many humans can be reasonably sustained on this earth. More scientists are working hard on this question now.

What’s the answer? Just how many humans can the Earth sustain? The answers are all over the map.

If you were to take the mode of the number of observations of reports, I’d say the answer is less than 8 billion.

However, I’d like to hypothesize that these reports look at the carrying capacity of humans only; we’re only in this for ourselves. We’re not looking at how we’re affecting the floral and fauna populations because we see them as resources to be consumed by us. We don’t give a shit about them.

Leaving the sage grouse behind

I was doom scrolling through TikTok the other day and came across a clip from some movie. The new governor of a desert state was wondering why one policy was protecting the endangered sage grouse and another policy was building a solar farm to fight climate change in the area where the sage grouse lives.

Granted, this was a movie or TV show, but we all know what happens. In the end, the sage grouse gets fucked so we can keep our Christmas lights on overnight and feel good about fighting climate change because our electricity comes from solar panels.

Thankfully, we’re starting to wake up to the dangers of climate change, and we’re building more green infrastructure, but do we really understand the environmental expense? What are we greenwashing behind the scenes?

It may be that global society can achieve a measure of sustainability in climate terms — but on a planet that has been stripped of creatures like the tortoise and the sage-grouse, shorn of natural agency, reduced to a biological pauper, its last wildernesses occupied for the greater good of the industrial juggernaut. We will be a kind of gleaming metallic Noah’s Ark that carries few animals, only lots of people. — Via The Intercept

We still haven’t gotten to the root of the problem. These are Band-Aids that are masking the biggest problem facing this world. That problem is us; there are too many of us competing for resources, and we Americans need to take a hard look in the mirror.

An average middle-class American consumes 3.3 times the subsistence level of food and almost 250 times the subsistence level of clean water. So if everyone on Earth lived like a middle class American, then the planet might have a carrying capacity of around 2 billion. — Via Science.org AU

That’s the number, folks, 2 billion people. It’s probably less than that, but how the hell do we collapse 8 billion people down to 2 billion?

You can’t. That ship has sailed.

We’re incompatible with the earth

The reality is that we are incompatible with our planet. Our permagrowth mindset will cause the extinction of so much wildlife, even if we manage to get climate change under control.

We might be able to sidestep our extinction, but at what cost? Are we ready for a world devoid of bird songs? A world without fish in the sea? A world without ash trees?

Are we willing to forgo our Amazon Prime and instant gratification to let Short-eared Owls have a chance to thrive? Are we willing to stop sprinkling our lawns and wasting precious water?

What are we willing to sacrifice, to do without, so that life may be able to live again?