Our Species

One of the very conservative financial opinion writers I follow (yes, I do watch that side of the street, too) had a screed this week against Earth Day and its supporters whom he regards as eco-terrorists.

His reasoning is that they (we) hate our own species and regard ourselves as alien to the planet, looking forward to our own extinction with diabolical glee.

I took the criticism to heart because I have often written of our species as a passing phenomenon in the geological history of our planet, and take heart in believing that the planet will survive us.

I say that not because I am self-loathing. I feel lucky, privileged to have been born human on this planet.

I say it first simply as a matter of fact. We are a very recent development in the history of the planet and there surely are more reasons to believe we likely won't last longer than, say, the dinosaur, than there are reasons to believe we will. The writer himself acknowledged that we are an inauspicious species on a tiny planet tucked away in a corner of what is likely only one of billions of universes, so to make a big deal of ourselves is ignorant hubris.

Now he may be right that our complex brains, consciousness, which so far as we know is unique to our species on this planet so far, will sponsor innovation that will sustain us longer than mere biological and geological history would predict.

My own sense is that tendency to interpret the fate of our globe anthropomorphically is not only a narrow parochial exercise, but also leads us to make short-sighted decisions that ignore our place imbedded alongside and dependent on all the other species and phenomena.

I don't believe the likelihood of our species having an end – just as we had a beginning – is a tragedy in the history of the earth. Any more than I consider the certainty of my own death a tragedy. It is simply the culmination of the wondrous story that began several decades ago with my birth.

No doubt many of the things people who fancy themselves green are misguided and self-defeating. The system of which we are a part is way more complex than the human brain is capable of fathoming.

I have been impatient at times with naturalists who managed to close down a lovely beach I grew up on because human activity was disturbing the habitat of the Piping Plover. I seriously doubt either that snow fence will save the bird, nor that the extinction of the bird will be any more terrible for the planet than the extinction of the millions of species that have disappeared since life first appeared here.

But the conviction (or religious belief) that the so-called free market is a more dependable mechanism for balancing the needs and demands of the various species – so-called Social Darwinism – than those who conscientiously work to responsibly conserve our mutual habitat, is nothing more than human hubris.

Have its sponsors noticed what the freeing of the global market of its restraints resulted in just a couple of years ago?

Be grateful we're not finally in charge here.