Abandoning the anthropocentric vision and respecting the laws of ecology is the only way to safeguard the future of our species, and all others. An editorial by Sea Shepherd president Paul Watson.
I grew up in a small fishing village on Passamaquoddy Bay, in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, and I still remember clearly how things were in the 1950s. Today things are not as they were then. I am not talking about technological, industrial or scientific progress. I am referring to the health and stability of ecosystems. What was once strong is now fragile. What was once rich in diversity is today far poorer.
I have been fortunate, or perhaps cursed, to remember almost everything. I still see vivid images of the past. It has, in fact, been difficult for me to come to terms with this decline. I see the shells on the beaches that are no longer there, the small crabs under the rocks that have now disappeared, the shoals of fish, the pods of dolphins and the beaches free of plastic.
I began travelling the world in 1967. I hitchhiked and travelled by train across Canada, joined the Norwegian merchant navy, crossed the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, travelled through Japan, Iran, Mozambique and South Africa, worked as a tour guide in Turkey and Syria, co-founded Greenpeace in 1972 and in 1977 founded Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Many of the things I saw then no longer exist or have been severely damaged, altered and diminished. In the 1960s we did not buy water in plastic bottles. In the 1960s the word "sustainable" was never used in an environmental context and, apart from Rachel Carson, very few people had a vision of the future, of where we were heading and what we were doing.
But slowly, awareness began to take hold in the minds of more and more people. People started to understand what the word "ecology" meant. We witnessed the birth of Earth Day and the first Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 in Stockholm, Sweden, which I covered as a journalist.
The understanding of what we are doing gradually became more widespread, and those who grasped it had to pay the price of being labelled as radical, militant and, with a new term: eco-terrorist. The real "crime" of eco-terrorism was not setting fires to cause damage to ski resorts, bringing down a power line or practising tree spiking (driving long nails into trees to protect them from chainsaws). These things are merely outbursts driven by desperation and frustration. The real crime is the thinking, the understanding and the imagination — in other words, the questioning of the modern economic, social and political paradigm.
The word eco-terrorism should more properly be applied to the destruction caused by progress, such as the Bhopal disaster in India at the Union Carbide plant, or the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the 1970s, together with the late Robert Hunter and with Roberta Hunter, Patrick Moore, David Garrick and Rod Marining, we studied and wrote the three laws of ecology. What we came to realise is that these laws are essential for the survival of the planet's biodiversity and of humanity. We understood that no species could survive outside these three basic and fundamental ecological laws.
The law of diversity: the strength of an ecosystem depends on the diversity of species within it.
The law of interdependence: all species are interdependent.
The law of finite resources: there are limits to growth and to the carrying capacity of the environment.
An increase in the population of one species leads to greater use of resources by that species. This leads to a reduction in the diversity of other species, which in turn leads to less interdependence among species. For example, a continuing decline in phytoplankton populations in the oceans is leading to the decline of other species and has caused a 40 per cent fall in oxygen production since 1950. The decline in whale populations has contributed to this drop, since whale excrement is a major source of nutrients — particularly iron and nitrogen — for phytoplankton.
The planet simply cannot sustain 7.5 billion people — a number that is growing — who consume primarily the flesh of dead animals. Every year the slaughter of 65 billion animals generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transport sector combined. And industrial fishing is emptying the oceans and causing an unprecedented decline in biodiversity in marine ecosystems.
Ecological systems are collapsing all over the world, from coral reefs to rainforests, because human beings are exploiting resources far beyond the capacity of ecosystems to create and renew natural resources. The decline of ecosystems is also leading to the collapse of human social structures, spilling over into global conflicts in the form of wars and domestic violence. Terrorism is not the cause of society's problems — it is simply a symptom. Human beings are compromised by mediaeval paradigms such as territorial dominance, hierarchical ambitions and superstitious beliefs, combined with primitive behaviours such as greed and fear.
The fishing village where I lived as a child is no longer a fishing village. The relative innocence of our lives as children in the 1950s and 1960s no longer exists. The African bush, the Arctic tundra, the marine reserve of the Galápagos Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazonian rainforests through which I travelled, are no longer as they once were.
Human beings have this remarkable ability to adapt to decline. It is a trait that proved extremely useful when we lived as hunter-gatherers. We adapted to food shortages, to climate change and to the world evolving around us. Today we are trying to adapt to destruction of our own making, and this adaptation is translating into greater control by governments and multinationals and into a dependence on industrial technologies.
We no longer have the empathy we once had. I remember clearly the events of 23 October 1958. I was seven years old on the day of the Springhill mine disaster in Nova Scotia. 75 people died and 99 were rescued. I remember crying over the fate of people I did not know, and I remember my excitement every time a miner was brought to the surface alive. I no longer have that capacity. Perhaps I lost it in growing up, or perhaps it is because society no longer has room for that kind of emotion.
A disaster had struck and we were weeping for people we did not know. Last year, almost a hundred people were brutally killed just a few kilometres from where I was living in Nice, France, by a madman who drove a lorry into them. A few days later a priest was beheaded in France. Every passing week brings with it stories of mass killings in the Middle East, in Africa, in America and beyond. It is a worldwide festival of pain made of chaos and violence, yet it is met for the most part with complacency and a flurry of Facebook posts saying "we pray for Paris, Orlando, Nice, Beirut or Istanbul" — a litany of self-indulgent adaptation to tragedy, quickly forgotten.
This is not the world of my childhood. We remembered the horrors of the Second World War with genuine emotion. I remember talking with veterans of the two world wars and feeling their pain. Today it is just a short-term news item, in a world that seeks to escape through films, celebrities, video games and an increasingly fanatical religious fervour.
The reality is this. The human population is growing and with it the consumption of resources. But since resources are finite and the rate of renewable energy is lower than demand, this leads to only one outcome: the collapse of resource availability. And since we are literally stealing resources from other species, this will lead to the decline of species and habitats, which in turn will lead to a further reduction in resources.
At the Paris climate conference (Cop 21), I called for an end to state subsidies for industrial fishing worldwide and a moratorium of at least 50 years on commercial fishing. This proposal went unheard at a conference that did not even consider the fundamental role of the oceans in addressing climate change. My view on Cop 21 is that governments were not looking for solutions. They were looking for the appearance of solutions. And they certainly did not want to hear them from people like me. They want solutions that bring jobs and profit. They want no form of economic sacrifice.
Furthermore, I believe that the majority of humanity — and certainly those who lead it — does not grasp the true gravity of the situation. There are six perspectives on climate change:
1. Denial
2. Acceptance, with the idea that it is a positive development
3. Acceptance, with the idea that science and technology will save us
4. Acceptance, but with a refusal to acknowledge all the consequences
5. Apathy
6. Acceptance, with the determination to find real solutions
Those who deny climate change have personal interests in doing so and are driven mainly by greed or ignorance. Patrick Moore, a former colleague of mine at Greenpeace, sees climate change as an opportunity for longer growing seasons and better weather (he lives in Canada and I don't think he has thought it through). Others, such as Elon Musk, see our salvation in science — either by abandoning our planet or by developing artificial ecosystems on Earth. Many responsible world leaders acknowledge the problem but are politically too powerless to address it with realistic solutions, because those solutions would not be politically popular. And, as with everything, most of the world is indifferent and too focused on having fun (the industrialised world) or surviving (the underdeveloped world).
On the path we are currently on, the future is quite predictable. More wars over resources, more poverty, more concentration of wealth in the hands of a privileged few, more disease, more civil conflict and, with the decline of biodiversity, more global hunger and pestilence.
The rich tapestry of all our cultures and our achievements in science and art is intertwined with biodiversity. If bees disappear, our crops disappear too. If forests shrink, we shrink. If phytoplankton dies, we die! If herbaceous plants die, we die too!
We exist thanks to the geoengineering contribution of millions of different species that keep the ecological system necessary for our survival functioning. From bacteria to whales, from algae to sequoias. If we damage the foundations of this survival system, everything we have created will disappear. And we will disappear.
We have made the mistake of declaring war on nature and, thanks to our technologies, it appears we will win this war. But, since we are part of nature, in the process we will end up destroying ourselves. Our enemy is ourselves and we are slowly becoming aware of this indisputable fact. We are destroying ourselves in the futile effort to preserve the image of what we believe ourselves to be.
In this war we are slaughtering millions of species (through direct or indirect exploitation) and reducing their numbers to dangerously low levels, while the numbers of humanity reach dangerously high levels. We are waging this war against nature with chemicals, with industrial tools, with ever-increasing extraction technologies (such as fracking) and the suppression of anyone who opposes it.
In the last two centuries we have left in our wake hundreds of billions of bodies. We have tortured, murdered, abused and wasted too many lives and annihilated entire species. We have turned ecosystems rich in diversity into barren, lifeless wastelands, polluting the seas, the air and the soil with chemicals, heavy metals, plastic, radiation and industrial waste.
We were once terrified by the prospect of disasters such as Chernobyl or Fukushima. But these accidents happened and we adapted and accepted them. Now we are at ease.
At this moment, the media ignores it, politicians deny it and the public appears unconcerned by the frightening consequences of Fukushima that are unfolding before our eyes, which we keep firmly shut. Fukushima is the greatest environmental horror we have ever unleashed in the history of ecological crimes. And yet it is as if it never happened.
Meanwhile, we are becoming a sociopathic species. We are losing the capacity for empathy and compassion. We idolise soldiers, hunters and resource developers without a thought for the victims they cause. We delight in violent fantasies, hailing two-dimensional imaginary killers as heroes. Our attitude has become so Darwinian that the weak (other species) must succumb so that the strong (us) may survive. But we forget that Darwinism acknowledges the laws of ecology and, when it comes to the law of nature, we have no choice, because in the end it is nature that controls us, not the other way around.
The consequences of our actions will not occur many centuries from now, but within this century. Marine ecosystems are collapsing, now! The planet is warming, now! Phytoplankton is in decline, now! To put it bluntly: the planet is dying now and we are the ones killing it!
In my experience and from what I see, there is only one way to avoid falling victim to the consequences of having ignored the laws of ecology: we must free ourselves from the anthropocentric mindset and adopt a biocentric idea of the natural world. We can do this because we have magnificent teachers in indigenous communities around the world, who have had biocentric ways of life for thousands of years, exactly as our entire species did in the past. We must learn to live in harmony with other species.
We must introduce a moratorium on fishing, deforestation and industrial-scale agriculture. We need to stop producing goods that have no real value, such as all the plastic objects used for leisure and excess. We must put an end to the mass production of plastic that is choking all our seas. We must stop poisoning the soil and dumping toxins into the sea. We must abolish cultural practices that destroy life for the sole purpose of entertainment. It certainly won't be easy, but do we really want the epitaph of our species to be "Well, we needed the jobs"?