Cav's Place

I find myself very disheartened by all the green parties and environmental organizations that claim to attempt to strike a balance between protecting the environment and ensuring the well-being of the people, or even to protect the environment and improve the people’s standard of living at the same time. That means they’re just greenwashing, because environmental health and humans’ well-being are no longer compatible and this drive to constantly improve the people’s standard of living is what got us here in the first place, robbing Earth of as much as we can and giving back as little as we must.

Though most people never seem to realize it, it’s obvious that humans’ well-being requires a healthy environment in the long run, but not the other way around. Or at least not usually, since right now the damage is so great that the environment would really need humanity’s help in order to prevent further degradation. But it wouldn’t matter so much in the end, since Earth as a whole would recover soon enough after we’ll be gone even if we wouldn’t fix this damage before that’ll happen. It’s just a pity that so many other species would be dragged down along with us if that were to happen, so we owe it to them to clean up all this mess!
But we won’t manage to do anything for the environment if we, those who are currently alive, also want to preserve and even improve our own standard of living, and that of humanity as a whole, at the same time. It’s like chasing two rabbits… We are far too many and the environment is far too damaged, so there can be no balance for a long time to come. We can’t even say that we’ll take from the areas that still have plenty to offer and give in the areas where the damage is significant, because the damage is everywhere and we currently need more than the entire planet still has left to offer anyway.

We have three options: First, fight for people’s well-being at the expense of the environment and perhaps let two or three more generations live a good life, then rapidly go extinct and let Earth recover on its own. Second, keep trying to achieve a balance and likely ensure humanity’s survival for several more centuries or even millennia, but have both our standard of living and the health of the environment constantly degrade as time passes, our only real hope being to manage to move to another planet before going extinct. Third, fight to preserve and restore the environment at the expense of humanity and hopefully manage to reach a point where an actual balance between the two will once again be possible, perhaps as little as a century from now.
From where I’m standing, the only real solution, both morally and practically, is the third one. But, you see, that third option actually requires us to focus on the environment and accept that we’ll need to make significant sacrifices for that purpose. We’ll also need to accept that these sacrifices will have to be made for at least one full century, and probably more than that, so it’s highly unlikely that any of us, those who are currently alive, will still be around by the time the fruits of our labor will truly be ripe for picking. It’s not a pleasant prospect, but it’s the only option that ensures our future. The second option might require far fewer sacrifices from us, but it will require even more from those who’ll come after us and the future it promises is uncertain at best. While the first option might require no sacrifices from us, but it also offers no future at all.

Telling people such harsh truths might not be the way to earn any popular support, votes or funding, but if those parties and organizations actually mean it when they say that they mean to find that elusive balance within at most a couple of decades, and not let people suffer during that time either, then they’re obviously not really going to do much for the environment in the first place and probably only mean to gain votes and funding by selling lies, just like everyone else in that “business”. It is also possible that they might do something, of course, but such an approach can only take them down that second path described above and therefore anything they could manage is going to be way too little compared to what’s necessary in order to really protect the environment. Not to mention that it will also cause people to suffer, and greatly, just perhaps not right away.

I wish those who see what truly needs to be done would stop trying to gain the support of those who don’t. Just do as much as you can out of what needs to be done by any means necessary and, when you need more help and popular support, get it without bothering to discuss issues with those who couldn’t comprehend them anyway.
What we do now might not make much of a difference for Earth as a whole, but many of the other species we currently share it with cannot wait any longer for us to get our act together. And, as weird as this phrase might seem, our future cannot wait any longer either. We need to stop putting ourselves above the world, or even on the same level with it. We need to stop trying to find a balance that can’t currently exist anymore and know that we’re the only ones to blame for the fact that it couldn’t possibly be restored in the near future either. We need to admit that, as the Earth had to suffer for us so far, so do we now have to suffer for it, preferably before it forces us to just as we keep forcing it…
If we start now and do not flinch from what needs to be done, that third option might still be available to us… Barely…