The catchphrase ‘It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature’ was a hit marketing campaign for margarine in the 1970s. The phrase really stuck in people’s minds, kind of like how margarine globs onto English muffins, or crackers, or any of the thousands of ultraprocessed items available in the miles of grocery aisles manufactured by a handful of multinational conglomerates under the guise of a plethora of brands. Of course, it also resonated because it’s so obvious, or at least it should be.
Oren Lyons* often used a similar and more meaningful version of this phrase, even before the margarine commercials. In general, he would say that you can’t negotiate with the laws of nature. There’s no winning a battle against the laws of nature. There’s no bypassing its rules. There’s only understanding and learning how to work within them. And ain’t that a bitch? Because right now we as a collective species, especially in the Global North, don’t seem to understand this. In fact, we generally think we’re kind of above it all and that we can science our way out of anything, rather than recognizing that science is just our way of understanding the laws of nature well enough to better exist within their confines. That understanding is also kind of what we call physics.
In two of Andy Weir’s novels, The Martian and Project Hail Mary, he hypothesizes that the combination of science and human cooperation will save the day. When faced with catastrophe, the people of the Earth will band together and do the right thing for their collective well-being, or even for the survival of the right individual—like Matt Damon. I’m actually not sure if Weir believes this to be our natural inclination or if he’s trying to place the notion in our minds as a sort of inspiration, as a way to help us save ourselves. Because right now we have a rather strange and unnatural combination of beliefs. Many of us believe in science, but we also believe that we can use science to bypass the laws of nature. If we could only wrap our super-evolutionary brains around enough modern knowledge, we could science our way out of any problem. In a sense, that’s somewhat correct, but in practice, we’re not really doing that. Instead, we’re using our belief in science as an excuse to collectively blow off reality and are assuming that sometime in the future we can use our super-intelligence, ours or the one we eventually dream up in the cloud, to solve the problems we already know how to solve because the solution in front of us requires a change in our behaviour that we just don’t want to make. That seems to be what we’re really doing—apparently, collectively we’re five years old. Then, of course, we have another chunk of the population that doesn’t believe in science much at all, or at least climate science, but also shares the same sense of human infallibility. This is all extremely dangerous, and it’s basically a recipe for an evolutionary dead-end.
While our science and non-science selves seem to be very different, they both have notions that are born out of the same place. Our superpower as a species is our ability to tell stories. This enables us to collaborate on such a large scale. Unfortunately, it also allows us to introduce dangerous ideas from time to time. One of those is the notion that we have dominion over the planet. Kind of a wild notion, especially since we don’t really have dominion over the planet. The planet will shake us off like a parasite when necessary, in fact, pretty much every culture has a story built into their mythology where it does just that at some point in our distant past. But somewhere down the line that idea entered our consciousness and was propagated into our Abrahamic religions and is central to the Enlightenment era and, of course, colonialism. And while there has always been a division about the meaning of dominion—does it mean control and extraction as a God-given right or does it mean stewardship—the former has largely won out, and as I said, that’s an evolutionary dead-end.
To me, the only people looking at our problems correctly are the people who understand that it’s not dominion that we have, but the responsibility of stewardship. Our ability to affect our surroundings is a great responsibility. The Earth is a gift, not because it offers us unlimited resources to drain (which it doesn’t), but because it offers us life in the first place. Seems obvious, right? Well, I’m reminded of a conversation I had right around my college years while on a bus driving through the Yucatán in Mexico. I found myself talking to an oil surveyor, and I asked, as I was prone to do in those days, “Hey, did you ever think that maybe the oil is supposed to stay where it is? You know, like maybe it greases the plates or something? Or just shouldn’t be burned up?” And his answer has always stayed with me. Without missing a beat, he replied. “I think God put the oil exactly where it is so that we could use it when we needed it.”
And that brings me to the problem at hand, our level of consumption in the Global North is inherently unsustainable. There are cycles, reciprocity, and interconnections that too many people have lost sight of, and thinking that we can endlessly take much more than we give back has somehow become accepted. Can we science our way out of it as Andy Weir’s lovable characters do? Sure, in fact, we already know the answer. It’s less consumption—drastically less consumption—but we don’t want to do that. So instead, we’re going to burn more fossil fuels, tear down the remaining forests, kill all the coral reefs and fill the skies with satellites, just so we can make sure that products—like margarine, you won’t even believe it’s not butter—and services are available in abundance. And then somewhere down the road, in our collectively delusional minds, we’re going to come up with some other solution that will fix our problems. One that doesn’t require the inconvenience of, well, inconvenience. But, by then, it’ll probably be too late.
So, in case you haven’t been paying attention. We have a few major problems. A couple of them we talk about and largely dismiss, and the others we ignore completely. Burning fossil fuels, a feature of the industrial revolution, is warming the planet; we talk about that one a lot. And our general solution is to stop burning fossil fuels. That’s a good start, but that alone will not prevent the coming climate disaster. The Stockholm Resilience Center, the Swedish research institute founded in 2007 by Johan Rockström and Carl Folke, has identified nine planetary boundaries that should not be crossed if we want to stay in the habitable climate zone that allows us to live in conditions that we find, let’s say, endurable. I think endurable is a good way to put it. Deviating outside of these boundaries creates conditions that are, let’s say, unendurable. Yeah, I’ll go with unendurable. Meaning that civilization as we know it cannot exist. All of these boundaries are, as with everything, interconnected. The metrics they have introduced have become the standard for climate scientists across the globe, and while their findings are taken seriously by scientists, they are definitely not being heeded by our industrialists. You know, the people who are gliding along, making trillions of dollars producing, with our labor and our collective resources, all of the stuff we consume. In the case of the oil industry, they had actually started to identify many of these problems over seventy years ago and proceeded to cover up their own findings, and have spent billions on propaganda and political influence to keep the public misinformed. So yes, they aren’t heeding these scientifically accepted realities at all.
Anyway, for brevity, I’m going to give a very breezy overview of these boundaries, so it might seem overly simplified, but here’s the gist.
Climate
Or what we usually refer to as how hot the Earth is getting. For instance, the 1.5°C above preindustrial levels we are endlessly talking about. We’re blowing past this one, as everyone knows, and while getting off fossil fuels is absolutely necessary, if we don’t address some of the other boundaries, we will continue to blow past it. So in that sense, getting off of fossil fuels and developing something like fusion is actually the worst thing we can do if we then continue to overconsume. Let that sink in, because it’s crucial to understanding this point. Our core problem is not burning fossil fuels; that is a byproduct of our excessive consumption. And that consumption, at its core, is driven by our notion that we have dominion over the planet and can use it as an infinite resource.
Biosphere
Or the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem failures. This is attributed to climate but is also caused by the other boundaries we shouldn’t cross. If you haven’t heard, there has been a 70% reduction in wildlife since 1970, and a quarter of all identified species are currently in danger of extinction. The reason this is a problem for us humans is that we have co-evolved with all of these plants and animals and microorganisms around us for a reason—call it God’s plan if you will—and if we don’t have all of these complex interconnected life forms contributing to our ecosystem, well, Earth becomes a different ecosystem. One that we will probably consider to be unendurable.
Land Use
This is how much of the planet we are converting to non-resilient, non-climate-dampening ecosystems—deforestation of the Amazon is just one high-profile example where deforestation and introduction of industrial agriculture and ranching are destroying biodiversity, water systems and healthy soil, and releasing tons of carbon into the atmosphere. So this one is mostly caused by how we grow our food, or it might be better to say how we manufacture all of those items that fill our grocery aisles. There’s no avoiding a climate catastrophe without addressing our industrial farming practices and adopting some form of regenerative farming at scale. One note about regenerative farming, we should call it indigenous farming, because really it’s just the kind of farming we did all over the world before we became ‘civilized’ and screwed up how we grow our food.
Fresh Water
Well, we talk about this one a lot because, as we are finding out, we have a finite amount of available freshwater and we’re burning through it much faster than it can be replenished. The latest report put out by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health states clearly that we are already in crisis and that half the planet is currently experiencing severe water scarcity for at least one month out of the year. So we should probably put this pretty high up on the list. Or maybe, when we invent the AI, we can ask it how we can have water again. Like, hey, AI, we’re thirsty, any ideas?
Biogeochemical Flows
This is mostly the amount of manufactured nitrogen and phosphorus we’ve been using in our industrial farming. It’s depleting our soil at an alarming rate and destroying biodiversity. Now you might be thinking, so what? We can invent something to fix that, some other chemical or process. Or we can do what Matt Damon did on Mars and throw a bunch of astronaut shit on it and grow potatoes. But it doesn’t work that way. Without nutrient-rich soil, we can’t grow food.
Ozone depletion
This is caused by pollution, and it’s very solvable. But a new form of pollution is popping up on our radar, and that is the use of low-Earth-orbit, cheaply available satellites designed to burn up in the atmosphere. Yep, things like Starlink. Turns out, those satellites burning up in the atmosphere pump out a lot of heavy metal particulates that deplete the ozone layer in a way we are just starting to understand. We need to study it, which we’re not doing nearly enough of, and the commercial companies developing these technologies don’t seem to be accountable to any governments, and definitely not ours here in the United States. Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire and clearly deranged madman, says he wants to launch 100,000 satellites in the next decade and thinks he can scale it to 1 million soon after to create an AI power grid called Starmind. Yeah, he wants to call it Starmind. Wow, he’s a genius.
Ocean acidification
It just sounds bad, doesn’t it? Yep, pollution, agriculture run-off, climate, overfishing, biodiversity loss, all of it is contributing to the acidification of our oceans. And it’s happening faster than anyone predicted. The coral is dying, there are dead zones off the coasts, there’s a Texas-size plastic island in the Pacific—no wonder the Orcas are pissed off.
Aerosols
This is basically pollution and naturally occurring events like volcanoes. Remarkably, this is one of our lesser problems. But it’s also masking some of our warming. Many climate scientists believe that we are already living in a 2°C world, but that a quarter of it is being dampened by our existing pollution. If they’re right, that means as we start to clean things up we’ll be starting from a much hotter place.
Novel entities
These are human-made chemicals and plastics, things that don’t really occur in nature. So now we have forever chemicals that don’t break down and plastic that endlessly breaks down to the point where it’s in the bloodstream of every living being on the planet. The petroleum industry is currently building plastic manufacturing facilities to produce 4 times the amount of plastic we currently make today, and those systems will be coming online in the next few years. Needless to say, they’re not onboard for mitigating this problem. Apparently, they have a human infallibility complex or are insane.
So, those are the boundaries, and we have already crossed into dangerous territory in seven out of the nine. Fifteen years ago, we had only breached three. Is there any good news? Yes, there is good news. We know what needs to be done, that’s the good news. We do actually know what to do. The bad news is we don’t want to do it. Not only don’t we want to do it, but it would also take a level of cooperation that we’ve never achieved before. Carl Sagan actually said this in a congressional hearing led by Al Gore in 1986. That’s about 30 years after the oil industry first got wind of the dangers of burning its product; you can read about it here. Anyway, Sagan viewed our difficulty in finding the political will and our ability to fight corporate interests as our largest obstacle to saving ourselves from the coming disaster. We had the science, we just needed the global collaboration. And that still is our biggest obstacle. Back then, solving all of this would have been much easier. But now, now it’s going to be pretty inconvenient. But much less inconvenient than the alternative. The alternative, as I mentioned, will be unendurable. And yet, we still have political will and corporate interest to contend with.
So let me explain why all of this is unsustainable. The developed world, or what we call the Global North, makes up about 20% of the world’s population and has produced the vast majority of the pollution, novel entities and greenhouse gases that are currently warming the planet. Mainly through how we grow our food, power our homes and get ourselves around. And with just 20% of the world living the way we have, with our excessive over-consumption of natural resources, we are already busting past seven of the nine planetary boundaries listed above. In our capitalist/dominion mindset, what we are expecting to happen next, and what the industrialists like Jeff Bezos are promising, is that the other 80% of humans will partake in the level of consumption that the Global North has enjoyed for over a century. In fact, the industrialists are depending on it. Everything about our global economy, as it’s structured, requires exponential growth measured as GDP. That’s the inherently flawed logic of our global financial market. Its growth is based on extraction, and its success metrics don’t take into account the health of the planet. That, of course, is completely at odds with the laws of nature, because you can’t have endless growth in a finite ecosystem.
See the problem? What’s going to happen to each of those planetary boundaries when even just another 20% of the world reaches the Global North’s level of consumption? We don’t have that much more water left to consume, or landfills to fill up, or forests to burn down, or ozone to deplete. Is there some way we can raise the living standards for everyone, including those destitute in the richest countries of the Global North, and still maintain a livable planet? The answer is yes, but it requires redefining what abundance is and changing our values. Actually, our entire worldview. So it’s basically impossible, as Carl Sagan hypothesized. Okay, okay, I’ll stop being smarmy. But yes, it’s daunting. There’s no way to stay within the breaking point of a habitable planet without changing pretty much everything about the way that the Global North lives. And we definitely cannot double or triple the number of people living this way. Basically, we’ll have to change everything about the way we produce our food, how we get our energy, how we get around and what we leave behind as waste. And we have to change our mindset from having Dominion over the planet to having the responsibility of Stewardship—all with a healthy dose of humility for added measure. You know? Since we kind of fucked the place up already.
So, let me give just one example that outlines the difference in thinking required. Let’s compare cows and buffalo. They’re actually like apples and, uhm, not an orange, let’s say an oily rag.
There are roughly 80 million cows in the United States. It takes about 25% of America’s land area to house them and grow the food they need, and that requires 34 trillion gallons of fresh water and burns 2 billion gallons of fossil fuels every year. The land we’ve converted to a monocrop to feed them has become drastically less biodiverse and less resilient and is sucking the life out of the soil. The fertilizer required to keep it growing is further polluting our freshwater and creating a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The whole endeavour is completely unsustainable.
Compare that to the buffalo that Native American nations had cultivated for thousands of years before European contact. We can endlessly talk—and we’ll need to—about the indigenous farming techniques that existed in the Americas before the Europeans arrived. But for now let’s just talk about the buffalo. There were estimated to be upwards of 60 million buffalo in North America before the Western Expansion of the United States killed them off. A network of Native North American nations had been cultivating the Great Plains for thousands of years. They used controlled burns to expand the buffalo herd’s range, maintain its population and to enrich the soil. This was intertwined with various farming practices throughout the plains that also relied on the diversity of plants and animals that the plains sustained. All of this led to what we can probably call an abundance of available nutrition. And the resilience of these integrated systems was, by our standards, off the charts. And it required zero fuel, zero irrigation, produced zero pollution, and created a carbon-dampening environment. Contrary to the story the Europeans liked to tell, the Americas were not just a pristine wilderness filled with hapless people lucky enough to enjoy its bounty. The whole place had been cultivated and maintained for thousands of years by people who, with intent and deep knowledge, had worked with the land and did so for their own benefit and that of what many cultures called their fellow non-human relatives. Because largely, in the Americas, most cultures viewed the planet as something they were interconnected with and had a reciprocal relation with, and this included the plants, and the animals, and the land. This, of course, has been well documented, but one person I enjoy reading and listening to on this subject is Dr. Lyla June. Here’s a recent talk if you’re interested.
Now I’m not using the cow vs buffalo example as a specific outline of what we can do; it’s more an example of the kind of regenerative circular systems we’re going to have to move on to if we want the Earth to be habitable enough to sustain a human civilization that can thrive with dignity. So again, the good news is that we know what to do. We have systems of knowledge to inform us. We especially have indigenous knowledge all over the planet as examples of sustainability. If you asked most people, they would say they want to keep the Earth healthy for future generations. There are millions of people coming up with ideas that can take us forward and heal the planet at the same time. Everything from sustainable farming to clean localized energy to economic systems that center around human well-being rather than the fantasy of endless economic growth. That last one might be best exemplified by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, which imagines a world where our metrics are based on measuring the standards of dignified human existence and how they can be nurtured and maintained within the planetary boundaries that keep our planet healthy.
But none of this is possible without changing our worldview and deciding that stewardship of our environment is more important than economic growth. Our economic growth is based on the extraction of our natural resources. We’ve built our entire notion of success on the dollar amount that is created from that extraction. All of that has to go. Our metrics have to be founded on preserving our environment and building systems that heal the planet and keep us all safe. As I said, the good news is that I believe that most of us want that world. The knowledge needed to create it is right in front of us. Our superpower is the stories we tell ourselves. We’ve been telling ourselves the wrong story for long enough. It’s time to change the story. When enough of us believe that our place is to be the stewards of our planet rather than living in the delusion that we have dominion over it, that’s when we can get to the work of creating the next world. A truly sustainable world, for everyone.
*I quote Oren Lyons all of the time. He’s a Haudenosaunee Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of both the Onondaga Nation and is a member of the Indigenous Peoples of the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. He has a million great things to say about climate change and the human connection with nature. I quote him a lot because he is succinct and correct, pretty much all of the time.