When the public reasoning again seems to fall into rational lapses on consensus, I felt it was time to re-publish this article I wrote a few years ago.
200 years ago there were less than a billion people on earth. Between 1900 and 2000, the increase in the world’s population was three times greater than in the entire history of mankind. The earth now has close to 8 billion people.
At the same time, in 1900 there were about 5000 cars in the world, and no trucks or buses. In 2010, there were about 1 billion 200 million cars in the world that emitted exhaust gases into the air together with our industries. Each year, there are about 85 million new cars added.
Almost 8 billion people eat, use water, produce waste and pollution in a way that has never happened on earth in this scale before.
We must also not forget that human exploitation of our natural resources for all these people at the same time also increases these levels. Up to 500 million tonnes of heavy metals, solvents and toxic sludge enter the global water supply every year. In developing countries alone, as much as 70 percent of all industrial waste is dumped unfiltered, directly into rivers, lakes and streams.
Our actions affect the earth in a way it has not encountered before. And this has happened only in the last 200 years of its history.
From the climate scientist’s point of view, there are significant disturbances in the physical and ecological systems of the earth. And what they find in support of a rapidly changing climate is not a loose assumption. Their results confirm that the changes caused by human activity are happening right now, it is not a question of whether it will have an effect, it is happening right now. It is about what the result of this effect will be for us. How we organically change our earth. And where our total dependence on life comes in terms of the survival of all life on earth, since more than 10,000 species are exterminated each year due to human influence. They are gone forever. This is something that happens solely because of land degradation as a result of our greenhouse gas emissions and from our over-exploitation of the earth in terms of global logging of forests, careless land exploitation for agriculture, global urban expansion, mining in the form of open-pit mining, oil-sand and oil extraction.
If we make assumptions based on an extension of this perspective, then we are actually talking about changes that are already interfering with our everyday lives in a way that is not just about independent coincidences in the environment of one species alone.
What we are doing now is already about survival.
Trophic cascade reasoning often seems to be more down to earth and more practically applicable in its way of showing how relationships have consequences in a more natural way than consensus arguments. No matter what scale we choose. The larger the scale, the greater the impact.
It’s about how we relate to our surroundings. To our nature and others. That everything is connected in ways that are often invisible. That we acknowledge that they are there and that we have a part in these contexts. From the personal to the global. Everything is a relationship.
This video is an example of a local scale.