Robert Waide on humans and nature as 'coupled'
Photo: ktylerkonk
“The planet itself is the ultimate coupled human-natural system. So everything that humans do on the planet collectively affects the entire operation of the planet’s ecosystems. I think that’s a pretty important and pretty scary thing sometimes.” – Robert B. Waide
Robert B. Waide is a biologist and executive director of the Long Term Ecological Research Network Office – over two dozen sites linked over the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Antarctica. These scientists study ecological processes across large areas and over decades. EarthSky’s Jorge Salazar spoke to Dr. Waide about the deeply woven connection between humans and nature, an interdependency that forms what scientists call a ‘coupled’ system.
Dr. Waide has also generously given his time to EarthSky’s Global Science Advisory Council – helping to bring the insights of scientists to people around the world.
Dear Robert Waide,
Thanks for so wonderful a perspective. Perhaps you will consider that a titanic struggle between human beings and the natural world is in the offing. It seems this struggle is fulminating now precisely because too many leaders of the 6.7 billion {soon to be 9+ billion} members of the human family generally do not share your perspective. Many too many of our brothers and sisters, especially those with great wealth and power, evidently see human organisms as separate from, and somehow superior to, life as we know it on Earth.
At least to me, it appears that an epochal contest is taking shape on the far horizon between the ‘team’ of “mother culture and father profit” on one side and ‘Team’ Mother Nature on the other.
This could be the greatest show on Earth in 10,000 years.
The team of “mother culture and father profit” appears adamant in its willful intentionality to stay the same old business-as-usual course of recklessly overconsuming limited natural resources; relentlessly expanding large-scale production and distribution capabilities without regard to physical limitations of the natural world; and overpopulating our planetary home, come what may for children and coming generations, biodiversity, the environment and the Earth’s body.
Team Mother Nature simply is.
Which team will likely be seen by reasonable and sensible observers as winning the contest for success in 2012, 2020 and 2050, if the human community continues its idolatry of distinctly human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities by choosing evermore unbridled growth just as we are doing now?
If the leaders of the family of humanity do not choose change, do you have any ideas about which team will prevail and when will the outcome of the colossal contest no longer be in doubt?
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Dear Robert Waide,
Perhaps I have not been clear above. Let me put the questions another way.
Is there any way, any way at all, you can see that “mother culture and father profit”, given the exercise of all their demonstrable powers of intelligence, ingenuity, greediness and viciousness, can actually gain dominion of Mother Nature by subjugating Her to the whims of human desire, thought, judgment, will and action?
Sincerely,
Steve
Perhaps man has decoupled too much from nature and has lost important aspects of the relationship. As an avid backpacker, I never cease to be impressed with finding that those who venture out into nature and experience its beauty are also those who appreciate most the inseparable connection between man and nature.
Urbanization has obscured with concrete walls and city sky lines, the direct relationship man has with nature. Few in the city appreciate that water doesn’t come from pipes. It is delivered by pipes from natural aquifers or lakes. The green beans on the dinner plate didn’t come from a cannery; they came from fertile grounds, cultivated and harvested some distance from the grocery store.
When we loose perspective on the origins of food, building materials, energy, and most other consumables, we fall into a misguided mindset that there will always be an abundant supply. I wish that everyone could walk a nature trail, visit a farm, and spend a night at a national park with the lantern lights off and watch the expanse of stars unfold before their eyes. Then they would understand the importance to protect, keep clean, and maintain that which sustains us.
Thank you Dr. Waide for such a well articulated explanation of the connection between man and nature.
Cool!
The poet William Blake once claimed, “Where man is not, nature is barren.” Yes, we are coupled with nature. More so than ever, though, humanity needs to focus on the converse of this statement: Where Nature is not, man is barren.
Concerning the colossal failure of people building a human world to connect, much less to find balance, with the natural world…….
GUEST COLUMN by Steven Earl Salmony
November 26, 2008
Chapel Hill(NC)News
http://www.chapelhillnews.com/opinion/guest_columns/story/27746.html
Billions end up paying for excesses of the wealthy on Wall St.
Our lexicon of business activities is being expanded daily, thanks to the “wonder boys” on Wall Street. We are learning about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, recapitalization, puts, short selling and so on. We are gaining a new vocabulary from the recent meltdown of the financial system and expected slowdown of the real economy worldwide.
Where did this debacle begin? Well, it began in the center of the human community’s banking and investment houses in the financial district of NYC. Supposedly, the “brightest and best” among us go to Wall Street, know what they are doing and do the right thing. Unfortunately, such assumptions turn out to be colossal mistakes.
How did this calamity occur and why is the human family in such dire economic straits? It appears that grotesque greed and a culture of corruption have come to dominate significant operating systems of the global political economy.
Powerful people in high offices within huge business institutions with access to great wealth are recklessly and deleteriously manipulating the unbridled expansion of the global economy in the small, finite planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.
Self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have surreptitiously “manufactured” a subprime “asset bubble” and perversely fostered its uneconomic growth within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, this asset bubble did what bubbles do. The subprime bubble burst and made a mess. Global credit markets have frozen, stock prices are tumbling and the value of the dollar is gyrating.
Evidently organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy, and the unraveling (i.e., deleveraging) of the worldwide subprime swindle are running the artificially designed financial system of the global economy as a pyramid scheme. This is to say that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth funneled pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated. Note that 30 percent of annual corporate profits end up in the accounts of a tiny number of people. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. Does the economy of the family of humanity exist primarily to provide wealth to the already stupendously wealthy? The “bankstas” among us evidently think so.
In the 1980s, this extremely inequitable method of distributing wealth and arranging business activities was called a “trickle-down” economy. We have been repeatedly told how this ‘rational’ economic scheme is good because it “raises all ships.” And yet, from my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources now appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The ‘ships’ carrying these billions of less fortunate people (i.e., more people than lived on Earth in the year of my birth) do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.
Concerning a pernicious inclination to extoll the ‘virtues’ of avarice even though human greed is ravaging the natural world…….
Perhaps it is time for the same ol’ business-as-usual, pin-stripe-suited leaders, the ones who adamantly espouse and religiously exemplify an apostate’s creed of greed, to be replaced by new leadership.
Too many leaders of this patently unsustainable culture of avarice evidently define the culture’s efficacy by the endless accumulation of material possessions; by the unbounded acquisition of more money, money, money, money; by recklessly overconsuming and relentlessly hoarding limited resources. They demonstrably declare to all the world that greed is good.
Are we not members of a culture that worships consumerism? Are the products of greed nothing more or less than the objects of our idolatry?
Are the pin-striped suits, fleet of cars, chauffeur, private jets, McMansions, distant hideaways, secret handshakes and exclusive clubs…… all “signatures” of success in a culture promoted by the ‘goodness’ of greed?
Consider for a moment what perversity greed has wrought.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
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