The earth will be fine; we may not be

By Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen

Published: Saturday, June 16, 2007



It's true that we have big brains and opposable thumbs and we've used these to come up with some amazingly destructive technologies that we can all be proud of. But let's not be too impressed with our capacity for annihilation.

So it seems climate change may not mean the end of all life on this, our beloved but fragile planet.

Scientists working on the Svalbard archipelago, Arctic islands owned by Norway, have found evidence that plants came and went as the climate heated and cooled over the past 20,000 years. What this suggests, the scientists say, is that plants repeatedly adapted to rapid warming by shifting large distances northward -- even crossing the wide stretch of water between the islands and the mainland.

To biologists, this finding is interesting but not terribly surprising. Life adapts. Individual species may founder and disappear in the face of environmental change. But others will survive and new species will arise. As Tom Waits growled, "you can drive out nature with a pitchfork but it always comes roaring back."

This isn't a message we hear much these days. Quite the opposite. "Fragile nature" has become such a cliche that journalists, activists and school children seem to be incapable of discussing the environment without adopting a worried expression and the tone of someone asking if the patient will pull through.

The planet is an exquisite little shop. All living things are delicate china cups perched on glass shelves. And humanity is a big, strong stupid bull.

This sort of thinking is supposed to mark one as sensitive to the environment and compassionate toward the multitude of other life forms that share this world with us. I have to admit, though, I find it arrogant. And more than a little misinformed.

Here's the key thing to know about life: Its time on this planet is measured in the billions of years. And humans? We built our first city 4,600 years ago. There are trees older than that.

It's true that we have big brains and opposable thumbs and we've used these to come up with some amazingly destructive technologies that we can all be proud of. But let's not be too impressed with our capacity for annihilation.

During the First World War, humans dug two sets of trenches from the border of Switzerland to the North Sea and spent four years hurling every imaginable horror industrialized societies could build into the narrow space between. Massive artillery shells rained down. Tunnels packed with explosives blew up. Poison gases blanketed the land, seeping into the mud.

By the time the war ended, a zone of near-total annihilation had been achieved. It lay like a thick scar across Europe.

And today? It's farmland mostly. And if those fields hadn't been regularly tilled, planted and harvested, they would have become forests. In the span of a single human lifetime, all visible evidence of humanity's awesome military might would have been swallowed up by that nature we so ridiculously call "fragile."

There are so many examples like that. The land around Sudbury was infamously turned into a moonscape by industrial poisons, but almost the moment the poisoning stopped, saplings started to grow. The United States dropped 19 million gallons of herbicides on Vietnam's jungles to remove cover from the enemy but today that cover is as lush as ever.

In Germany's Ruhr region, once the ashtray of Europe, open-pit coal mines have been turned into parks and slag heaps are green hills. This transformation had human assistance, but that only speeded the process. Nature would have done the job in its own good time.

Of course in many of these places we have caused lingering damage, such as the heightened rate of birth defects suffered in Vietnam today as a result of that herbicidal assault 35 years ago. But lingering damage is not lasting damage. Give nature a few centuries or millennia -- barely a tick on the clock when you've been around for billions of years -- and all sign of our wicked deeds will be gone.

The asteroid that hit the planet 65 million years ago -- turning the earth into an oven set on "broil" -- wreaked devastation beyond anything the nasty mind of man could conjure. The dinosaurs and most other species alive at the time were wiped out. But life adapted and thrived. It always does.

Life is ferocious. Unconquerable. The only thing more laughable than the idea that nature is fragile is the notion that monkeys with big brains and opposable thumbs could smash it like a china tea cup.

Please note this is not the same as saying humans are harmless. We are certainly not that. But any damage we may do will be limited to the particular arrangements of life on the planet as they exist today. We can drive species to extinction. We can poison air and water, upset ecosystems and even alter the climate. But life will adapt.

Whether we can adapt is another matter, which is why environmental sustainability must be a guiding principle of our actions. It's not altruism. It's self-interest -- the self-interest of a species that needs nature far more than nature needs it.

Dan Gardner's column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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© The Ottawa Citizen 2007


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