Greenpeace Foundation
Life’s worst crisis in 65 million years…
There have been five planetary mass extinctions in the history of life. Events which so disrupted the seas, atmosphere, and basic requirements for life that large animals were swept aside; leaving only small and resilient creatures to slowly evolve toward complexity again.
We’re now entering the 6th. Unlike the previous five, this one is caused by a single species: ours. It may seem slow to human eyes, but aside from the crashing asteroid which killed many of the dinosaurs, it’s the fastest one the planet has ever seen. And fast changes are far worse for life.
A human 70 years old now lives on a planet with less than a fourth of the wild animals that existed when she was a child, and that trend is accelerating as the human population expands, uses more and lower-quality fossil fuel for energy, and the resilience of global ecosystems fall like dominoes.
This is not the crises of the decade or century. This is the crisis of our species, the biggest challenge to existence and continuation we will ever face. The scale of event which only happens roughly ever hundred-million years.
Rapid change is selective. It knocks out large, complex species with brains and long lives in favor of small, simpler creatures which reproduce quickly. The largest creature to survive the last one weight less than 10 pounds. So where does that leave us, and the species we depend upon and care about?
Yet we are conscious, and at least in theory can steer our behavior away from disaster. Making that happen is what our campaign is about.
We need to get our brains around it.
We seem have many problems. A climate problem. An acidification problem. A population problem. An extinction problem. An energy problem. But what we really have is a brain problem. Our short-term behavior has led us into a series of nested predicaments.
We are evolutionarily biased to ignore the future. To base our decisions on “feelings” rather than facts. Yet those “feelings” come to us from the deep recesses of a brain shaped by evolution for a tribal hunter-gatherer. Our abilities to change the planet have increase a trillionfold, but we have the same feelings we’ve always had. We strive not for “enough” but to have “more than others”. We require greater and greater reward to get the same satisfaction. We buy things to strive for social status, and to blame problems on “outgroups”.
The 6th Extinction Stops Here.
It’s time to take a stand. It won’t be an easy stand, because we’re not talking about buying a trendy hybrid car, using recycled paper towels, and installing solar panels. We’re talking about deep changes in the human way of doing things, to save a world.
This sort of situation – exerting short-term discipline to deal with longer-term problems – is not one of our species’ strong points. Many of us simple, literally, don’t care what happens to the world after our kids die. We have no sense of connection to the multi-billion-year story of life, and halfway through what could be a billion years of large complex life. We don’t care whether humans will be around for 500 years or 5 million, because we just don’t think about it.
Since we can’t see or touch the people of the future, and they can’t do us any favors, we consider them to be expendable, like the species we’re vaguely aware are going extinct all over the planet. Just their tough luck. In other words, where the future is concerned, we’re a society of sociopaths.
But we need not be.
We are not absolute captives of our evolved irrationality. We can think and reflect. In principle, we can embrace a deep time future with trillions of human childhoods lived on a planet with healthy ecosystems. The ONLY thing we have to do to achieve that is don’t wreck the planet this century.
We have been greatly distracted by the carbon pulse. That very temporary glut of burnable coal and oil which has changed what we value. At the rate we’re going, it will end soon; first with oil becoming energetically unaffordable and then, more gradually, coal. The problem is that if we use it until then, we won’t have a living planet to go back to.
At present, we turn fossil fuels into money, and money into brain reward plus environmental costs. Those brain rewards are pretty stimulating, and they’ve caused us to look away from the natural world. But in the lifespan of the human species, the carbon pulse will be a lightning flash which comes and goes quickly. Our survival, and that of other large complex species, will depend on the earth’s ability to sustain it.
Our campaign will be putting forward some pretty radical-sounding propositions. The most radical of all is the notion of a trillion human childhoods, which is ten times the number of humans who have ever lived to date. It’s probably still attainable, but it will not remain so unless we truly step up to becoming homo sapiens in fact as well as name.
Join us. Be radical in your desire to stop the Sixth Extinction.
Because if that’s radical, we don’t want to be moderate.
The USA’s oldest and original Greenpeace, proudly unaffiliated with Greenpeace USA