Dancing in the Dark

Earlier today I ran across an article on Slate.com about the demise of the American honeybee. Now in itself this is not such a surprise, when we know that we are destroying hundreds of life forms each year. This particular case hit home only because there was a fear that it may disrupt the California fruit crops, since even now, with all our technology, we can’t really pollinate plants ourselves; we need the bees. However with our typical ingenuity we had solutions, in this case captive bred hives that are taken around the country by truck to perform the service that their wild peers would have done but for their unfortunate demise. Interestingly the demise of the honeybee is not directly attributed to foolish shortsighted decisions made by man; rather we are merely the facilitators who allowed a parasite from beyond these shores to invade the world of the American honeybee.

This unfortunate pattern has repeated itself time and time again, sometimes accelerated by human action, as in the introduction of rabbits and then foxes into Australia. But in a shrinking world, more and more species are migrating, invading new territories and attacking the native inhabitants, wiping them out with an efficiency that makes our own efforts in that direction positively amateurish. This appears to be a phenomenon that is not exactly new or even quite as unnatural as we may have initially assumed. After all, migration of species is something that is as old as life itself, and it follows that every time a species moves into an area inhabited by other life forms, some adjustment is necessary, and often enough that adjustment will be the partial or whole destruction of the native by the invader. Even man, the most recent and most advanced of parasites, spread gradually across the world.
In a natural cycle of things, then, we may expect that Nature will find a way to balance the invasions. The native species will evolve defenses or perish (an argument in favor of evolution, since an intelligent designer would have precluded such dramatic changes). Unfortunately, we cannot be certain that the new systems will be beneficial to us. Why should they, when the developed in response to stimuli wholly independent of us? Harking back to the case of the honeybee, our attempts to preserve them in the face of natural selection was an utter failure. Concerned “experts” sought to treat hives with chemicals targeting the parasites, we transported artificially bred hives around the country to replace the devastated wild populations. Yet all our intervention only resulted in a different form of eventual destruction, one against which the bees could not hope to ever evolve in time to survive.
My point, at the end of this long-winded discourse, is that the world does change constantly. It always has and much as we might like to freeze frame the status we like, that’s just not going to happen. Every single action we take has consequences along the entire spectrum of life. Be it the explosive growth in certain parasitic algae and water plants (fueled by vast amounts of nutrients in the farm runoff) that choke other life or the disappearance of birds from farm as rail fences replaced hedge (a disappearance that left insects free to attack our crops without any control by natural predators) our actions have always reverberated through the food chain.  As I said earlier, the one thing we never know is precisely how our actions will affect the rest of Nature. But if there is one thing experience should teach us it is that attempting to rectify one mistake by proactive action usually results in still more unintended consequences and those consequences will usually be no better than the problems they replace.

In practical terms then, this does lead to two very important conclusions. First and foremost, we have to accept that the world is changing around us, and that this is neither a good thing nor a bad thing: it is just a fact of life. This is not a repudiation of the dangers of change, nor is it a blind acceptance of those who cry “the sky is falling!” We have to remember that we are by far the youngest species on this planet and still evolving. In just the last few thousand years (a blink of an eye compared to sharks, for example, that evolved 400 million years ago) our life spans close to tripled or quadrupled, our population has increased several times over. In the last few hundred years alone we have spread to areas of the world that were free of our destructive tendencies. There is feeling in some circles that destruction of the environment is a modern trait; in fact we’ve always changed the environment around us to achieve our ends. From the first crop we planted by clearing an area of its existing flora, we began to destroy the natural world around us. All that’s changed over time is the scale and efficiency of destruction. What’s interesting is that humans are not the only ones who modify their environment - there are plants that release chemicals that inhibit the growth of other plants in their vicinity.
But while the changes we wreak are not quite as unique as tree huggers may imagine, it’s equally important to note that we are making those changes at a rapidly accelerating rate. And every change we make has consequences beyond the obvious. When we destroy forests for farmland, the changes range from possible destruction of certain species (and the possible destruction of several other species closely linked to them) to loss of links in the carbon cycle to build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to overall increases in ambient temperature. Five thousand years ago, those changes were so small in scale and so gradual that Nature could react to our actions and create a new equilibrium. But over the last two or three centuries, we have made changes at a rate that Nature simply cannot match. And just as our changes affect the world around us, that changed world will in turn affect us down the line.
Obviously, from the simplistic tone of my essay, I’m no expert in environmental science, certainly less expert than the guys at American Enterprise Institute who believe that global warming is not a threat. But it seems a fairly simple and logical conclusion that while we do not know that our industrialization over the last few centuries have destroyed the world beyond repair, it’s almost beyond doubt that we have destroyed and exterminated countless forms of plant and animal life and we still do not know quite how those losses will affect us over the years ahead. It doesn’t seem to be asking overmuch that we tread extremely carefully in future and seek to stabilize the environment about us. And that we treat all “silver bullets” with extreme skepticism, be it hybrid cars (my Prius for instance saves gas consumption but contains more toxic materials than non-hybrids), genetically modified crops (higher yield but the risk that they may invade and destroy natural environments and be near invulnerable to Nature’s control) or my favorite good-idea-gone-bad, artificial reefs made of old tires (a perfect way to dispose of scrap tires, till the “reefs” came apart and began to smash into and destroy the real coral reefs, wash ashore in the thousands and overall prove a massive environmental catastrophe). All we need to do is feel our way very carefully forward, as we wait for Nature to finally catch up with all the damage we have wreaked during our short time here.