Taking Without Returning

In effect, the title to this piece of writing speaks to humanity’s tendency to degrade and simplify in order to shape conditions and circumstances to be more suitable for the requirements of societal and systems development. As humanity moved away from cultures based upon a sustainable hunter gatherer society the need and desire to control, extract and shape gradually became paramount. With an increase in knowledge and technological prowess humanity’s influence on the environment by design, manipulation and management has grown to be enormous. No longer did humanity live within and upon the fruits of the natural environment. Rather and at first in very small ways, our ancestors learned to produce for our requirements. Very slowly with minimal impact at first, humanity began to take from the abundant environment more than the environment could regenerate. As our ancestors spread around the world the human footprint has grown to an extent where there are few untouched by human hands places. We have a comprehensive global presence.

Our presence, our footprint is wound up in all the systems we have created and established and at the core of it all will be found two fundamental principles incrementally established in pre-eminence, exchange and gain. The former, societies and cultures employ in all manner of system functions. The latter has become the key motivating component in the exchanges. These two specific principles are the drivers at the wheel. While certainly the argument can be made,  exchange is fundamental to our humanism, gain is an add-on grown in importance and influence comprehensively. How different our societies would be today if, instead of gain,  altruism (“regard for others as a principle of action”; COD, 2005) had joined exchange at the wheel. So, indeed maybe gain defines humanity just as much as exchange although my gut suggests we have, rather, witnessed a band-wagon effect.

For this moment-in-time though gain dominates and the concept the word embraces has been adopted in our thinking and designed into the very fabric of our societies. We do to gain and ultimately we takeaway and don’t put back.

There seem to be three ways humanity takes away: by removing without reinstating; by adding and modifying and thereby simplifying; and by doing nothing when and where clearly degradation is occurring or is about to occur. The degrading results take many forms. 

Removing without reinstating occurs widely with resource extraction. When we add or extend settlement, for example sprawl, the landscape is modified considerably. Our tendency to ignore or deny the occurrence of degradation caused by, for example, polluting activities has been a human trait for a very long time. Here is a list of other words referring to our practices of ‘taking away’: cleared, dug, levelled, sucked, drained, moved, filled, obliterated, killed, dammed, diverted and so on.

I have discussed systems before and no doubt will come back to the topic in future essays. Just now it is worth repeating, systems comprise a complex web of over-lapping associations and functions in our societies and in the environment. I have re-stated this because attention needs to be given to a very important over-arching and highly influential system and the values, attitudes and beliefs supporting it. Economic systems, good and bad, are pervasive in almost everything humanity does on this finite planet. This is very important to understand because it is a principle driver to almost everything we do and one-way or another there is no escaping the fact we are all involved. In no particular order, financial planning, budgets, incomes, taxes, product development, growth of an economy, bankruptcy, buying a house, going on a vacation, buying tickets to a sporting or entertainment event, major or minor urban development, purchasing an ice-cream cone, these and so many more are all part of the economic systems we have created. At the heart of it all are the notions of wealth creation, profit and loss, exchange and the good life. In turn those concepts ultimately rely upon the concept and practice of taking while putting back is an unwelcome expense or inconvenience.

In one way or another we all take away not always directly, but with certainty because we inevitably participate in the systems dependent upon and involved in resource extraction for energy, raw materials and food. We are paid an income from our involvement as employees. We buy from the systems producing products. Also, we live in settlements designed without much regard for the environments they replace. And then as habits form we pay little attention to issues having apparently nothing to do with us, somebody else's problem. We slip into ruts determined by our values, attitudes, beliefs and commitments. The economic systems dependent upon profits and growth guarantee our involvement as long as we are willing participants. But, unless one is in the front line with a shovel to extract or a megaphone to direct, the whole process is rather convoluted and remote. And as long as we remain oriented toward gain and gain remains dominant we will continue to choose, indeed we will have to participate, no choice involved.

How does the above happen? Why are we constantly depleting limited resources, producing vast amounts of profligate product and failing to repair the damages we have created and continue to create? I believe it all starts and ends with mind-set, the principles and priorities we adhere to, the values, attitudes and beliefs we adopt. With our mind-sets we establish goals, the methods employed to achieve them and the justifications for doing so. We use tools such as science, technology, marketing and huge sums of investment capital including human, environmental and economic. If necessary we make sure our methods have a low profile to keep them out of the public view. Conversely, we are bold riding high on the hubris horse of ill conceived design manifestations. Our policies and rules in one way or another give support to or at least enable these events, products and consequences to occur. We work at it willfully, in ignorance, with mis-guided understanding and in denial. We chase what we have conceived to be the good life and all the bits and pieces comprising it without really paying attention. We are on the band-wagon tread-mill of acquisitiveness in what we still believe is a frontier world. 

So we extract and leave the destruction behind. We climb mountains and leave the garbage there. We dump vast amounts of garbage on land and in the seas. We cut forests and turn them into vast simplified environments. We carelessly and callously cause species to decline to the point of extinction. We design and build sprawling settlements requiring huge amounts of energy and infrastructure to function at the cost of environmental destruction and simplification. We do all the above and then spend vast amounts researching why the ice is melting, the seas are rising and the temperatures are incrementally climbing to very dangerous levels. Our journey to the cliff edge, below which the pile of destruction grows, lumbers on. 

The history of humanity, our history, can be simplified down to an equation where the result must show a positive balance. We seek to gain in the economic systems we have created. The wealth of nations and individuals depends upon it. Modelling is a form of equation and over the years modelling designers have determined to a greater degree of accuracy the required inputs to make the models useful. They have learned poor data just does not give accurate information. In the early days of computer development I remember a phrase used to describe the importance of the data. It went something like this: garbage in garbage out. In reality and in continual pursuit of gain we still seem to be fixated on the belief we can continue to use garbage variables in our equations and everything will be just fine. Slowly and in no way quickly enough we are starting to recognize the gain mantra along with its destructive tendencies really are destructive of environments and the social fabrics and systems we have created. It is well past time for a re-boot visit to our values, attitudes and beliefs and to find a way of converting the mind-set of gain into something much more altruistic, focused upon re-instating and protecting the ecology of complexity by putting back.

I must acknowledge before finishing, not everything we do degrades. Currently, there are tree planting programmes with goals to achieve the planting of millions of trees. There are wonderful park systems. Individuals, groups and government agencies strive to protect and reinstate environments to health. All good, but these efforts must be kept in perspective. In fact currently the balance is skewed heavily toward taking and we must remember unless a balance is reinstated the degradation, including all the climate change proliferation, will continue to fester. Yes, we can and to some extent are putting back, but that alone especially at the scale being achieved will not suffice as long as the underlying causes of degradation are allowed to persist.