A Radical Theory of Conservation

Just a dozen lifetimes ago more than half the Earth was still wilderness thriving with life. Written accounts describe how life was so plentiful that herds of animals and flocks of birds would stretch far beyond the horizons and could even take days to pass by. Vast forests were abundant with wildlife, and pristine oceans were teeming with fish. Since then, the population has grown from 500 million to 8 billion people who are increasingly consuming and polluting the Earth. Every day, on average, 100,000 acres of forest, our primary oxygen source, are cut down or burned down. Every day we burn into the atmosphere 80 million barrels of petroleum, 20 million tons of coal, and over a billion cubic meters of methane gas. Every day we consume 100,000 tons of sea life, and in exchange for this depletion, we have dumped so much garbage in the oceans that floating masses cover thousands of square miles, and millions of tons wash up on shorelines. Half the essential life generating coral reefs are gone. Half the essential oxygen producing rainforests are gone. And half of the world’s vertebrate animals are gone. If life is our reason for being, why is our species degrading it at an accelerating rate? One theory is that civilization has a fundamental contradiction in its function which is causing increasing dysfunction in the system. While it is true that civilization is an inherent development of life’s survival adaptations, it is also true that civilization is increasingly diverging from nature’s balancing system. It developed to help ensure our own survival, but this insurance has come at the cost of restricting our natural, instinctive, survival function. The increasing regulations, laws, technology, overpopulation, social coercion, and overcomplexity that inexorably comes with the growth of civilization, increasingly restricts the instinctive survival drives and instinctive survival responses that are essential for our full system function. Actual metabolic functions of oxygen assimilation and sensory awareness are increasingly repressed into people’s unconsciousness over generations of civilized development. We attempt to compensate for our impeded function by consuming and reproducing more. This perpetuates the development of civilization which causes more restriction of natural, instinctive behavior, resulting in more dysfunction, more consumption, on and on. We are compulsively consuming Earth’s finite, magnificent life system as imbalance increases. All systems require balancing in order to function, from the balancing spin of planets in solar systems to the balancing 98.6 degree temperature in our metabolic system. Life is most alive when function is balancing, but the variable factor in the equation of life is that balance is not constant. This means the survival instinct in all life must continuously adapt to the environment in the effort to attain a balancing function. Over the eons of years these continuous survival adaptations eventually produced our adaptable species, and we then developed the adaptation of civilization. Now, the survival adaptations to attain balancing function are running amok, and are conversely restricting our instinctive, balancing function. The reasons we do not acknowledge the dysfunction is happening are 1) Survival is our dominant driving behavior, and 2) From the beginning of our life, and depending on the amount of individual, quality nurturing we receive, the cognitive defense mechanisms in our brain block awareness of functionally repressive experiences, so everyone, by varying degrees, become less aware we are less functional. The bottom line to our situation is that our compulsive survival will not allow us to change our addiction to consumption. We will keep surviving at the increasing expense of Earth’s life system, and at the increasing expense of our own balanced function, until civilization collapses, only for the cycle to start again. Civilization is here to stay, in some form, as long as our species exists. The only way we can stabilize our situation, which includes retaining benefits of civilization while regenerating Earth’s life system, is by making the one adjustment to our natural behavior that will reduce the direct cause of the system imbalance. Yes, the secret to life, at this stage of system development, is population reduction. If we steadily reduce the world population over the next 50 to 100 years from 8 billion to 1 billion people, simply by having 1 or 2 children in a family, then 3 amazing results will happen.