Modern People - Incompatibility
Rufous-winged Sparrow
I grew up in what was at the time rural Ohio surrounded by woodlands and family farms. Even in my preschool years the woods was a comfortable and enjoyable place for me, and it still does. I took up nature photography in my teens while living there. College took me to the big city and later life found me residing in more urban locales, but photography always took me back to nature on a regular basis. I have spent between two and three months each year for more than three decades taking pictures in the natural areas of North America and elsewhere. Because I return to many of the same locations many times over many years, any changes become obvious. Those simple observations say without a doubt that wildlife and wilderness are rapidly disappearing all over America, and in fact everywhere.
There are many specific reasons that most things wild are in rapid decline but all of them have their roots in people and their numbers. There are 108 million more people in the U.S. and nearly 4 billion more people in the world than when I started taking pictures. Each one of those people needs space for themselves and for growing, harvesting, and extracting all of the resources they consume1. As we turn more of the world's land area toward supporting our own numbers we turn it away from supporting everything else, and the population of every other living thing declines. For instance, in my lifetime many common American songbird populations have declined by between 50 and 80 percent. At the same time numerous woodlands and rural areas, including the one I grew up in, became nothing but housing developments and shopping malls. Land that once supported all sorts of wildlife now it supports almost nothing but people. Many states like Ohio have even opened their parks and other state-held lands to resource extraction making them less wild, less scenic, and less useful for wildlife. More significantly the U.S. House of Representatives has begun a ruthless anti-environment campaign to make national parks, wildlife refuges, and other protected lands vulnerable to exploitation2. Human population keeps growing, people keep using up more space and resources, and the world is not getting bigger. The first thing to yield is, and always has been, wildlife and wilderness. At some point long after those vanish it will be our turn to yield, starting with the poorest among us.
Only 50 years ago the global wildlife population was twice as big as it is today. Before humans became a major influence the entire earth was wilderness. Today only 23% remains. With entire ecosystems now collapsing we are witness to the sixth wave of mass extinctions our planet has seen in a half-billion years, and we are the reason. This is not often in the news, and many know nothing about it. As long as it doesn't affect their favorite television shows or their wallets most Americans just don't care. The only thing that surprises me is that we got to this point so quickly. I never thought I would live long enough to see such drastic changes, and as Monty Python might say, I'm not dead yet.
So what about all of the conservation efforts undertaken by various countries and sincere individuals trying to preserve our natural heritage? There have certainly been successes. For instance, they saved the bald eagle from extinction. In 1963 there were only 417 nesting pairs. By 2007 when bald eagles were removed from the U.S. federal endangered species list there were 9,789 nesting pairs. That's wonderful, but while that and some other good things were happening more than half the wildlife population on the entire planet disappeared. A national symbol like the bald eagle may garner enough support to bring it back from the brink of extinction, but the rest of the world keeps going to hell. The sad fact is that the best efforts of the best people have helped selected species in selected places but have never in history halted or reversed the overall downward spiral of wildlife and wilderness in America or anywhere else. Obviously our collective efforts have not been even close to adequate. In fact the speed of this downward spiral has only increased.
It might be possible for people to change everything I have written about here, but the will to do it does not exist. That is because things like wildlife and wilderness play no role the lives of most people. Those people feel no connection with nature and feel no responsibility to preserve it for anyone in the future. I know many people who fit this description.They are by far the biggest obstacle to slowing, halting, or reversing the decline I've been discussing here. With the prevailing attitudes and politically based hostilities to all things "environmental" it is impossible to change any of this. While a group of people in New Hampshire save a pond the robber baron Trump opens 3.6 million acres of pristine wilderness in Utah and Alaska to industrial exploitation. And so it goes until there is nothing left.
The extinction of most species that are not useful to people and the elimination of wilderness is assured. I think this will come to pass with most people being as oblivious as they are now. I feel sure of this because the warning signs have been obvious for decades with virtually everyone looking the other way. Enormous areas of wilderness have already vanished and countless species have already gone extinct without most people even realizing it or caring. Development of the last wilderness and the passing of the last wild tiger, grizzly bear, and butterfly each have no less impact and relevance to most than the next episode of America's Got Talent.
People do not miss what they never knew. Humanity will miss wildlife and wilderness the same way it misses the extinct Passenger pigeon. Until 1870 passenger pigeons made up more than one third of the entire U.S. bird population. Their population was roughly 5 billion3. Single flocks of Passenger pigeons contained hundreds of thousands of birds and there could sometimes be up to 100 nests in a single tree. Literally everyone knew them and today no one does. Passenger pigeons are not missed or even thought of today unless we see an old photo or read an essay by some idiot photographer. As Aldo Leopold wrote in 1947, “Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know”. It is obvious that all of nature as I know it will vanish in the same way.
Dean
1 Some of this population growth, but not close to all of it, can be compensated for through efficiencies; doing more with less. LED lights and higher mileage cars are examples.
2 Congress changed House rules to declare that all public land has a value of $0. That makes transfers to states and other entities exempt from cost benefit analysis regardless of how much revenue or other benefit they provide for the public.
As part of a much larger attempt to weaken national park protections, on Jan 21, 2017 the U.S. House of Representatives moved to encourage oil drilling in our national parks.
Since 1977 Republicans have attempted to allow drilling in the Arctic national Wildlife Refuge almost 50 times. They succeeded in 2017 and the refuge will never be the same again.
It is difficult to find a large patch of land in America that is unscarred by human activity. In 2017 Trump opened 2.1 million of the most pristine acres we have to industrial exploitation.
On February 2, 2017 Congress voted to allow coal mining waste to be dumped into nearby streams and rivers. They say disposing of it in a less destructive manner is too "burdensome" for mining companies.
H.R. 861 to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/861?r=10
Relaxing coal pollution, methane flaring rules: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/relaxing-coal-pollution-methane-flaring-rules-this-week-in-congress/
3 It took 45 years for us to completely eliminate Passenger pigeons but most were gone in less than half that time. The last Passenger pigeon lived for 29 years at the Cincinnati Zoo and died on September 1, 1914.