Monday 13 January 2014

The Philosophy of Sustainability -- Week 2 begins

Straight up on week 2 of my Future Learn course "Sustainability, Society and You", We've been asked two very important questions.

The first is the scope of sustainability. Do we just want to sustain opportunities for human wellbeing, or do we extend that to include other living creatures we share the Earth with.

The second is about the sources of our obligation to act sustainably. Dr Neil Sinclair is asking why we should try to preserve opportunities for other people in future generations who we will never interact with.

Having come from a background of an enormous interest in biology, I see little difference in sustaining opportunities for humans and sustaining opportunities for other living beings. In fact, I think it's impossible for us to have the former without also bringing the latter into the mix.
Ecologies are amazingly complex, and we don't always understand the relationships between the varied organisms in each ecosystem. Knowing that we don't fully understand something is an incredibly important realisation, and one that all too many people are willing to dismiss all too easily.

Take, for instance, krill. These small crustaceans feed on phytoplankton and zooplankton. They then swim around in enormous swarms, getting eaten by (seemingly) anything bigger than them that comes their way, including humans. They (as a collective of all species of krill) are an important link in the food chain.
So what happens when the temperature of the sea rises? A lot of species are arctic, and rising temperature levels may put undue stress on krill, reducing their numbers substantially.
Pollution may decrease the amount of plankton available, which could also reduce the numbers of krill.
And once the krill population drops, so too do the populations of fish that survive in whole or in part on krill.
Fish populations that are already under pressure from human fishing may be devastated by the removal of this one link in the food chain.

Okay, so that's just one species of fish, right? Wrong. The scenario I describe affects multiple species of fish, all at the same time, and from there it affects all the predators as their food source dwindles. A lack of these creatures might go on to cause a boom in the numbers of plankton, causing toxic algae-blooms which block the sun, which then has further ramifications.

Removing a tiny crustacean from the food chain causes a massive knock-on effect which has the potential to put food pressure on human populations.

These important connections in food chains around the globe are everywhere, and sometimes we take them for granted. Colony collapse disorder in bees has been causing increasing amounts of worry, as European honey bees are responsible for pollinating many agricultural crops worldwide. This has the potential to put stress on the food crops of many countries.

It's not just food that we should be worrying about though. Medicinal properties of plants and animals are continually being discovered, and there are well-founded concerns that our destruction of the Amazon could be leading us to destroy potential cures for cancer or other diseases through massive extinctions of plant life.

There are good reasons for keeping our ecosystems intact; reasons which benefit us as well as benefiting other life-forms within ecosystems, and I think I've only just started to scratch the surface of this question, but I want to get onto the second question.

Beyond all the fluffy, herd-mentality co-operative stuff, I'm looking very specifically at one of the basic things that defines me as a life-form: reproduction. Having four children, I want to preserve the opportunities for my genetic line. It seems quite astounding to me, but every creature that lives on the face of this planet is descended from the same ancestor. It's quite clear when you look at the taxonomy of species. And it blew my mind the day I heard Richard Dawkins say it, even though it was the most obvious statement that I had ever heard (and I'm paraphrasing here): every single one of your ancestors lived long enough to pass on their genes. By preserving opportunities for future generations who I will never interact with on a personal level, I am preserving opportunities for my genetic lineage to thrive, to spread, and most importantly, to continue.

What can I say? I am more than who I am. I am the culmination of more than 3.5 billion years of life that has survived hostile conditions, crawling from the littoral zone, mass extinctions, predators, starvation, drought, pestilence, plague... I'm ego-maniacal enough to want, at some stage in the distant future, to be the mother of new species, even if I'm never actually remembered for anything beyond the next couple of generations. And sustainability now gives my genetic heritage the best footing for long-term survival.

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