Peaceable Journey - The New Human Ecology

The New Human Ecology

It is the time to talk about the joy of change. We are creating hope out of the goodness we find within ourselves and driven by the innate value of all species and ecosystems. They surround us and cheer us on invisibly and silently. We have learned about the importance and difficulty of protecting ecosystems. While we should celebrate our successes, there are two reasons we are not winning the struggle: Not enough of us are engaged in preventing the harm we are doing to Earth, and we have not agreed on universal principles and methods to achieve equally universal goals like the Seven Results. We can change that.

The premise behind the new human ecology and its Seven Results is simple: Life needs from us not one new behavior, but many. A single toxic element in a stream can kill all life. If one of the Seven Results is missing, the others will be ineffective. If we add 2.3 billion more people to Earth in 38 years, we will continue to lose ecosystems at an accelerating rate; billions of people already here will live in poverty forever.

The Seven Results are the goals of the new human ecology. We change our behaviors to create them. For most of us:

The first fast track to the Seven Results is created when we change what we consume, from the organic grains we choose to the hair products we buy. We stop eating meat, eggs, and dairy, and discover the thousands of plant species to eat. We stop buying SUVs. We choose smaller homes and change how we heat and cool them. We stop buying leather shoes and leather car interiors. We boycott businesses that imprison orca whales.

The second fast track is to stop making babies. One child at most can be enough for each family. We must reduce our populations now; slowing or leveling off population growth is not a sustainable, humane, and biocentric option.

The third fast track is our love, empathy, and compassion. It will deliver us to social and economic justice as it will to species' rights. Do not underestimate its power to sustain us as we learn how to change our human ecology. We will wake up to the needs of impoverished people and invest in their desire to be in control of their lives.

That is the abbreviated way we create hope.

The Seven Results Revisited

In chapter 1, I described the Seven Results we must create if we are to thrive ecologically and morally as a species. Here they are revisited:

Healthy, intact ecosystems that dominate global landscapes and seascapes and require little to no human intervention

A vegan, organic, and humane consumer lifestyle oriented to sustainable efficiencies and relationships

Social and economic justice for all with transparency in public and corporate institutions

An immediate, negative population growth based on natural attrition

Economic systems that are ecologically sustainable and restorative, enable social and economic justice, moral, humane, and operate within the new human ecology

An increase in empathy, love, and compassion toward all beings and ecosystems

Appropriate, sustainable, and equitable consumption of goods and services

All Seven Results are required to create the new human ecology.

Each of the Seven Results has a synergistic effect on the other six. They feed and strengthen one another to create a solid new human ecology. Moving to a vegan ecosystem niche and steeply reducing human populations may feel like radical steps, but consider how radically unsustainable and harmful we are living today. The Seven Results signal a de-radicalization of our current human ecology. They are direct and pragmatic goals. Life will be better for us because it will be better for all species.

Getting agreement on the details of each of the Seven Results will be a challenge. Vested economic interests and powerful institutions are, like us, innately resistant to cultural and personal change. Social and economic justice, one of the Seven Results, sounds good, but there will be vivid disagreement about how we achieve it. The bigger the change, and this is big, the more we will tend to avoid it and find reasons to reject anything outside of our comfort zones, worldviews, and ideologies. We are strong enough to do this.

We are walking away from the carnist, morally inept, current human ecology because it leads directly to a future none will be able to bear, a future no good soul would choose. If we make the right choices, we may be able to create an environmentally sustainable and humane future, but only if there is a consensus that there exist some universal human values and behaviors that are adaptable to ecosystems on the scale Earth needs.

The Seven Results are purposefully and by necessity broad. Yet they assume that specific human behaviors will be needed to produce them. How we achieve each of the Seven Results will be a creative process. Those few billions of us who have access to wealth and resources have the greatest ability and responsibility to implement the Seven Results immediately. That does not exclude what can be done in the presence of poverty. For all of us, rich and poor, this is our species' moment, our era.

Excerpt from This is Hope: Green Vegans and the New Human Ecology by Will Anderson

If we add 2.3 billion more people to Earth in 38 years, we will continue to lose ecosystems at an accelerating rate

We are walking away from the carnist, morally inept, current human ecology because it leads directly to a future none will be able to bear...

We are strong enough to do this.

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