“We’re like a virus,” a colleague said, as we sat beside a campfire in the national park we worked at. “People are destroying this planet.”
Evening fireside chats or long park drives sometimes ended this way, with a fellow nature-lover despairing that we as humans were killing our environment.
I understood the pain they felt, but I disagreed with their conclusion.
I often hear progressives or environmentalists talk about the various ways in which human beings are altering our planet–climate change, mass extinctions, pollution, single use plastics–and end their rant with the declaration: “Human beings are a cancer, a plague on the Earth.”
I too am a progressive and an environmentalist. I don’t just empathize with these people–I feel the same fears. Traveling the United States I’ve seen the human-induced devastation firsthand–the clearcuts, the droughts, the mountaintops removed, the glaciers melting.
Human beings punish and plunder every part of the planet. The destruction seems unstoppable, inevitable. And those of us who care often feel small and insignificant in the face of it; we lose hope.
So I understand the torment that all nature-lovers feel. What I disagree with is the assumption that human beings are basically evil, destined to destroy. It is in fact this idea–that we are separate from the natural world, that we are some kind of parasite–that is destructive.
Aldo Leopold, famed author, scholar, forester, farmer, and outdoorsman, wrote about a “land ethic.” He posited that if we human beings were going to learn how to survive on the land, that we were going to have to accept that we are as much a part of the land as any other living thing that inhabits it. You don’t burn down your own house with you in it–that’s the idea. He felt that if we begin to see ourselves as just another living thing benefitting from the abundance of the land, then we would feel obligated to protect it.
I agree with Leopold, though I am not arguing–nor was he–for some sort of hippy-dippy drum circle of land-hugging. (Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things–hug the land if you like.) I am talking about mindset. The plague is not the human species; the plague is the concept that we are a plague.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 famously defined wilderness as natural spaces “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
That’s cute but also completely unrealistic. There is no place on this planet that has not felt the impact of human beings, even if it hasn’t felt the heel of a hiking boot. Glaciers far from human habitation are melting due to human-caused rising temperatures. The most remote stretches of the oceans are being infiltrated by our trash and acidified by our carbon dioxide.
Even US national parks–fortresses of wilderness that limit the activity of humans with their trammeling feet–are impacted by people over every square inch.
Take fires. Inaction is also an act of human control. Decades of quelling every fire that licked at a national park forest has turned many of them into kindling, ensuring that when the fires do come they are bigger and more devastating, while also halting natural fire activity that leads to rebirth in forests.
Even when we try to help, we hurt. Another argument for humans as a plague, right?
Not so fast. The problem here is not that humans are born to destroy–the problem is that we have forgotten how to help.
For thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of years, human beings across the globe lived in harmony with their surroundings. All pockets of the planet have seen sustainable living by human beings. These people did not view themselves as better than other living things but as one of them, and therefore learned along with them how to grow and thrive in community.
There are and have been entire human societies built around not taking too much, giving back, sharing what we have. Around respecting the land and the bounty it gives all living things. The author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls this being indigenous. These concepts are as much a part of the human species as the more destructive ones that dominate our world today. They have just been forgotten, sometimes intentionally.
Take national parks. The concept of national parks was born in the late 1800s as a reaction to rampant environmental devastation in the American West. Activists like John Muir opined the loss of natural wonders and called for their protection. The public responded with enthusiasm–it still does, we Americans love our national parks–and national parks were born.
Baked into the national park idea was the notion that humans are a problem, that we are separate from and must be kept out of nature to keep it wild. Humans in their thousands were evicted from national park lands, some whose ancestors had called those places home for countless generations. The land lost the people who had treasured it and cared for it for sometimes thousands of years.
Lost too was the knowledge that those people had about how to live sustainably in those spaces. What time of year to plant native produce, what plants held which uses, the best way to spread a little fire to get the grasses to grow strong and tall to keep the bison fed. The concept of “people don’t belong in nature” expelled the people and erased all that we could have learned from them.
Order. Control. Dominance. These are the plague. Separateness is the plague. A sense that we are overseers of nature and not its children is the plague.
I am not arguing against America’s national parks. I worked in them, I cherish them as much as anyone–I love them so much I built a website about them. What I am arguing is that the logic that founded them is flawed. Mistakes were made. And one of the lasting consequences of those errors is that people today–even park and nature lovers–are still believing some toxic lies.
The narrative that we humans are meant to control the landscape and its denizens is a lie. The story that people don’t belong in nature, that nature is a separate thing from us and can only exist where we are not, is a lie. The belief that we are only capable of destruction stems from these first lies–it is also a lie.
What I am calling for is a radical shift in thinking. Many of our modern societies have collected these lies, packaged them and fed them to the masses, taught us to believe that they are true. Stop believing them.
Stop believing the lies. Human beings are as natural as any other thing born of this planet. We have proven over and over again that we are capable of living on it with respect and reverence.
You, you reading these words, you are my proof. Do you–a person reading a piece about environmental devastation–have only destruction in your heart? I doubt that you do.
I have known foresters careful of the trees they take; I have known fishermen conscious of the bycatch trapped by their nets. I have met people from all over this planet who are trying to listen to what the land is telling them, who take only what it gives willingly, who give back.
I know that there are people eaten up with destruction. These people are infected with the disease of order and control; they have bought into what the lies have told them. Do not be one of these people.
There is a plague; it is belief in the lies that want to tear us from nature, from our rightful place as part of a community of living things. We are weaker when we are isolated from what we know deep within ourselves as our true nature, when we are separated from what rings true with our souls. We are easier to take advantage of and manipulate when we believe the lies, and it is also easier for us to do the same to the Earth.
Here is my cure for the plague of lies: stop believing them. Stop giving them power. Believe the truth, discuss the truth, convey the truth to the ignorant.
And what is the truth? That we humans are not a disease; we are ill. We are not innately destructive; we are stripped from our rightful space in the natural world at a young age and fed lies about ourselves. The pain and confusion we feel at being divorced from who we are meant to be is what causes us to destroy.
Whoever you are, whatever your background, wherever you reside, you are a natural being on this planet; you belong.
And you don’t have to run out and nuzzle a tree or abandon your apartment for a life in solemn contemplation amid the mountaintops to belong to the land. You don’t have to do a damn thing but believe in something new. You can simply change your mind.
Perhaps when you stop believing the lies you will find that you love yourself a little more, that you feel more connected to the nature you see in your life or on TV. Maybe you will buy more sustainably or support causes that fight the lies. Maybe you will do great things to stop the destruction, but it starts with this change in your mindset.
Uninfect yourself. That is the greatest thing you can do to stop the destruction created by the disease of lies. Do not label yourself a plague. Call yourself what you are–a natural, wondrous product of this precious Earth.