Will humans survive the next hundred years? This is one of the more common questions I get asked. The benefit of understanding how nature works and its unyielding power is to accept our inevitability. However, this is what actually makes me optimistic about the future … but not in the way you might think.
I have an 18 year-old girl and 17 year-old boy who are bombarded each day with rhetoric designed to make them feel guilty about being human. It’s one of the more poisonous aspects of modern conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More and it affects us all at some point.
‘If someone is not happy within themselves, how can they help the environment? That is why to protect non-human elements is to protect humans, and to protect humans is to protect non-human elements’.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet
What I say to my kids is, ‘you were born in this century, at the end of a period of great privilege. Two generations ago my ancestors were fighting world wars and would not have wished that upon you. Nevertheless, my grandparents often reminisced about ‘the good old days.’
Each generation adapts to survive in its own time and accepts that as normal. Our survival as a species won’t come about because of politicians or scientists, it will be the inherent wisdom of people who continue to live life on the margins’.
Children born a century from now will face different challenges and who is to say what that will mean? In actual fact, it will be no different to the way we feel today.
Humans and animals have equality and if anything, it is only our ego, pride and self-worth that creates the loathing we have for our own species. We should not feel guilty about being human. We should not feel guilty about following our animal instincts. Most of all, we need to understand that we are not in control of our species’ future. There are forces far more powerful that determine this. All we can do is try to better stewards of Earth and influence others to do the same. That is the most powerful thing we have.
Almost nothing we do alone will make a difference
As a scientist this has been one of the most challenging and glorious conclusions of my work. And this statement doesn’t mean science isn’t important, it just means that it won’t change our species’ overall outcome – though we can use knowledge to make the world a better place for us right now.
At the start of the pandemic I read articles on uncertainty principles and complex systems science relating to health. There are thousands of unknown factors that determine the outcome: more than we can ever research. So, whatever we do, COVID will eventually affect us all. That’s not to say, along the way, we shouldn’t get vaccinated, wear masks and protect each other. That’s just what healthy communities do to look after each other. But the power of single microscopic virus is too much for us to defeat.
Likewise, no matter how much technology we throw at environmental problems, Earth’s powerful processes will override everything. The future will be what it is, not what we want it to be.
Will humans survive? Yes, almost certainly, but the factors that determine the outcome are so immensely complex that our blunt and instrumental efforts are almost meaningless. The only thing that makes a difference is the combined impact of all individual animals including humans. And that scale and complexity is unfathomable, irreplaceable and impregnable.
How will humanity survive?
If you define humanity as our current civilisation that may not last for much longer. Collapse is inevitable but will be caused by lots of confounding factors such as lack of water, global crop failure, fertility decline and pandemics. It’s not going to be an easy time but for reasons I explained above, new generations will accept that, and work with what they know. My kids lived through a pandemic. For me it’s been a bit of a disaster but for them they just accept it.
We can’t design a way to fix our future ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More but it will happen naturally if we work with and not against nature. Today, the closest we come to a workable solution, is ‘rewilding’ with animals. It is the only conservation process worth investing in, if we are to have food, water and stable climate.
The scale of rewilding being done today is only really possible because land has already been destroyed and has little commercial value any more. I think it is a sign of times to come. It’s because it’s already ecologically dysfunctional and of little use to humans.
Elsewhere the rate of land clearance and extinction outweighs this progress and will continue to, as long as we are drawing more from the Earth, than it can provide for us all to survive. By ‘all’ I mean all animals including humans.
But ecosystems continuously move towards a state of greater diversity as that is the most likely to surviveDarwin’s theory how species are formed, where those that stand in closest competition with those undergoing beneficial modification and improvement, will go extinct faster. Natural selection is by survival of the likeliest, not survival of the fittest. The fittest are only likely to survive because they happen to be most suited to the environment into which they are born. The More. In the last 50 years we’ve killed so much wildlife that we’ve slowed this resilienceReferring to an ecosystem’s ability to maintain a steady stable-state. The need to build resilience is entirely anthropocentric and symptomatic of ecosystems that are damaged or declining, leading to loss of ecosystem services on which humans depend. More process to a crawl. However, given the chance, wildlife rebounds incredibly quickly. It’s only people that are stopping this from happening at the scale needed to recreate a habitable Earth at present.
We are beginning to notice this. We are starting to have conversations and this will help us transition to a more basic lifestyle and economy.
A new style of civilisation
According to the Nature Conservancy Kenya, there has been a 65% increase in Tweets about nature since 2016. It seems that we are living in an enlightened age when people are learning the value of nature quite quickly.
There is a lot we can do today, to make this transition more comfortable, and prepare the next generation for new challenges. The effort we make in conservation science isn’t wasted and maybe even our failures aren’t a reason to feel depressed at all.
I like to think about it this way.
Our incompetence got us into this mess.
We are no more competent at getting out of it. Despite our self-professed incredible technology, science and skills, we have little or no control over nature. Mother Earth isn’t attacking us though, what we’re actually doing, is banging our head repeatedly at an impenetrable wall, trying to break through. What we don’t realise is that there is a cliff on the other side.
In actual fact, we should sit down for a while, and ponder how we might recover our strength and get on with doing our best to look after ourselves, our species and other animals. That is the role of conservation and science, to cushion us against the fallout from own impunity.
Ironically, I think it is this incompetence to break through the wall, that will eventually get us out of this mess without falling off a cliff. Nature will hold us back and in generations to come we might just be thankful for that.
What’s the point in feeling guilt or despair when we are not in control? We are simply part and parcel of Earth’s processes.
A hope for the future
So, will humans survive the next hundred years? Yes, definitely. But we will transition to a very new way of living and it won’t be by our own choice or design.
The collapse of our modern way of life will see us forced to change. The signs of this happening are already there.
Over the last couple of hundred years we have taken a finite amount of energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More inside the biosphere and we have borrowed this from the Earth. We have stolen from animal-driven ecosystems and created so much waste that we are threatening the survival of all animals. Climate change is the symptom of ecosystem decline. It’s the final stage in the release of energy from habitable ecosystems to where it isn’t useful any more.
After our global economy collapses, the debt we have to the Earth though, can be repaid very quickly. We won’t have a choice. Wild animal populations will rebound. These are the animals we call ‘pests’ at the moment but they will become abundant. Our ecosystems will reform in an alternative way with different species, cast from what is left over, from today’s world.
This is the only thing that can alter our future. Because only when animals work together do they create habitable ecosystems. There is literally no other mechanism that matters when it comes to human survival. It’s because we are one of those animals that we cannot afford to feel guilty and why we should have some hope.
The energy we consumed, once wasted and poured into our oceans and atmosphere, will be rapidly consumed by animals and within decades, new food chains and landscapes will form. Within a relatively short space of time we will be living a quite different existence and our culture will change to fit the new way of living.
Our descendants may even be healthier and happier. Earth’s processes, though, will have resumed control and we will evolve and live alongside our animal cousins for perhaps thousands more years.
