Why raping the earth may prove to have been a great idea – and why it's time to stop

I woke up this morning with my heart running at least 110 and feeling somewhat ashamed of myself.

I'd walked into …. I don't really know where, it might have been a bar, probably one that I worked at. I don't think it was very busy at the time. I'd noticed 2 guys kicking and punching a rather young women in a park across the road as I'd walked in. Apparently I was so completely indifferent to the whole thing that I didn't even mention it to anyone else who was there.

Some idle banter carried on until one of the other characters noticed, through the window, the terrible event that was on. I looked out the window. This was a while later, and they were still administering kicks and punching in the same grueling, steady beat as before. Being four, and only two malfeasants outdoors, there wasn't even a thought about looking for some extra help. As we started towards them, the two guys split immediately in either direction. I had to run to get my phone so that coordination could be maintained between the two groups who would nail the bastards.

I ran, and ran as fast as I could for several minutes before seeing two forms come up in the distance. I continued to run, and was soon standing beside two characters. They were the girl, and one of the other guys from the bar, or … whatever it was. Damn! Where'd he go? Where’s the guy? Aw man, don’t tell me he got away. I quickly called the other two guys … where are you? Where are you? Can you still see the other guy?

They both got away. My heart sunk.

I felt ashamed, as I struggled into consciousness, due to my initial inaction. I'm the kind of guy that, when living in a neighborhood full of bars, will sit on the front step and smoke and drink coffee when there's a fight brewing after the bars close, just so that it's clear that there's a sober bystander. Perhaps some of them should have fought it out, but … it never seemed to go further than that first push. I saw what seemed to be altogether too many friendships and relationships go down the drain from that vantage point. Who knows if they remembered the next day though. I'm the kind of guy that (once upon a time this happened) will insist that a friend and I should go stop six guys who were kicking the shit out of a youngster at three in the morning. I'm the kind of guy that will irrationally tell a rather large, unknown, 6'6 guy that it's time to take it outside, in order to stop a fight with another unknown character, just to take a casual pose and ask him … why the hell were these guys about to fight anyways … it's just not worth it, y'know … . OK, so let's pretend that there are no stories illustrating the other side of that. Main point is that I give a shit and feel ashamed when I do nothing, or am not prepared to do anything, even if it was just a dream.

Then, I had a brainwave, the form of which I tried to scribble down before I woke up. That’s what follows. Perhaps the title stirs the pot a little much in tying it to this story, but this is it – Why raping the earth was a great idea, and why it’s time to stop. The tie to the unfortunate event experienced by the woman in my unconscious is fully intended to bring a sense of disgust and injustice.

So, as the lucidity faded, I realized … wait a minute, if there were three of us when I caught up, that should be a cause for celebration. We saved her, right? My heart was still beating 110. Out of excitement. We did it! Yeah, sure, the guys got away, but that’s not what mattered.

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I’d actually planned to write something about the strategic aspects of Ukrainian membership in NATO. This is way better.

I’m about to make an argument for why it was a great idea to rape the earth. Then, I’m going to argue why it must be getting damn near time to stop. She can only give so much. Are you disturbed yet? Aside from the story that provides the context, the innovation is largely redesigned packaging for relatively well-established ideas.

The first realization was that if the value of shares on the stock market was intended to represent the net present value of all future streams of profits, including a hypothetical liquidation of capital, then it’s really messed up because we’re basically setting up a system which is fully intended to concentrate every expected future profit into our hands in the present. This presents itself as an enormous incentive to ‘mine the earth’. That basically means to borrow from future generations such that we outlive our actual means from today.

Then I realized that this has enabled us to achieve the concentration of capital that we have in the present day.

The enormous capital surpluses have permitted reinvestment into R&D such that we can now get more production out of every bit of nature that we DO use. For those who see technology as the solution to environmental problems, that’s good.

So far so good for the ‘Order of the Invisible Hand.’ However, as argued and well illustrated by Jared Diamond's Collapse, we are ‘mining the earth’ right now. As seems most plainly evident, to me, in terms of maintaining inherent soil productivity in dry areas with conflict risks, the earth has a limited capacity to replenish its inherent productive potential. This rate is different for various ecosystems, depending on more variables than much of anyone is inclined to count. In that sense, we can consider the earth as possessing a certain sort of natural capital, with differing potential rates of return (linked to what may be called the upper bound on a sustainable ‘discount rate’).

The main idea in Collapse is that we are depleting this natural capital much faster than it can replenish itself. The potential result being, well … read the book. He’s an optimist. So am I. The invisible hand will certainly get to play, but it’s free pass is coming to an end. Preventing Collapse is almost certainly contingent on limiting the scope of action for the invisible hand.

What I’m saying that’s different from Diamond’s point is that, not only have we rapidly burned our way through returns that were deposited over the previous hundreds of millions of years, but we are also unfairly leveraging against the future by depleting the ability of our natural systems to produce returns when we eat into the capital base. We have exceeded this capacity in almost every single place where there are humans for some time now. However, between mining and leveraging our natural systems, the temporary surplus may have fueled an extraordinary rate of technological growth that may well permit a long term, perhaps permanent, improvement in our capacity to achieve a decent quality of life.

However, you can only eat into your savings and borrow against expected future earnings for so long before you go bankrupt. When natural systems start to go bankrupt, the effects are ... well, let me say again, read Collapse. It's happened many times before in history at a smaller scale. Sum up many similar events happening around the same time, and ... I'll leave you to find an adjective to describe the end result

I could leave it there, but it seems as though it could be interesting to flesh this out in just a little more detail. On second thought … I think I’ve said quite enough. It’d take at least a few pages to even begin developing each of the previous paragraphs, and I’m already within my target of 1-2k words.

The main point is counterintuitive. You should feel good about having played a role in raping the earth. My goal is to design a call to action with respect to the environment that is not driven by guilt. Yes, we have devastated much of nature. It could get much worse. BUT, don’t feel bad about what we’ve already done. (Well, maybe just a little bit). It has played an important role in fueling the sort of technological progress that make our lives so much better, today, and well into the future. However, we’ve leveraged too heavily against the future. The evidence is less clear in Canada than much of the rest of the world. We have an incredible basis of natural capital. Our low population density has made it easier to maintain more of our natural capital than most other countries. This is a great reason to maintain the returns we get, both economically and psychologically, as a result of leaving space for many of our natural systems to stand on their own two feet.

We are not monkeys. We’re eating into our natural capital at unprecedented rates, while mortgaging future generations in order to fund our profligate lifestyles. This can’t go on. I’m convinced that we have it in us to make sure that the apocalyptic visions of fear-mongering environmentalists never happens. We need to prove them wrong. Just imagine what will happen if we don’t. Let’s act like human beings and make sure that our actions today do not threaten the ability of future generations to live a life at least as good as ours.