Coupled. Joined together. Linked.
That’s what scientists believe we are, with Earth. Scientists sometimes call us and Earth a coupled human-Earth system, or a coupled human-natural system. Dr. Robert B. Waide, executive director of the Long Term Ecological Research Network Office and member of EarthSky’s Global Science Advisory Council – explained this concept to Jorge Salazar in a recent EarthSky interview.
In his interview, Waide used the language of science when he spoke of ecosystem services, which is a phrase that describes aspects of nature upon which we humans depend: air, water, plants, metals, sunshine, essentially everything tangible. But even the concept of ecosystem services doesn’t go deeply enough for most people. The words don’t convey the depth of our bond with Earth. It’s not just that nature provides services for us, upon which we depend. It’s also that, in acquiring those services – by the simple fact of our living on this planet – we humans in turn affect nature powerfully. Dr. Waide spoke to Salazar about scientists’ emerging understanding of the deeply-interwoven interactions between human and natural systems. He said:
We can no longer understand either natural or human systems by themselves. They’re deeply interwoven, and they each have long-term dynamics which influence the operation of those systems. So, in fact, humans behave in certain ways that effect the function and the structure of the ecosystems around them, and therefore effect the ecosystem services that come back to humans from those ecosystems.
It isn’t just that we live on Earth. It’s that we and Earth are joined together. Examples of our bond with Earth are all around us, and always have been. That’s what Jared Diamond was getting at in his book Collapse, which described societies that failed due to deforestation, fertility losses in soil, overhunting, overfishing, water management problems, or that most integral of issues, human population growth.
Here’s an illustration. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina initiated a tragic illustration of a coupled human-environment system along the Gulf Coast. What began as a natural event, a hurricane, became a human disaster as levees broke and New Orleans flooded. Afterwards, contaminated water from the city had to be pumped back into the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, as environmental experts warned of devastating effects to surrounding wetlands. The secondary damage caused by polluted flood waters then impacted humans again, economically. And so the human and natural impacts cycled back and forth, dependent on each other: coupled.
Or here’s another illustration, in Texas, closer to home for me. The magnificent Big Bend National Park provided an ecosystem service to ranchers in the 1800s, who grazed their cattle on the vast fields of tobosa grass there. In other words, nature was affecting humans, providing a service. But in only decades beautiful Big Bend was overgrazed, and ocotillos and prickly pear replaced the grass. Humans had affected nature. Today, though, many people now find the desert landscape in Big Bend restful and enchanting, and the area has become a sanctuary to the hundreds of thousands of people each year who view the park from scenic overlooks or hike on designated trails. Nature is affecting humans again, providing new ecosystem services (spiritual rejuvenation and recreation).
And so it goes, with nature affecting us, and us affecting nature, back and forth. The examples I just gave are big ones, but you can find little ones as close as your suburban backyard. That’s because, no matter where you are on Earth, you and Earth are part of a single system. This is what many scientists today are trying to parse and analyze. In fact, the study of the human-Earth system is a priority area for the National Science Foundation via its Biocomplexity in the Environment program. A fall 2008 deadline has just passed for scientists to submit proposals to study the dynamics of coupled natural and human systems. Looking at the 2008 awards in this area, you get a glimpse of just how minute and detailed those scientific studies have to be, in order for scientists to make progress in understanding our connection to Earth.
My guess is that, as this century progresses, the understanding that humans and Earth are linked will become better known. It might become as powerful and ubiquitous in human culture as Albert Einstein’s revelation early in the 20th century that space and time are linked. Today’s astrophysicists will correct you if you speak of space and time separately. Astrophysicists have coined a new word – spacetime – which has become familiar to many people. In a way that’s similar, will many people come to understand that we don’t just live on Earth? Will we and our children come to recognize that, in the deepest possible sense, we and Earth are one thing?
Here in late 2008, with few people on Earth recognizing the vital link between us and the planet, we do harmful things to Earth that might ultimately harm ourselves. Will people come to see themselves as coupled – joined – linked to Earth? Consider that this recognition could lead to a more harmonious, more beautiful and safer place to live if an older and wiser human species learns to take care of Earth, much as older people learn through necessity to take care of their own bodies.
What’s especially interesting to me is that the neurobiology of the brain and our sense of consciousness, ‘of I’, convinces most of our species that this somehow ‘does’ separate us from nature. The idea we are distinct and separate becomes terrbly important. The very idea that our most basic biology is part of the wonderous fabric that makes up our nature (and nature in general) and that all our neurobiology/chemistry is most likely knit together as a kind of living fabric should be cause for awe– instead this very idea causes the most venomous reactions, because it removes, for many human beings, their sense of specialness and being watched over and cared about.
A part of me, pauses… to wonder how in the world we can we ever feel ‘part of’ nature or feel coupled with the earth, when our own species has a difficult enough time even experiencing one another as part of one family and experiencing our essential samenesses and the profound empathy that should emerge out of that recognition. Without this happening, everything else becomes a moot point for me. All of human science will be incinerated with all the rest of us if we can’t address that issue.
-Doug
Doug, interesting perspective. I suppose if you don’t have a sense of oneness with nature, it’s hard to get that sense.
But it’s clear the social mores of a culture shift and change over time. For the sake of the preservation of our human species, I hope there’s a shift toward greater awareness of our essential connection to the planet, as this century progresses.
I think that’s a valuable contribution that science will make in this century! Maybe if science finds the ‘evidence’ more people will come to understand it and feel it.
We are part of nature. We evolved on this earth. We ain’t foreign. We ain’t a disease. We are indigenous to this earth. Our advantage (or disadvantage) is that we are sentient. We can think. We can realize we are. We can realize that we are mortal. This causes problems in our psyche. We know we are. We know we won’t be. this is a problem because we possess the same will to survive as any other animal.
That is the human condition, The basis of religion. The sourse of a lot of trouble.
Ben, I agree with you. We’re part of Earth, yet we know we will die. Interesting distinction!
Hi Benjamin–
I probably shouldn’t bring this up here, because it’s a bit off the topic, but… other problem apart from the ones you and I spoke about, is that our species often seems desperate to separate itself from all the ‘other’ animals on the planet. It was an odd design flaw to add a neocortex, but change so little about the underlying stuctures. In many respects it looks like our frontal lobes were ‘hell bent’ to be ‘in the service of’ our most aggressive, sexual, predatory and power based (territorality, dominance and all that)’inner’ brain structures. There are few other ways to interpret the raging rivers of blood that have marked our human history. We became such great hunters, that killing other human beings became an equal proficiency. I wish people could look at this with a more clear headed neutrality– but we just run, run run from it.
If only human beings could acknowledge these predispositions, we might be more along the way of controlling ourselves.
I fear that all of our ‘positive’ intellectualities and supposed new awarenesses leave us fiddling while the earth continues to burn (metaphorically, of course). It is the nature of human communication, what we communicate about, that needs more attention.
-Doug
Hi Deborah–
Is there a way to correct typos ‘after’ I actually post a response?
Oh, I have to remember where I’m posting!! I guess part of the problem for me in considering the contribution of science to these issues is that, to use my lingo, the ‘affect’ is usually missing. Everything we do, everything we learn, everything we feel motivated about or interested in or passionate about floats upon the feeling tone or affects which support it. To one extent the scientist really can put this ‘affective’ part to the side (although I think the whole intuitive process is tied into our affective brain systems), but then when you try to communcate science to the public you’re left with this void. There isn’t any question that the whole cognitive side to this, the knowledge, the scientific method, the attitudes about truth and proveability are all the very foundation of scientific progress– but the communication aspects to the greater public requires this other kind of dual attention.
-Doug
Doug, no, after you hit submit … that’s it. Don’t worry about typos etc. This is cyberspace! No one notices. (P.S. Well, I did notice one of yours, but I’ll correct it)
In response to two posts above – your ‘raging rivers of blood’ post – yes. It’s true. My dog is geared to hunting, and nothing seems to curb that urge in him. Likewise, humans have the brain functions you describe and much more. Yet we also have self-awareness. And isn’t it our task in life to recognize our own self-destructiveness, and try to correct it? On the small scale of a single human being, or on the large scale of an entire planet of human beings, I believe this is so.
So if we knew, really knew, we were coupled to Earth and that harming Earth was harming ourselves … wouldn’t it be our task to correct that behavior?
Nothing is perfect, but we could try.
Hi again–
It’s very interesting. When you talk to individual humans, not a single one (well I’m exaggerating) would ever tell you that they would ever kill another human being. And when forced (okay mostly males) they’ll say the governemnt made me do it, or the emperor or king or whatever. So as individuals no one ever takes responsibility. My initial training was as a psychoanalyst, and if I described to you the supposed process of a person discovering their self-destructiveness you would get a migraine to listen to the lengths our brains go to in disgusing, repressing and tricking us into believing self-made fictions about why we do things!! So self-awareness is a much more slippery slope than you might think.
Well, pessimism and cynicism aside. And granted they are typcially non-productive attitudes, I do think situations can change, sometimes very fast and sometimes very dramatically. To have lived through the cold war and especially the Cuban Missile crisis, there was not a single person on the globe who ever dreamt the Soviet Union would implode. Now the more basic question of how to change human behavior spanning diverse culture and social/governemnetal systems, that’s another question.
On GlobalMind-Shift.org, Brain Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, has produced some quite moving vidos about how profound our attacment is, not only to earth, but to the universe. The question always is, “Can you get a critical mass of people to pay attention and to feel the meaning of that attachment. Pangeaday.org is another powerful attempt to try to get human beings around the world to notice the overwhelming sameness of our speoies. There is no shortage of organizations around the globe on the internet struggling with all the same questions— but I know you already knew that!!
-Doug
Keep going, Deborah. Very best wishes for 2009.
Thanks for all you are doing to protect the environs from wanton, irreversible degradation and global biodiversity from massive extirpation; to preserve Earth’s resources from relentless dissipation and the future of our children from reckless endangerment; to save “the pale blue dot” from the ravages of unbridled global overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities of the human species in these early years of Century XXI.
Thank you Steve. Same to you. I hope you and your family are having the best of holidays.
Deborah
And many thanks to you, too. All the children (5) were here for the holidays. That makes this holiday the best.
With every good wish, I am
Sincerely yours,
Steve
Excuse me, but I see a lot of kissing up to the “earth”, and a lot of disparagement of religion. (See Benjamin Napier’s comment: “That is the human condition, The basis of religion. The sourse (sic) of a lot of trouble”). I’m not going to be so quick to make light of another’s belief in God. I will remind you atheists that historically more harm has been done by the Godless, than by the God loving. Science has its place, but so does Deism. I don’t like mosquito’s, but they are here with us.
If you want to see a good example of humans coupling with Earth. Look at the native Americans. They are the protectors of Mother Earth. They have been around for hundreds of years and live harmoniously with the Earth. Or at least they used too…
Thanks for the article, very thought provoking…
Paul
Yes. Good example. Of course, we are coupled with Earth whether for the good (as with the Native American lifestyle) or for the bad …
You’re welcome Paul. Thanks for dropping by.
Deborah