3.7: Concluding Comment

This chapter has shown us why we need a healthy environment, why we need a world that can meet human demand while still maintaining adequate resources and services for non-human life. The discussion of fossil fuels illustrates how one critical resource can pose fundamental problems for the health of all life, for the functioning of Earth’s life supporting systems, and ultimately for the maintenance of human security. It has also shown what happens when we place too much demand on Earth’s life supporting systems, and why we need to seriously consider what we are doing to our world. It is not just being nice to the plants and animals; it is saving our own skin, because humans need what non-human lives provide and do for us. As humans, we need ecological integrity, we need intact ecosystems, we cannot maintain our life supporting systems by ourselves.

This chapter has provided a rationale for why a healthy environment is required for human security, but, as mentioned early on, it is not the only factor determining security. There are other factors, discussed elsewhere in this book that now play their key roles at global scales. These include issues such as politics, theology, economics, culture, city planning, business considerations, social planning, and ethical considerations. However, at this stage they increasingly tend to get into each other’s way. Early in this chapter we wrote, “The security discussed in this chapter is characterized by living an everyday life within a stable society functioning within a stable environment.” That security no longer exists because Earth can no longer provide a stable environment. As we see from the discussion surrounding Table 3.1, one consequence of overshoot is that the pursuit of one kind of security now tends to jeopardize the achievement of another. Only through a reduction of ecological overshoot (or degrowth) can we hope to solve that conundrum.

Human progress has created an unprecedented global environmental crisis that is leading to a multitude of unprecedented global social, political, and economic crises. While there may be pockets of ‘perceived security’, globally right now there is no genuine human security anywhere and no prospect of such security being a reality for a long time. What do we do? The moral philosopher Mary Midgley wrote, “Wisdom … comes into its own when things become dark and difficult rather than when they are clear and straightforward.” (Midgley, 2005, p. x) With that in mind, maybe a threat to our security is not all bad. Maybe these next decades will form the basis for the next significant step in our evolution, one that moves us from the current adolescence of the human species into a more mature, wiser species, fewer in numbers, considerate of, and well aware of its place on Earth and its limits in exploiting Earth’s gifts — one developing a better view of what humanity can really be.