12.6: The Human Footprint - Consumption

Sustaining the Human Population

When ‘consumption’ has been discussed in environmental contexts, attention has usually focused on the consumption of energy and material goods, largely derived from ‘resources’ that have been translocated from the ‘developing’ world to the ‘developed’ one and used to make the stuff the people there ‘demand’ to have, whether they need it or not—a ‘demand’ that has been fueled to a great extent by marketing efforts aimed at increasing the circulation of money (see Section 12.7). However, from our perspective here in the early Anthropocene, it appears that this conversation needs to be updated in several ways. It is becoming clear that industrial culture has penetrated virtually every region of the globe, fueling desires and ‘demands’ for this high-consumption lifestyle everywhere in its wake, and with the increasing money-based affluence that absorption into the global economic system has brought about in many ‘developing’ countries (one must ask—what are they ‘developing’ into?), more and more of these demands are being met by rapidly increasing ‘consumption’ worldwide. While this change may be good news with respect to alleviating human poverty and decreasing inequality among subgroupings of our human species, increasing the per capita consumption of what is now a very large human population is taking an even more devastating toll on nonhuman populations worldwide. Moreover, as the human population continues to grow while the planetary changes we have already set in motion take effect, simply feeding people around the world is going to become increasingly difficult, let alone supplying everyone with the ‘stuff’ they have been conditioned to think they need; therefore, the focus of this section will be primarily on the food that we consume and the impacts on ‘nature’ of providing it, as well as some other products that come directly from the wild.

It must be acknowledged that people of the ‘developed’ world have historically been responsible for the greatest share of consumption overall, as well as the largest amount of emitted carbon, and they still maintain the highest per capita energy consumption at present. However, the ‘developing’ world, considered altogether, has now taken the lead in energy consumption, with China becoming the largest global energy consumer in 2011, and the second largest consumer of oil—second only to the United States–as well as the largest producer, consumer, and importer of coal, accounting for almost half of global coal consumption for at least five years (EIA, 2015). The entire Asia-Pacific region taken together, moreover, was utilizing about 42% of the world’s energy consumption by 2015, about equal to that of North America, Europe and Eurasia combined (Ritchie & Roser, 2019), and its share of the global oil and gas trade is being projected, based on present trends, to rise to around 65% by 2040 (EIA, 2018), with per capita energy use expected to increase by 46% (Woody, 2013). This changing ratio of energy use can be seen as correcting an inequitable balance among nations, but again, on the macro level, if historical inequalities are to be rectified by simply demanding more for everybody from the global environment, we will be substantially increasing the likelihood of seriously destabilizing the Earth system as a whole.

It seems that, once we humans become accustomed to living with certain luxuries and conveniences, we ‘shift our baselines’ and become very resistant to the notion that we should cut back on these apparent improvements that we have learned to take for granted, even if we understand intellectually that there are very good reasons why we should. A thought-provoking article by David Owen in The New Yorker (2010) examines humanity’s track record—which, in the face of continually improving technological ‘efficiencies,’ shows us doing nothing but consuming more, more and more—a phenomenon that’s been termed the Jevons paradox. ^[24] And as ‘efficiencies’ in many technologies have made prices fall at the same time that convenience and accessibility have risen, our collective consumption of energy and many other things has steadily expanded, in a way that is rather frightening when we allow ourselves to look at the larger situation. Take refrigeration, for instance. As Owen explains, the average refrigerator in 2010 was reportedly 20% larger than it was in 1975, used 75% less energy and cost 60% less; sounds great, but if we shift our perspective to the macro-level, we discover that “the global market for refrigeration has burgeoned” along with its contribution to energy consumption and carbon emissions. Refrigerators didn’t come into widespread use until around the middle of the 20^th century, and then they were generally modest metal boxes—before that, people used ‘iceboxes’ or found other ways of preserving whatever food wasn’t eaten fresh. Now expectations in suburban America run to enormous side-by-side refrigerator-freezers with on-demand ice machines that ‘everybody’s gotta have,’ and the energy that could have been saved by all the ‘efficiency’ gains is going to satisfy the incessant demand for more—more volume, more convenience and more food kept past its due date before finally being thrown away; “coincidentally or not,” Owen observes, “the growth of American refrigerator volume has been roughly paralleled by the growth of American body-mass index.”

But surely, refrigeration has led to improvements in diets and health all around the world; how could we deny that its development and proliferation has been a good thing? “Refrigerators,” Owen explains, “are the fraternal twins of air-conditioners, which use the same energy-hungry compressor technology to force heat to do something that nature doesn’t want it to.” In 1960, 88% of homes in the US did not have air conditioning—and of course nobody had it before the 20^th century, demonstrating that human life can go on without it—but by the mid-2000s, with efficiency driving down the cost of their production and operation, the percentages were roughly reversed, with almost 90% of homes having air conditioning, mostly central air, the consequence being that “we now use roughly as much electricity to cool buildings as we did for all purposes in 1955.” And air conditioning is not just for the developed world anymore—air conditioner use tripled in China between 1997 and 2007, he reports, and it was estimated to have accounted for 40% of electricity consumption in Mumbai in 2009, with India’s use projected to increase tenfold between 2005 and 2020. Economists generally see this ‘efficiency dilemma’ in monetary terms—if you increase the efficiency of producing something, the price goes down, and the demand for it goes up—a good thing within their conceptual framework. But in the real, three-dimensional world, the human population everywhere is increasing all the time, insidiously multiplying the effect of our demand for more—so, as we enter the third decade of the 21^st century, we can all watch as unprecedented heatwaves blanket North America, Europe and Asia, and contemplate all those air conditioners giving temporary relief while applying strong positive feedback toward worsening our predicament.

The global food supply is an often-overlooked type of ‘consumption’ much more fundamental to our human lives than the energy to run our air conditioners, however. To understand its effect on the natural world, we first need to recognize our massive appropriation of the net primary production (NPP) of the Biosphere. The NPP is basically ‘the total food resource on Earth’—what’s left after the plants sustain themselves for all the other organisms that can’t make their own food the way plants do—and the proportion appropriated for human use was originally calculated to be nearly 40% of the terrestrial NPP (Vitousek et al., 1986); this “human appropriation of net primary production” (HANPP) was recalculated by Haberl, Erl and Krausmann (2014) and revised downward to around 25%, but it was still noted to have doubled over the course of the 20^th century, reflecting “large increases in land use efficiency” while still incurring “considerable” ecological costs (Krausmann et al., 2013).

We have the Green Revolution to thank for allowing us to sustain our massive population increase over the 20^th century, increasing the amount of biomass nature has been able to produce utilizing the sun’s energy by making substantial energy inputs of our own; the Haber-Bosch process for artificially fixing nitrogen, industrially scaled up in 1910, has been called “the detonator of the population explosion” (Smil, 1999). Primary agricultural production globally only makes up somewhere in the range of 2%-6% of the world’s total energy consumption (FAO, 2011), while the rest of food-sector energy consumption—altogether accounting for about 30% of the world’s total energy consumption–goes to things like processing, distribution, refrigeration, preparation, and retailing, which presumably includes advertising and other marketing (see Woods et al., 2010). On the other hand, agriculture is becoming increasingly dependent on fossil fuels, primarily required for energy-intensive inputs like pesticides and nitrogen fertilizer—the latter requiring large amounts of natural gas for its production, a demand that has increased at least sixfold over recent decades—so much so that the FAO appears to be quite worried about how we will manage to feed our expected population increase, especially in view of our looming long-range greenhouse gas ceiling and the short-term volatility of the fossil fuel market.

Clark and Tilman (2017) observed that “global agriculture feeds over 7 billion people, but is also a leading cause of environmental degradation”; agricultural activities account for between one-fourth and one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, occupy over 40% of the Earth’s land surface, are responsible for more than 70% of freshwater withdrawals, and drive deforestation, habitat fragmentation and biodiversity loss. Modern agricultural systems inject a tremendous amount of nitrogen and phosphorus into the global system every year, so much so that our interference with their global cycling constitutes one of the “planetary boundaries” that Johan Rockstrom says we shouldn’t be crossing, as discussed in Section 12.1; a little less than half of added nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) reportedly is taken up by crops in the field; much of the rest finds its way into rivers and lakes, causing eutrophication, causing algae blooms and deoxygenated ‘dead zones,’ as well as acidifying water bodies and soils. Moreover, unlike the nitrogen incorporated into fertilizer, which can be produced industrially from nitrogen gas that is abundant in the air, the phosphorus used in fertilizer is derived from phosphate rock, posing a surprisingly little-appreciated problem; phosphate rock is a non-renewable resource that may be depleted within 50-100 years (Cordell et al., 2009).

In addition to these specific threats, however, planetary-system level worries are emerging that have direct consequences for our human security. Thomas Homer-Dixon and colleagues (2015), considered the possibility that “synchronous failure” in several separate social-ecological systems could interact to cause “a far larger intersystemic crisis” that could then “rapidly propagate across multiple system boundaries to the global scale” and potentially “quickly degrade humanity’s condition.” As they explain, while the global GDP increased by a factor of almost 20 since the 1950s, this seeming achievement was made possible by a sevenfold increase in the withdrawal of resources from natural systems and the injection of wastes back into them, thus leaving many of these natural systems “under enormous strain” and eroding the resilience of the entire planetary system, making it more likely that a major crisis in one part of the system will affect all other parts. Nystrom and colleagues (2019) name the emerging anthropogenic artifact that feeds us the “global production ecosystem” (GPE), an entity that is “homogeneous, highly connected and characterized by weakened internal feedbacks,” constructed “to yield high and predictable supplies of biomass in the short term, but create conditions for novel and pervasive risks to emerge and interact in the longer term.”

These authors evaluate the resilience of the GPE with respect to three key features: connectivity, diversity, and feedback. With the huge recent expansion in global trade and increasing socioeconomic connectivity, production ecosystems are increasingly connected across continents and oceans; exports of soybeans and palm oil to markets in China, the US and the EU, increasingly to feed livestock, are driving deforestation across the tropics, while declining fisheries in one place shift fishing pressure to another or to aquaculture, itself increasingly in need of crop-based feed. With consolidation of entire supply chains reinforcing “global homogenization of species,” crop diversity suffers; biodiverse tropical forests are replaced by extensive monocultures, with a shift toward a “globally standardized food supply based on a few crop types,” such as maize, wheat, and rice–leaving large numbers of people vulnerable to pathogen-induced crop failure. In decoupling the GPE from natural feedback processes, crucial feedback processes that have regulated and maintained the Earth System are increasingly weakened; when one type of resource becomes depleted or one ecosystem degraded, instead of responding to reduce the destabilizing processes, the global production system simply moves on to drain resources and exploit ecosystems elsewhere. The entire Earth is thus kept “in a forced state through intensification” so as to maintain “a high and predictable global supply of biomass,” while the increasing loss of resilience of the system is being “masked at a global level, thus increasing the risk of shifting the GPE into an unknown state” (Nystrom et al., 2019). ^[25] Moreover, the frequency of “food production shocks”—sudden losses to food production—has been increasing over time, mainly due to “geopolitical and extreme weather events,” according to Richard Cottrell and associates (2019), and adding to these concerns, a report by the London-based research firm Chatham House (Bailey & Wellesley, 2017) has identified 14 chokepoints—“the junctures along shipping and overland trade routes through which transit especially high volumes of commodities” in the food transport network that are especially vulnerable to disruption—all but one of which have been closed or disrupted at least once over the last 15 years. The impact of the spreading coronavirus pandemic on our global food supply chains is yet to be determined.

Meanwhile, virtually every recent article addressing agricultural production begins with a nod to the huge increase in global food production that will be needed by 2050—as well as a growing ‘demand’ for meat. Almost all of them also make mention, however—if hidden somewhere in the body of the document—of the possibility that we humans might drastically cut back on our consumption of meat, and the difference this could make; the Chatham report, for example, notes (p. 30) that, should this occur, “the vast volumes of soybean and maize grown and traded to support livestock production could decline dramatically.” Striking differences were revealed in comparisons of the environmental impacts of different foods, for example, in Clark and Tilman’s (2017) life cycle assessment of over 700 agricultural systems: “for all indicators examined, ruminant meat (beef, goat, and lamb/mutton) had impacts 20-100 times those of plants, while milk, eggs, pork, poultry and seafood had impacts 2-25 times higher than plants, per kilocalorie of food produced.” The implications of this dawning awareness are so enormous, in light of the projected demands of the global food system over the coming decades, that they will be considered in greater detail in the subsection that follows.

The Global Livestock Industry

The Diet-Environment-Human Health-Animal Ethics Quadrilemma

Ruminant animals like cattle and goats can convert low-quality forage material into high-quality protein that humans can eat, and raising them can sometimes be a sustainable practice within the bounds of nature alone, especially on lands not capable of supporting much else, as long as the number of humans to be fed in this way is not too great for the overall system. That said, however, today’s intensive cattle production is far from that sort of system, even as the number of humans being fed in this industrial way seems to be increasing all the time. Raising livestock intensively is “becoming an industrial-scale process” around the world; as of 2019, the global production of beef and veal was forecast by the USDA to reach 62.6 million tonnes, led by the US, Brazil and the EU, together accounting for roughly half of it, followed by China and India. The US is reportedly the greatest domestic consumer of beef, consuming almost the same amount as the US production, 12.4 MT, as well as exporting 1.5 MT (USDA 2019). Chicken production for 2019 was forecast to be 98.4 MT globally, led by the US at 19.5 MT. Global pork production for 2019 was projected to be 108.5 MT, with the US in fourth place, producing 12.4 MT. The total global ‘production’ of beef, pork and chicken was thus expected to be around 245 million tonnes in 2019—it’s apparently never been higher. As Shefali Sharma of the Institute for Food and Agriculture Policy (IATP) explains (2018), a small number of corporations make up the “Global Meat Complex”: “a highly concentrated (horizontally and vertically), integrated web of transnational corporations (TNCs) that control the inputs, production and processing of mass quantities of food animals.” JBS, a Brazil-based company with headquarters in Greeley, Colorado, has become the top meat-producing corporation in the world, followed by Tyson Foods and then Cargill—the latter a prime example of the integration of these multinationals, being not only the third-largest meat processor in the world but also a top grain trader and the second-largest feed manufacturer. These giant corporations generally receive large tax breaks and publicly funded subsidies from the governments that house them; they also happen to be major contributors of GHG emissions, land and water co-optation and pollution with little or no accountability for their environmental impact.

In order to supply the growing demand for meat, intensified production of livestock is on the increase in developing countries, particularly in Asia, with “at least 75% of total production growth to 2030 projected to occur in confined systems,” or confined feeding operations (CAFOs), according to Machovina, Feeley and Ripple (2015); such intensified production depends on internationally traded feed concentrates, with livestock being fed 626 million tonnes of cereal grains (around one-third of the global harvest), 16 million tonnes of oilseed, mainly from soy, and another 268 million tonnes of protein-rich byproducts, mainly bran, oil cakes and fish meal. These CAFOs—concentrated animal feeding operations—are coming under increasing scrutiny; according to the US Government Accountability Office (USGAO, 2008), there were around 12,000 of them in the U.S. in 2002, housing an estimated 8.6 million beef cattle, 3.2 million dairy cows, almost 48 million hogs, 304 million laying hens, 457 million broiler chickens and over 678 million turkeys. The size of these operations continues to increase; in 2012 there were reportedly more than 12 million beef cattle in operations with at least 500 animals, with the average feedlot holding more than 4,300; there were 5.6 million dairy cows in dairies averaging 1500-2000 animals; 63.2 million hogs in operations averaging nearly 6,100 animals; 269 million egg-laying hens in operations averaging 695,000 animals; and over a billion broiler chickens, with operations in some states exceeding 500,000 animals, according to Food & Water Watch (2015). Ethical concerns have been raised about the conditions under which animals are cared for in these operations, with respect to cleanliness, noise, crowding, constraint of movement, and sometimes deliberate cruelty on the part of certain workers, and slaughterhouses in England are slated to be monitored with CCTV cameras to prevent such abuses (Smithers, 2017); in the United States, however, new regulations permitting “high-speed slaughter” of pigs and chickens, rapidly being instituted, are likely to further jeopardize humane treatment in U.S. facilities. ^[26] Altogether these intensively raised animals in the US generated at least 335 million tonnes of manure in 2012, “about 13 times as much as the sewage produced by the entire U.S. population” (Food and Water Watch, 2015).

Globally, livestock production is reportedly responsible for about 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions at that time, which in 2014 were 7.1 Gt\(\ce{CO2}\) equivalents out of a total of 49 Gt\(\ce{CO2}\) equivalents emitted (Ripple et al., 2014); of that amount, about 44% of the livestock emissions, or 3.1 Gt\(\ce{CO2}\) equivalents, were in the form of methane (\(\ce{CH4}\))—said to be 20-30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than \(\ce{CO2}\)—most of which is produced by ruminant animals (cattle, sheep, goats and water buffalo) in the process of enteric fermentation, the largest single source of anthropogenic methane. Livestock’s other contributions to greenhouse gas emissions are about evenly divided between \(\ce{CO2}\) emissions from land use change (deforestation and other ecological conversions) and fossil fuel use–about 2.4 Gt\(\ce{CO2}\)—and nitrous oxide (\(\ce{N2O}\)) emissions—another 2.2 Gt\(\ce{CO2}\) equivalents—from fertilizer applied to grow feed crops and from manure (Machovina et al., 2015). Ripple and colleagues (2014) note that the livestock sector of the global economy has “generally been exempt” from climate policies, emphasizing the importance of increasing public awareness of the fact that “what we choose to eat has important consequences for climate change.” ^[27]

Meanwhile, there has been increasing attention focused on the human health benefits of reducing the amount of meat in our diets. David Tilman and Michael Clark (2014) observe that “ a global dietary transition”—one that hasn’t been good for us–has already been taking place around the world, driven by rising incomes and urbanization: traditional diets are being “replaced by diets higher in refined sugars, refined fats, oils and meats,” contributing to increases in obesity, type II diabetes, coronary heart disease and other chronic “non-communicable diseases.” ^[28] Tilman and Clark (2014) speak of “the tightly-linked diet-environment-health trilemma”—which should be expanded into a quadrilemma of diet-environment-human health-animal ethics, as we recognize what the livestock industry is doing to both domestic animals and, through habitat destruction and its associated hazards, wild animals as well, something that will be considered next. “Animal product consumption by humans (human carnivory) is likely the leading cause of modern species extinctions,” according to Machovina, Feeley and Ripple (2015), and what’s happening in the Amazon “is a primary example of biodiversity loss being driven by livestock production”: “never before has so much old growth and primary forest been converted to human land uses so quickly.”

The Deforestation of the Amazon

Originally occupying more than six million square kilometers, Amazonia is “the largest and most diverse of the tropical wilderness areas,” centered on Brazil but extending into eight other countries. It is known to contain include at least 40,000 species of plants, 427 species of mammals, 1294 species of birds, 378 species of reptiles, 427 species of amphibians and around 3,000 species of fishes (da Silva, Rylands, & da Fonseca, 2005); when species as yet undescribed by science are added to the mix, the total number of different species in the Brazilian Amazon alone is thought to be on the order of 1.4-2.4 million (Lewinsohn & Prado, 2005). Denizens of the Amazonian rainforest include jaguars, tapirs, giant otters, pink river dolphins, macaws, toucans, harpy eagles, anacondas, poison dart frogs and electric eels, not to mention rhinoceros beetles, morpho butterflies and giant cockroaches. ^[29] When roads begin to penetrate the unbroken forest and large areas of the forest are cut down, almost all of the animals are destroyed along with it, and those that survive in the forest fragments left behind are forced to live under radically altered circumstances; forest edges become hotter and drier and more vulnerable to invasive species, and human hunters can enter via new road networks, penetrating the remaining habitat and stripping them of their larger native animals. Moreover, isolated forest fragments act like islands—animals are trapped within them, physically or behaviorally, and are often unable to find appropriate mates to insure gene flow, leading eventually to population die-out. Extinction does not follow immediately upon habitat fragmentation and degradation but generally occurs progressively over time, leading to the notion of an extinction debt, species with a few remaining members but already doomed to disappear (Wean, Reuman & Ewers 2012); it is estimated that the last 30 years of Amazonian deforestation has already committed 10 species of still-existing mammals, 20 species of birds and eight species of amphibians to extinction (Rangel, 2012), numbers expected to rise substantially if deforestation continues or accelerates. And, as we should remember while we watch the Amazonian and other tropical forests go up in flames, the number of individual animals perishing may reach into the billions. ^[30]

The forests of Amazonia are also critical to one of the Earth’s major hydrological cycles. Making up what she calls “the Flying Rivers of the Amazon,” Sharma (2017) explains that 18 billion tonnes of water are pulled up through the trees of the rainforest every day–more than 7.25 trillion tonnes of water every year–evaporating to form clouds 3,000 meters high that drift to the west, encounter the Andes mountains, and then shift to the south, bringing needed rain to the grass- and shrub-lands of southern Brazil’s Cerrado, as well as Paraguay, Uruguay and northern Argentina—rain that is now diminishing, lowering aquifers and causing water deficits in these regions. This massive movement of water influences global atmospheric circulation and supplies up to 20% of freshwater input into world oceans (Nepstad, 2008). More than 15 billion tonnes of water pour out of the Amazon River into the Atlantic Ocean every day, but the “river of vapor that comes up from the forest and goes into the atmosphere” is even larger than this flow, according to Amazon researcher Antonio Donato Nobre ^[31]; he likens the evapotranspiration of as many as 600 billion trees to a geyser spouting water into the air, but “with much more elegance” (see Kedney 2015). But the Amazon underwent severe droughts in 2005, 2010, and 2015-16, alternating with periods of severe flooding in 2009, 2012, and 2014, an oscillation that some scientists believe could represent “the first flickers of [an] ecological tipping point,” a tipping point that they believe could be reached at 20-25% deforestation (Lovejoy & Nobre 2018), a point many believe is fast approaching; these authors estimate current deforestation at 17% across the entire Amazon basin and almost 20% in the Brazilian Amazon, and urge a major reforestation project as “the last chance for action” (Lovejoy & Nobre, 2019). Should large parts of this massive forest abruptly ‘tip’ into a different state, the event would likely not only have immense consequences for the hydrology of all of southeastern South America and beyond, it would release a massive amount of carbon from dead and dying trees that could push the planetary system past other climate change thresholds. Not to mention the loss of all that Life!

“What people don’t realize,” according to University of Florida ecologist Emilio Bruna (see Simon, 2019), “is that those trees have over millennia evolved really efficient nutrient extraction mechanisms,” mechanisms that species evolving in other types of ecosystems don’t have. “It’s called the paradox of luxuriance,” he says—people look at the luxuriant growth of the vegetation in the forest and think they will be able to grow anything there, but the nutrients initially released when the trees are cut and burned quickly vaporize or leach away, leaving the land impoverished. “You go from a really lush tropical forest to a completely nonproductive cattle pasture almost immediately,” says Bruna, so agriculturalists frequently abandon worn-out fields and move on deeper into the forest, repeating the process. Increasingly, however, the deforestation is less for pastures than for soybean cultivation—soybeans to be exported and fed to livestock elsewhere on the planet—that represents “a recent and powerful threat to tropical biodiversity in Brazil,” as Philip Fearnside (2001) predicted almost 20 years ago; 87 million tonnes of soybeans were produced by Brazil in 2016, 71% of them going for livestock feed, according to Fuchs et al. (2019), noting that China’s imports of soy from Brazil increased by 2000% between 2000 and 2016.

The Amazon forest is one of the largest stores of carbon in the Earth System, and is estimated to sequester around 150-200 PgC [GtC] in its living biomass and soils, but its ability to store carbon seems to be decreasing (Brinen et al., 2015); the droughts in 2005, 2010 and 2015-2016 and their resulting fires released millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. Wet tropical forests like the Amazon aren’t supposed to burn, but rainforests which were once fireproof are now flammable due to drought (see Sax, 2019), and in drought years wildfires alone—even in areas without intentional deforestation—can emit up to a billion tonnes of CO2. ^[32] Nearly 42,000 fires were reported by the end of August 2019—the highest since 2010; Brazil suffered a severe drought in 2010, whereas rainfall was only slightly lower than normal in 2019, making “a massive uptick in deforestation” the likely root cause of the fires (see Sax, 2019). Jos Barlow and colleagues (2019) “clarified” the cause of Amazonia’s “burning crisis,” finding “strong evidence” that the increase in fires was linked to deforestation; not only were there nearly 3 times as many active fires in August 2019 than there were in August 2018, refuting the government’s claim that August 2019 was a “normal” month for fires, but more than 10,000 square kilometers were deforested between August 2018 and July 2019, more than four times the average for the same period in 2016-2018.

Unfortunately, Barlow and colleagues had to withhold the names of some fellow researchers at their request (see Pickrell, 2019) because of the “landscape of fear” created by President Bolsonaro, who has slashed science funding and fired prominent scientists publishing such data. But people were already getting the picture; as Bill McKibben (2019) reported, “satellites were showing a new fire erupting somewhere across the landscape every minute”—“not because lightning was striking, but because greed and corruption were striking.” Jair Bolsonaro, who has proudly claimed the title of ‘Captain Chainsaw,’ made it clear that the Amazon is now open to development. Questioned about the remarks of Pope Francis, who said that, in the Amazon there prevails “a blind and destructive mentality that favors profit over justice,” and that “highlights the predatory behavior with which man relates to nature” (Sassine, 2019, in translation), Bolsonaro reportedly answered that “the forest was ‘like a virgin that every pervert from the outside wants,’” and that “therefore Brazilians should cut it down before others had the chance” (McKibben, 2019). Ironically, the InterAcademy Partership (IAP) of over 140 academies of science recently released a Communique (2019) not only declaring that “there can be no solution to climate change without addressing deforestation” but also noting that, if the Amazon is no longer able to provide rain for the country’s crops, Brazil will face an estimated trillion-dollar economic loss over the next 30 years, with pasture productivity reduced by 30% and soybean production reduced by up to 60%.

Bolsonaro has also signaled his disdain for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, going back many years, as documented by Survival International (2019). In 1998, Bolsonaro was quoted as saying, “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians,” and in 2018 he asserted, “If I become President there will not be a centimeter more of indigenous land”; in Brazil’s Congress he posted “In 2019 we’re going to rip up Raposa Serra do Sol (indigenous territory in northern Brazil)—We’re going to give all the ranchers guns,” and he promised to abolish FUNAI, Brazil’s national Indian Foundation, responsible for mapping and protecting indigenous lands. As Survival International’s Fiona Watson (2018) reported for the Guardian shortly before he took office in January of 2019, under his rule the 100 or so uncontacted tribes of the Amazon will face genocide—“silent invisible genocides,” with few witnesses, as they are “massacred over resources because greedy outsiders know they can literally get away with murder.” Meanwhile, indigenous groups and biodiversity alike are also threatened by big infrastructure projects, many of which are “dragged along” after agricultural expansion. A scheme to build more than 40 dams on the Tapajos River and its tributaries and create an industrial waterway, of which “the soy industry will be one of the main beneficiaries” (see Salisbury, 2016), was halted in 2016, largely because of its threat to the Munduruku people, whose traditional territory would be flooded (Amazon Watch, 2016), but it is likely to be rehabilitated under the Bolsonaro regime. Altamira, the city spawned by the Monte Belo dam complex on the Xingu River, slightly to the east of the Tapajos has spawned, is a good example of the kind of culture that is expected to replace the people who have been living sustainably in the area for hundreds of years (Faiola et al., 2019); it already hosts its own mall with a Burger King franchise, across from which is displayed “a mural of jungle animals and forest—now a popular backdrop for mall-goers to take selfies.” These moves provide all the more reason for bringing pressure to bear on the livestock industry, and particularly its deep roots in Brazil.

The “Bushmeat” Crisis

Consuming Our Evolutionary Cohorts

Much of the world’s population lives in urban centers and is fed by industrial agriculture; however, another large and rapidly growing segment lives in large part by hunting for ‘bushmeat’ wherever wild animals can still be found. ^[33] This consumption of wild animals is “considered among the greatest threats to biodiversity throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America”; “indeed, case studies illuminate a multitude of locations where once vibrant wildlife communities are harvested to a state of defaunation” (Brashares et al., 2011). Going back through earlier reports form a few decades ago, it’s beginning to look like we’re already starting to see something resembling the dawn of the thirtieth day, when the growth of the waterweed, which seemed so slow and innocent at first, finally covers the whole surface of the pond; the human population is already not only huge and still growing but also eating way, way outside of its appropriate trophic niche as a large-bodied primate, and where it is not being sustained by the great industrial machine it is now increasingly turning on its surrounding wildlife populations to consume animals in such numbers—and in some cases with an additional, money-seeking ferocity—that observers are asking the question: when they’re all gone, then what?

Probably the first report in the scientific literature on this emerging problem was Kent Redford’s “The Empty Forest” (1992), which stateded that “until recently, human influence on tropical forests through such activities as burning, swidden agriculture, and hunting was regarded by ecologists as of such low impact that it was negligible, as important but confined to areas of human settlement, or as confined to rapacious colonizers destroying the forest from the outside” (emphasis added). Redford pointed out that forests can be emptied of many or most of their large animals even when the tree cover remains–in other words, that “a forest can be destroyed by humans from within as well as from without.” But the problem was brought to the attention of the general public—some of them, at any rate—in a shocking manner largely through the photographs of Karl Ammann, a wildlife photographer whose horrific illustrations for the books Consuming Nature (Rose et al., 2003) and Eating Apes (Peterson, 2004) bring home just how devastating a toll is being taken on many of the most iconic of the African animals, including all of our great ape cousins, whose habitats lie entirely within some of the most active areas under attack by the bushmeat trade. ^[34] Ammann also called out big NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund for sitting on the issue, not drawing it to the attention of their donors or doing much about the problem for fear of its potential to rock a lot of cushy boats. Much of the bushmeat is being transported out of the forests on logging trucks, to be sold in urban centers, locally and even internationally. Logging operations open up forests like can-openers, constructing extensive road networks that provide easy access to hunters who may come from far away to engage in the commercial trade in wild meat, and timber companies often encourage the consumption of bushmeat as a cheap and easy way of feeding their workers; moreover, the lucrative returns allows hunters to equip themselves with guns and ammunition, snare wires and motorized transport that increase the efficiency with which wild animals can be ‘harvested.’

By 1999, it was being reported that people in the Brazilian Amazon were consuming somewhere between 67,000 and 164,000 tonnes of wild meat, coming from an estimated 9.6 to 23.5 million wild animals every year, while the amount of meat being taken out of tropical forests in Africa was thought to exceed one million tonnes per year; when calculated in kilograms per square kilometer, this would amount to as much as 20-50 times more than the “largely subsistence” take out of the Amazon (Robinson et al., 1999). Four years later, in “Wild Meat: The Bigger Picture,” it was acknowledged that “massive overhunting of wildlife for meat across the humid tropics is now causing local extinctions of numerous species” (Milner-Gulland & Bennett, 2003). “Protein extraction” rates were being calculated in terms of “production” of tonnes per year, with an estimated quantity of over five million tonnes of wild mammalian meat being removed from the forests and consumed by the human populations of Latin America and Africa, the amounts for the Congo basin being four times higher than had been estimated earlier (Fa et al., 2002). ^[35] Many large-bodied, slow-reproducing species are especially vulnerable, including some of the most cognitively complex; the great apes (whose wild populations are entirely confined to the tropical forests of Africa) and elephants, for example, are presumably included in this estimate of protein extraction.

Moreover, when the ratio of exploitation, in kilograms of meat taken per square kilometer of forest per year, to “production”—presumably animals being born and growing to huntable size, reduced to kilograms of living animal biomass per square kilometer per year–was calculated and projected forward (Fa et al., 2003), the results were unsettling; almost five times more meat would be removed than ‘produced’ in the forest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by 2050; when divided by the expected population at that time, this would lead to an estimated drop in the “bushmeat protein supply” of 78%. The authors acknowledge that “the picture is indeed a bleak scenario, not only for wildlife but also for the region’s inhabitants”; the “trends of protein supply” are “highly pessimistic,” they conclude, “simply because of the uncontrolled increase in human numbers,” and they raise the hope that this might be compensated by “alternative protein sources,” animal or vegetable, locally produced or imported. They speak nary a word, however, about doing something to lower the denominator of that latter consumption ratio.

If the relationship between bushmeat consumption and population growth is a dismal one, the linkage between its consumption and income level is also a disturbing one; it seems that, in rural areas, the least wealthy families consume the most bushmeat, but in urban centers, the wealthier households have higher rates of consumption—“thus, the ‘poor’ person’s meat in the country becomes the ‘rich’ person’s meat in the city,” according to Brashares and colleagues (2011). Much of it is consumed in the big cities of the tropical countries where it originates, but there is also a lucrative international trade; for example, at just one European airport, the Paris Roissy-Charles de Gaulle in France, an estimated five tonnes of bushmeat was being smuggled in every week through the personal baggage of arriving passengers, suggesting “the emergence of a luxury market for African bushmeat in Europe” (Chaber et al., 2010).

In “the first comprehensive global assessment” of hunting on terrestrial mammals, William Ripple and colleagues (2016) conclude “results show evidence of a global crisis.” They identify 301 mammal species threatened with extinction for which human hunting is a primary threat, including 126 species of primates, 65 species of even-toed hoofed mammals, 27 species of bats, 26 marsupials, 21 species of rodents, 12 species of carnivores and all pangolin species; the likelihood of threat is generally proportional to body size, with almost two-thirds of the largest terrestrial mammals (over 1000 kg) being at risk of extinction as a result of human hunting. Bushmeat hunting is occurring almost entirely in the developing countries of Africa, South America and Southeast Asia; of the 301 threatened mammals, 113 are found in Southeast Asia, 91 in Africa, 61 in the rest of Asia, 38 in Latin America, and 32 in Oceania. Almost a quarter (23%) of all populations of these heavily hunted mammal species deteriorated between 1996 and 2008, the highest percentages being among the primates and even-toed ungulates; the majority of them currently have less than 5% of their ranges in protected areas. Threatened species inhabit a number of different trophic levels, from apex predator to mesopredator to herbivores of all sizes, and play ecological roles from seed dispersers to pollinators to prey species. Since human hunting disproportionately affects the larger-bodied animals, which generally are slower to reproduce, dramatic reductions in their populations produce cascading effects throughout their ecosystems, primarily by loss of the ‘top-down’ control they normally exert, sometimes “releasing” smaller species and possibly increasing risk of transmission of disease to humans. The primary method of obtaining bushmeat is often through the use of traps and snares, which is highly wasteful and results in a great deal of suffering, since up to a third of animals escape with injuries and the many that die may take hours or days to do so. When under severe hunting pressure, moreover, mammals can develop complex ways of avoiding human presence, but living in such “landscapes of fear” can rob them of energy and reduce their time spent foraging or capturing prey (Ripple et al., 2016).

Zoonotic diseases that are thought to have emerged from butchering of wildlife for human consumption include Ebola, HIV-1 and -2, the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and most recently SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus currently spreading in a global pandemic. As Morens, Daszak, and Taubenberger (2020) acknowledge, “we must realize that in our crowded world of 7.8 billion people, a combination of altered human behaviors, environmental changes, and inadequate global public health mechanisms now easily turn obscure animal viruses into existential human threats”; as they observe, “we have created a global, human-dominated ecosystem that serves as a playground for the emergence and host-switching of animal viruses.” William Karesh and colleagues (2012) explain “nearly two-thirds of human infectious diseases arise from pathogens shared with wild or domestic animals,” and note that “changes in land use, extractive industry actions, and animal production systems” have been involved in zoonotic transmission. The viruses responsible for both the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic and the 2012 MERS outbreak are thought to have originated as bat viruses, the MERS virus passing through dromedary camels as an intermediate host and the SARS virus through palm civets sold in a Chinese “wet market” (Cui et al., 2019). COVID-19 is also believed to have jumped the species barrier in a ‘wet market’ where exotic wild animal bushmeat of various kinds can be found (see Perlman 2020); its animal host of origin is also thought to be a species of bat (Zhou, 2020), although pangolins—illegally but widely consumed in China—are also under consideration (see Cyranoski, 2020; Yu, 2020). There have been calls for the abolition of these so-called ‘wet markets’ by critics including the Wall Street Journal (see Walzer & Kang, 2020), while Sonia Shah (2020) focuses attention on the rampant habitat destruction that is forcing wild species into greater contact with humans, and David Quammen (2020) addresses the “perilous trade in wildlife for food, with supply chains stretching through Asia, Africa and to a lesser extent, the United States and elsewhere,” in conjunction with “bureaucrats who lie and conceal bad news, and elected officials who brag to the crowd about cutting forests to create jobs in the timber industry and agriculture or about cutting budgets for public health and research.”

Ripple and colleagues (2016) state that “we must find ways to curb our insatiable consumption,” pointing out that “it is critical to acknowledge that the terms ‘protein’ and ‘meat’ are not synonymous”; they recognize that “ultimately, reducing global consumption of meat is a key step,” both in regard to the bushmeat situation and with respect to the environmental problems created by the livestock industry globally, suggesting a shift in dietary preferences toward high-protein plant foods and even invertebrates and other novel sources of protein. They also do not shy away from advocating programmes to help lower birth rates, referencing a 2012 study by the Guttmacher Institute that calculated the provision of adequate contraception to all women in developing countries worldwide would cost only around eight billion dollars annually (Singh & Darroch, 2012)–a cost that could be easily shouldered by developed countries with ‘defense’ budgets in the trillions. These scientists repeated their warning three years later (Ripple et al., 2019), drawing attention to our species’ outlier status as what Darimont at al. (2015) called “an unsustainable ‘superpredator’”: we kill adult prey preferentially over juveniles, taking adults up to 14 times as often, something no other animal species does in nature, an unusual form of predation that can be thought of as drawing down the ‘reproductive capital’ of a population—those who make it to adulthood—rather than “living off the interest” of the juveniles produced every year, as other predators do (see Worm, 2015). The urgency of the situation, including the risk of creating future zoonotic pandemics, is spurring increasingly emphatic calls to make dealing with the escalating bushmeat crisis a conservation priority. ^[36]

Profiting from Body Parts

The trade in animal parts is an escalating problem over and above the hunting of bushmeat for subsistence consumption, however, and needs to be examined as a social phenomenon. When certain ‘parts’ become the object of sudden popularity, ^[37] or perhaps become marketed as a newly discovered cure-all unknown to Western medicine, or simply become known as a ‘good investment,’ this added symbolic status can in itself drive a species into extinction, something known as the “anthropogenic Allee effect” (Courchamp et al., 2006). The Allee effect is a well-known phenomenon within ecology, wherein once the population density of a species falls below a certain level, the less able the animals are to reproduce themselves and recruit new members into their population—a matter of “negative growth rates at low densities,” resulting from various biological factors. The anthropogenic Allee effect is a “human-generated feedback loop” that intensifies the process. Standard economic theory insists that the marketplace won’t drive species into extinction because, since the ‘resource’ becomes increasingly scarce as it becomes rarer, the cost of catching it will increase until exploitation stops, after which time its population will recover. Even as the last assumption is coming into question, the major claim of this theory has been shown to be incorrect by examples of species whose ‘value’ (read ‘price’ of some animal or part thereof) increases with its increasing rarity, which “stimulates further harvesting and drives the species into an extinction vortex” (Courchamp et al., 2006).

In certain places, the killing of animals for their meat and/or parts is being carried out by organized groups with sophisticated weapons, and is being met with similar tactics and firepower on the ‘anti-poaching’ side, and this is probably nowhere better illustrated than in and around Kruger National Park in South Africa, where the lucrative trade in rhino horn seems to be driving an anthropogenic Allee plunge in the two remaining African rhino species, even in their supposedly well-protected last stronghold. Annette Hubschle provides some important insight into the many human dimensions of the forces underlying the bushmeat crisis in Africa and likely in many other parts of the world. A Game of Horns: Transnational Flows of Rhino Horn (2016), which served as her dissertation in economic sociology. She focuses on Kruger National Park, where somewhere between 8,000 and 9,500 white rhinos and 350 to 500 black rhinos were thought to survive in the roughly 20,000 square kilometers of the park, and where, according to park anti-poaching officials, it’s so bad that “an available pool of 2,500 to 3,000 poachers” can always be found in and around the park, with “an average of ten to fifteen hunting crews tracking rhinos at any given time” (Hubschle, 2016, p. 325).

Hubschle traces the history of ‘conservation’ in South Africa, beginning with the arrival of the Dutch East India Company in 1652, imposing colonial rule; native Africans lost property and hunting rights, while colonists began seriously depleting populations by the late 1800s, necessitating conservation measures. As she explains, “while one might think that these conservation regulations sought to protect wildlife, in reality they can only be understood in the context of colonial exploitation of African people” (2016, p. 175). Kruger was set up as a game reserve before being declared South Africa’s premier National Park in 1926, but this came at the cost of several waves of forced removal of African people from the land, which continued until as recently as 1969. A wildlife ranching industry began to develop over the 1960s and 70s, with private ownership of wildlife and rhinos in particular accruing to the while elite, creating a legal market in wild animals and their products from which Africans continued to be excluded. This legal market in live rhinos, rhino horn and rhino trophies “provided the foundations for certain criminal activities to flourish and for gray channels to develop into fully-fledged illegal supply chains” (Hubschle, 2016, p. 181), and many of these activities continued after CITES banned the international trade of rhino products in 1977.

Conservation came to mean moving rhinos to the private holdings of white ranchers, ostensibly to rebuild wild populations, but more importantly opening the door to the commercial trophy-hunting industry; meanwhile, subsistence hunting by local communities of black Africans was branded poaching and criminalized. The breeding, sale to ranchers and commercialization of rhinos for their horns and trophies intensified over the 1990s and into the early 2000s, allowing this elite group to become accustomed to enjoying a most profitable business; however, she explains, the escalation of illegal killing of rhinos on public lands is now cutting into the supply of animals available for sale to the private sector, providing an incentive for the escalation of a paramilitary ‘war against poaching’ that she claims has little to do with respect for the animal itself.

Hubschle conducted interviews with 239 SubSaharan Africans who agreed to participate in her study, many from Mozambican communities located just outside the KNP. As they explained to her, their villages had been undergoing increasing economic marginalization for years after the illegalization of their own hunting, and as rhino poaching became increasingly lucrative, it only made economic sense to take the risks. Men from many different backgrounds make up the hunting crews, freely cooperating in rhino killing–and a grisly business it is, too, since, while rhino horns can be removed by careful excision without killing the animal because the hairlike horn material does not have a bony attachment to the skull, “illegal hunters use either ax, pocket knives or machetes to remove the horn” (2016, p. 307), and the wounded animal is left to die. Village ‘kingpins’ coordinate the huntying groups and emerge as self-styled Robin Hoods, constructing their identities as “economic freedom fighters” within a shared perspective that “the poacher is claiming back his right to hunt by poaching in modern conservation areas, which were the traditional hunting grounds of his forefathers” (2016, pp. 311-312).

She also interviews many of the “consumers” of rhino horn and those involved in the quasi-legal or illegal trade channels, and notes what she calls the “sacralization” of the rhino horn—but unfortunately not of the living rhino itself—in Asian communities; her conclusion was that “the sanctity of ancient beliefs and socially accepted norms not only supersedes rhino conservation initiatives but also international trade bans and domestic rules” (2016, p. 169). Contemporary consumers of rhino horn generally indicated they desired it for reasons of health (although most medical communities deny it has any efficacy) or for the status that its possession imbued; interviews with actors in the criminal networks meeting this ‘demand,’ however, indicated they looked forward to the extinction of the species because of its likely effect of escalating the ‘investment potential’ of caches of the horn.

The basic argument of her dissertation (2016, p. 67) is that successive programmes instituted for the protection of the rhino have “led to a historical lock-in that has allowed the illegal market in rhino horn to flourish”; key actors in this flow of horn do not accept the ban on trade in rhino horn and/or the legitimacy of the differentiation between legal and illegal rhino killing, and they use this “contested illegality” to justify both “gray” economic activities and those that are clearly illegal. A key finding of her research was the importance of actors situated “at the interface between legality and illegality” in maintaining the resilience of the criminal networks; somewhat shockingly, Hubschle observes that, “while conventional narratives point to the involvement of organized crime in transnational rhino horn flows, this label is only correct if wildlife professionals and state officials are subsumed under it, and the dominant role of local actors is acknowledged” (2016, p. 368). In her view, rhinos will “have a fighting chance” only when they can be seen as enhancing the well-being of the local communities close to the parks where they live, so the conservation community should seek positive change for them, and make sure that the voices of marginalized people are heard in planning the future.

The situation of rhinos in South Africa, while perhaps at the extreme end of the spectrum of violence as well as monetary reward, most probably applies in general terms to many other areas around the world where wildlife populations are beset by human hunters who live in villages and towns next to nature reserves and who have likewise been “economically marginalized,” often in small or large part by conservation efforts. Elephants are being slaughtered at astonishing rates virtually everywhere in Africa, the holocaust driven by the ‘demand’ for ivory; perhaps even more grotesquely than the rhinos, the elephants’ faces are chopped off with axes, poachers making off with the tusks and leaving the animals to die. Since older individuals—the ones with big tusks—are especially hard hit, altered sex and age ratios result, leading to in dramatic changes in the social structure of the population and leaving many ‘orphans,’ unaffiliated juveniles, to fend for themselves (Wittemyer et al., 2013). While elephant populations had been holding their own in the relatively well-protected parks of Southern Africa until recently, on a continent-wide basis at least three quarters of African elephant populations are declining; elephants in the “lawless forests of Central Africa” are “’on the front end of the spear’’’ and being slaughtered mercilessly (see Stokstad, 2014; Wittemyer et al., 2014), with forest elephants apparently extirpated from the eastern DRC between 1996 and 2005 (Wasser et al., 2015; Stokstad, 2015). Poachers are now turning to the last stronghold of savannah elephants, the Southern African nation of Botswana, home to about a third of Africa’s remaining wild savannah elephants, which had until recently maintained a stable elephant population of over 130,000 with relatively little poaching (see Nuwer 2019); Schlossberg, Chase and Sutcliffe (2019) estimated that a minimum of 385 (plus or minus 54) elephants were slaughtered in poaching hotspots in Botswana over the one-year period prior to their survey. According to Michael Chase, one of the co-authors of the study, the poaching must have started around the same time that Botswana’s rangers, who previously had maintained a zero-tolerance, ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy toward poaching, were disarmed (see France-Presse, 2018). President Mokgweetsi Masisi, coming to power in May of 2019, reversed a previous ban on hunting elephants, reinstituting the lucrative practice of trophy hunting. ^[38]

A recent discussion taking place around the issue of trophy hunting both illuminates how high the stakes are re the wildlife trade and offers a glimmer of hope that a new attitude is arising toward our evolutionary cohorts—at least within certain communities. Reporting on lion conservation, a situation representative of many large carnivores and other African megafauna, David Macdonald (2016) explains that lions have already been extirpated from 92% of their former range, and warns that, while trophy hunting may further diminish lion populations in some areas, if it becomes widely banned, loss of the revenue generated thereby is likely to result in conversion of most remaining lion habitat to more financially rewarding uses, primarily agriculture and livestock grazing. Voicing their opposition, Chelsea Batavia and colleagues (2018) identify the trophies themselves as “emblems of conquest,” while noting that the individual animals—“”commoditized, killed and dismembered”—are “relegated to the sphere of mere things when they are turned into souvenirs, oddities and collectibles”; they further claim that the practice is situated within “a Western cultural narrative of chauvinism, colonialism, and anthropocentrism” where trophy hunters symbolically reenact the subjugation and colonizing of indigenous peoples, and they condemn it as “morally indefensible.” Since Africa is facing predictions of a doubling of its human population by 2050 and a tripling by the end of this century, combined with what is already an antagonistic attitude toward lions and other carnivores due to increasing conflicts with local people, and since nonconsumptive tourism is unlikely to yield sufficient revenue to offset these pressures, Macdonald et al. (2017) maintain that “new financial models to encourage coexistence with nature must be found.” However, Macdonald knew Cecil the Lion as a researcher, and in reporting on the dramatic spike in world media attention that occurred shortly after Cecil’s killing by an American bowhunter, he and his colleagues express hope that this focused interest reflects “a personal, and thus potentially political, value, not just for Cecil, and not just for lions, but for wildlife, conservation, and the environment” in general (Macdonald et al., 2016). Echoing this optimism, Michael Manfredo and colleagues (2020) propose that cultural modernization—at least in certain countries—is resulting in a value shift “from domination, in which wildlife are for human uses, to mutualism, in which wildlife are seen as part of one’s social community”; they believe a key factor in this shift is anthropomorphism (“interpretive” anthropomorphism is an appropriate attribution of intentions, beliefs and emotions to nonhuman beings based on their behavior and/or general neurological homologies; see Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal, 2015) – they see this value shift as challenging the domination-based approach of traditional wildlife management to transition into one of compassionate conservation.

The coronavirus pandemic should intensify our scrutiny of the international wildlife trade, and indeed of all the other ways we humans are exploiting nonhuman animals—from the habitat destruction that pushes remaining wild populations into closer contact with people to the CAFOS that cram great numbers of domestic animals together in highly stressful and often unsanitary conditions to the wild animal farms that imprison nondomesticated species for profit—as unwise and unnecessary practices that are increasing the risk of future human pandemics. Policy discussions routinely address expanding disease surveillance and “managing the wildlife trade” (Watsa et al., 2020), but these authors also note that, in addition to pathogen screening, “how humans interact with wildlife” will be at the crux of our ability to deal with emerging infectious diseases. It seems the choice is ours: If we move farther into the 21st century without reversing the major trend lines of our collective trajectory—increasing human population, increasing meat consumption, increasing habitat destruction— it appears that, not only will we be further imperiling our own future, but virtually all African wildlife, as well as many other wild species around the world, if they survive at all, will become at best financial hostages, caught between the Scylla of human desperation and the Charybdis of the global money game, while the Biosphere goes down all around us. On the other hand, if we can come to see the approach of domination and use-orientation as the cognitive framework that underlies all forms of oppression and exploitation of “the other,” human and nonhuman alike (see, e.g. Hawkins, 1998), and choose to take the alternative approach to otherness that we know exists within our cognitive repertoire (a resonance can be recognized between Manfredo’s “mutualism” and the African philosophy of ubuntu, if understood as “a basically humanistic orientation towards fellow beings”; see Mokgoro, 1998), we might still have a chance at remediation. In order for this to happen, however, those groupings of humanity with the means to do so will need to radically revise their way of conceptualizing economics in order to alleviate poverty and undo existing inequalities, at the same time that we all begin shifting our diets back toward something more befitting a large-bodied primate and realizing that we all have the capacity to exercise a great deal of moral choice over how much larger our global population becomes and how much of the Earth we will leave wild for sharing with other beings.