Musings on Natural Capital

Have you noticed this truth about life? We live in a hostile world.

From our studies of history, and from our common experience, we discover a truth that is quite unwelcome: we live constantly and seemingly forever in enmity with each other and with the earth.

In ancient times, homo sapiens encountered natural enemies that had evolved in the planetary ecosystem. Poisonous snakes slithered beneath our feet, requiring us to look down, even as predatory carnivores stalked us from above. Furthermore, even if such an environment were not perilous enough to keep the hair on the back of our necks regularly raised with alarm, we encountered craftier dangers from our fellow humans. Something about the species itself seems to have encoded enmity among men.

Some men/women managed to band together in tribes or bands in order to collectively resist the numerous threats presented by existence on this earth. By collaborating, people could gather more life-sustaining resources, producing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Also by working in community, folks could more effectively overcome those beastly enemies lurking in the jungle, and those tribal ones in the next valley.

Your worldview may be defined by a revelation of Edenic origins, or maybe it is constructed around a principle of biologic evolution. I do not consider those two philosophies as necessarily contradictory. What some folks call irrationality, and some folks call heresy, I may call cognitive dissonance. Life is full of contradictions, and I can’t comprehend them all, so I’m willing to listen to what you have to say, even if I don’t agree with it.

Nevertheless, there has to be some basis of agreement, n’est ce pas? Otherwise we have no foundation for civilization itself. Folks have to agree on something, otherwise the tiger creeps from behind while we are trying to decide what to do, and he’ll pounce on us before we can say strategy—or if not the tiger, the lion or the dragon.

Or the tsunami, or the hurricane, or the toxic oilspill, or the toxic assets. Danger is all over the damned place. No way around it, no matter how much we civilize ourselves.

I suspect that in former times, people did a lot more acting than they did thinking, and that’s how they managed to get so much work done.

Or is it the other way around?

Oh, but I digress toward indeterminable speculations on the origins of our species, and the descent of man to whatever this is that we have on planet earth today. What I really want to write about is this phrase I heard a couple days ago: natural capital.

Our post-industrial revelation, or deduction--whatever you want to call it-- brings us to a juncture where we discover the absolute necessity of conserving the earth itself . (Call me a conservative if you like; I don’t care.) Even as we gathered its produce in the earliest times in order to sustain life and initiate civilization, we were being conservationists. Now, the global challenge of modern existence requires to get off our financial assets and start considering the earth itself as our most valuable capital--flora and fauna and elements and all of it.

The continuance of civilization itself will require conservancy (to use an appropriately contemporary word) and stewardship (the biblical word).

Can we rise to the task?

Yes, we can, if the North Koreans don’t nuke us to death, or the Iranians don’t jihad us to death, or the Israelis don’t irk us to death, or the Chinese don’t pollute us to death, or the Russians don’t vodka us to death, or Hugo doesn’t talk us to death, or rolling stone doesn’t amoralize us to death or tv doesn’t opiate us to death or the Americans don’t drone us to death.

Yes, we can!

Yes, I have my hand up. And I’d just like to say, Nuala, that the beginnings of civilization originate, parabolically speaking, in families—Adam, Eve, etc., when he looked at her and said woohoo! and nine months later out slithered little Cain. Later on Abel popped out, and there you have all in one family what you need to know about the origins of human bondage.

Oh there was a poisonous snake involved too.

Human experience has always been that way, always will. Many may say that concepts or ideologies of ethnic identity, nationhood, or the hope of world peace (it takes a village, you know) can supplant the family urge. But our DNA is strong and stubborn and built solidly upon the double helix of family procreation, and I like it that way.