"We look at the world as one giant farm field."
The above quote is from some seemingly-stupid advertisement I saw in a magazine. It seems to imply that we should demolish the last wildernesses to make way for food production operations, and may in fact imply just that. But I can use the same quote to mean something quite different.
Consider: overpopulation is one of the root causes of environmental problems. There's little doubt that if the human population were, say, one billion instead of six, we would be consuming fewer resources per unit time and taking up less space, and consequently causing fewer species extinctions, less global warming, etc. So what I propose is to kill two birds with one stone (actual killing of birds not included), by diverting the human reproductive drive and channeling it into a drive to help other species succeed, thus indirectly ensuring that our species will also survive.
And I would argue that farmers have been doing this for millennia already. (One interesting corollary: perhaps we like eating farm animals not only because hunting used to be an important part of our survival strategy, but also because it's easier to care for a farm animal as if it were your child than to do the same for a field of plants.) We just need to expand the scope of these transferred feelings of protectiveness and nurturing to include the creatures living in the wild lands and waters around the farms. To begin with, this would lead farmers to consider more carefully the consequences of expanding their farms at the expense of wild areas, and would hopefully result in more eco-friendly techniques such as growing multiple crops in the same field, integration of farms and forests, etc.
Eventually we could perhaps learn enough about the psychology of this phenomenon (assuming it actually exists, of course) to expand it to the wider population. There are many solutions to environmental problems, and a major problem with implementing most of them is that people simply don't care enough. Threatening them with future crises if they fail to act is all well and good, but we need a carrot as well as a stick (actual beating people with sticks not included, we hope). We want to reproduce because our genes say it will help our bloodline and our species to survive, but today what we really need to do to ensure survival is quite different. Let's find a way to get people to realize that.
Consider: overpopulation is one of the root causes of environmental problems. There's little doubt that if the human population were, say, one billion instead of six, we would be consuming fewer resources per unit time and taking up less space, and consequently causing fewer species extinctions, less global warming, etc. So what I propose is to kill two birds with one stone (actual killing of birds not included), by diverting the human reproductive drive and channeling it into a drive to help other species succeed, thus indirectly ensuring that our species will also survive.
And I would argue that farmers have been doing this for millennia already. (One interesting corollary: perhaps we like eating farm animals not only because hunting used to be an important part of our survival strategy, but also because it's easier to care for a farm animal as if it were your child than to do the same for a field of plants.) We just need to expand the scope of these transferred feelings of protectiveness and nurturing to include the creatures living in the wild lands and waters around the farms. To begin with, this would lead farmers to consider more carefully the consequences of expanding their farms at the expense of wild areas, and would hopefully result in more eco-friendly techniques such as growing multiple crops in the same field, integration of farms and forests, etc.
Eventually we could perhaps learn enough about the psychology of this phenomenon (assuming it actually exists, of course) to expand it to the wider population. There are many solutions to environmental problems, and a major problem with implementing most of them is that people simply don't care enough. Threatening them with future crises if they fail to act is all well and good, but we need a carrot as well as a stick (actual beating people with sticks not included, we hope). We want to reproduce because our genes say it will help our bloodline and our species to survive, but today what we really need to do to ensure survival is quite different. Let's find a way to get people to realize that.