{"id":13866,"date":"2013-06-13T17:07:30","date_gmt":"2013-06-13T17:07:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leedpoints.com\/?guid=06b9db71e382646051ad60b7667d31b3"},"modified":"2013-06-13T17:07:30","modified_gmt":"2013-06-13T17:07:30","slug":"the-big-crunch-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/the-big-crunch-3\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Big Crunch’"},"content":{"rendered":null,"protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\n Dodo bird<\/a> <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

“Only five times in Earth’s history has life been as threatened as it is now.” –Stuart Pimm, professor of conservation ecology, Duke University<\/p>\n

Quick, name an animal that has gone extinct. Most of us probably think of dinosaurs first; but science has absolved humans of all blame in that tragic event, as we weren’t even around yet. How about something that we’ve exterminated since our relatively recent appearance in our planet’s 4.5 billion years of evolution? Dodos?<\/a> Passenger pigeons<\/a>? Tasmanian tigers<\/a>? Maybe even wooly mammoths<\/a>? How about something quite recent—maybe Africa’s northern white rhinoceros<\/a> or the Pinta Island giant tortoises? (Rest in peace, Lonesome George<\/a>…) Closer to home, do you know we even wiped out America’s beautiful native parakeet, the Carolina parakeet<\/a>? And these are just large or showy animals. Who weeps over the loss of an insect or a plant?<\/p>\n

Speaking of Lonesome George… I had the awesome opportunity to meet this last representative of his subspecies during a University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) class trip to the Galapagos Islands in 2006. Our class text for the trip was Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s “The Future of Life<\/a>.” Wilson writes that “The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs.” Indeed, so massive is our erasing of the blackboard of life that we rank alongside meteors in the magnitude of our destruction… to five such world-killing events in our planet’s history, we are now adding a sixth, wrought entirely by human hands<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In his book “Biophilia,” Wilson comments: “The worst thing that will probably happen—in fact is already well underway—is not energy depletion, economic collapse, conventional war, or the expansion of totalitarian governments. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired in a few generations. The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.”<\/p>\n

Biologist Paul Ehrlich warns us that forgiveness may be the least of our worries. “Few problems are less recognized, but more important than, the accelerating disappearance of the earth’s biological resources. In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it is perched.”<\/p>\n

[pagebreak]<\/strong><\/em>For those of us in the sustainability movement, this gets to the heart of the question, namely, what are we trying to sustain? The answer, of course, is a livable planet—but a livable planet is no good without life. In breaking the strands of the web of life, we risk bringing the entire web down. The loss of even a single species can have devastating effects on ecosystems and the free services they provide, yet we are blithely eliminating entire ecosystems as we appropriate more and more of the planet’s resources for our own use. At 7 billion people, we consume approximately one quarter of the planet’s net primary productivity<\/a>. At this rate, can the planet possibly provide enough resources to sustain an estimated human population peak of around 10 billion in 2050? Even if so, what will be left for all the other species that once survived on these same resources? Can the biosphere of the planet—and by extension, humans—survive the coming “Big Crunch<\/a>” in which expanding human population and consumption squeezes everything else?<\/p>\n

Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey elaborates, “An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet’s four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal.”<\/p>\n

The sustainability movement needs to keep this in mind. We’re not merely building “greener” buildings; we’re trying to preserve life on this planet in all its diversity. We need to be measuring our economies in terms of heritage wealth, happiness, and quality of life, not gross measures of consumption and waste. We need to account for biodiversity and ecosystem services as part of our triple bottom lines. Above all, we must draw a line in the sand, not only to preserve what is left, but to start back-tracking and repairing (in so far as this is possible) the damage we have already done. To paraphrase Wilson, in a few million years, you may hardly notice the mess we’ve made.<\/p>\n

[pagebreak]<\/strong><\/em>If I had my life to live over again I would not devote it to develop new industrial processes: I would try to add my humble efforts to use science to the betterment of the human race. I despair of the helter-skelter methods of our vaulted homo sapiens, misguided by his ignorance and his politicians. If we continue our ways, there is every possibility that the human race may follow the road of former living races of animals whose fossils proclaim that they were not fit to continue. Religion, laws and morals is not enough. We need more. Science can help us.” –Leo Hendrik Baekeland, letter to a friend (Jan. 14, 1934)<\/p>\n

I think those of us in the Sustainable Industries movement would agree with Baekeland’s prescient sentiment!<\/p>\n

Kyle Crider is manager of environmental operations at Ecotech Institute<\/a> and Education Corporation of America. He holds a Master of Public Administration degree with a double-emphasis in Urban Planning & Policy Analysis. He is also a LEED Accredited Professional, Neighborhood Development (LEED AP ND). He is currently in the Interdisciplinary Engineering Ph.D. Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and not necessarily those of Ecotech Institute or Education Corporation of America.<\/em><\/p>\n

Flickr Commons photo by nsjmetzger<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2920,2921,2922,2923,2924,3294],"class_list":["post-13866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-green-building-posts","tag-e-o-wilson","tag-living-buildings","tag-lonesome-george","tag-population-explosion","tag-species-exctinction","tag-sustainable-buildings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13866\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}