Doing better by living better

In this country, the direction of the prevailing wind from the politically and socially powerful can always be read from the headlines of the Globe and Mail, and in environmental matters this is no different. The Globe’s headline of August 31 cried out that “we as a species can do better,” a sentiment that could have sent anyone with a slight acquaintance with evolution into a spasm.

In the Darwinian sense, we as a species are doing pretty nicely. We run this planet, and nobody eats us — at least not routinely (in fact, being eaten is almost certain to get you into the back pages of the Globe).

It turns out that the Globe wasn’t talking about our success as a species. The headline actually quoted Prof. Jay Malcolm of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Forestry — not exactly a Green Party cell — asking, rhetorically, whether mankind’s future was to be a destroyer of species by destroying their habitats.

Dr. Malcolm’s views, at least, have the intellectual weight to be taken seriously. Species loss is real, and the spread of population has pushed many species to the fringes of their original range. That was the conclusion of a study sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Nature (which revisionists will remember as the World Wildlife Fund): that global climate change will choke off many large areas of habitat that support unique species. At the same time, adaptive species may spread wider and farther, taking up the ecological space left by the extinct.

Whether the climate projections that underpin the study are reasonable is another question — although, significantly, they have been assessed as conservative by some authorities. Still, we here are old enough to remember the predictions of an imminent ice age, in the 1970s.

But a longer view has to see that populations didn’t start to spread the day after the invention of fuel-burning engines. Humans have been taking over large sections of the planet ever since hunting and gathering gave way to agriculture. Some species have adapted; some have thrived. Some have been hunted, madly, to extinction; some have just been crowded out. And it is far from clear that human activity has been inimical to every species’ survival.

Indeed, just as nineteenth-century industrialization destroyed species, twentieth-century industrial progress can be said to have saved many. It would be foolish to suggest that any effort could have been made to preserve any of the world’s endangered species without an industrial infrastructure to support it.

Similarly, industrialization and trade tend to concentrate populations, not disperse them. Opportunity at home, provided by industry, is what will keep the world’s poor from burning down rainforests to plant subsistence or cash crops and from shooting large mammals for their trophy value.

If the Globe’s editorial board wants to insist that this species can do better, it could start by recognizing that technological progress — which relies on industrial production — is an indispensable condition for protection of habitats and a sine qua non of ensuring that we, as a species, can exercise some of this “stewardship” that politicians, activists and the chattering class find such a compelling duty.

That brings us to mining. Mines are every activist’s bogeyman, for reasons just too deep to fathom. And they have been held up as irresponsible land use for so long that in the public mind, a mine equates roughly to mortal environmental sin. Yet mining and metallurgy is probably one of the lesser contributors of greenhouse gases among all human activity. It uses far less land than agriculture, forestry or manufacturing. And as far as we know, it has yet to cause any extinctions.

Historically, the industry (like most others) has been irresponsible with its wastes, but those attitudes disappeared long ago. And when it comes to some emissions (sulphur dioxide being a case in point), the mineral industry has turned them from wastes into salable products.

The metals the industry produces make civilization possible. It follows that they also make care and concern for the environment possible. If we — as stewards of the earth, not as a purely self-interested species — are to do better, we will do it as an industrial society, not as a post-modernist vision of Eden.