urbpan | Loving nature, the price of tea in China, and other subjects.

It occurs to me, that while this is my personal journal, I do give it as the web address for The Urban Pantheist, and people who find it through that route (if any, in fact, do) may wonder what some of my entries have to do with my zine.

In particular, I'm thinking of the highly personal yet now totally public issue of my vasectomy. What does that have to do with "Loving Nature while Living in the City?" I know some of you see an obvious connection, but many people don't. I think it's not a bad idea to spell it out a bit.

We humans are wonderful, unique animals. Through the power of ingenuity and intelligence we have spread to almost every habitable place on the planet. We have created the ability to communicate with one another, no matter what the physical distance between any two of us. We have brought countless diseases under control, and have the ability (but not yet the will) to prevent every member of our species from dying of hunger.

Unfortunately, we have also caused a great deal of stress on most of the rest of the species we share this place with. Every human on Earth can trace his or her ancestry to a single African woman who lived about 50 or 60 thousand years ago. Her children now number 6 billion. Her children hunted the mammoth to extinction, ate the last dodo's egg and introduced the mosquito to Hawaii. Her children did these things without knowing that they were wrong, that there are consequences to their actions. Now we have the ability to communicate with one another, from any two places on the planet; we have the ability to make choices using our imagination, our forethought, and our memory. We have the ability to learn from history.

Procreation is the reason that organisms exist. Why do mosquitoes suck blood? To obtain the protein they need to lay eggs and make more mosquitoes. Why does mold grow on your bread? To produce the spores that will drift on air currents and hopefully grow some more mold. Why do humans exist? To produce baby humans, right?

Sure, if you ignore that we are unique among organisms in having the ability to think. Humans exist, some believe, because the Earth needed a self-conscious being (or organ) to protect itself. We are alone among creatures in being able to make decisions based on something other than simple reactions, instinct or desire to feel good. We are alone in having a sense of past, present and future. And we are alone in having the ability to pass on ideas to others of our species--even to those who are not even born yet.

My parents, who were environmentally aware people 35 years ago, when I was born, made a conscious decision to have two children, and no more. They reasoned that they were replacing themselves. My problem with this logic is this: My parents still exist, my brother and I still exist, and my brother's children still exist. Where there were two humans, there are now six. In 35 years, the population of our family tripled. In 1969, when I was born, there were more than three billion people (source: http://www.futuresedge.org/World_Population_Issues/world_population_2.html). Now there's twice that, so my parents, well meaning though they were, were a little off.

We all know what a tremendous drain on the Earth's resources humans are. We all know (or should) that North Americans disproportionately drain those resources. There are many ways that we can lessen our impact. We can consume less of everything, especially animal and petroleum products, for example. We can support politicians and policies that support sustainable agriculture and industrial practices (hint: not those supported by corporations). We can choose develop our cities, not creating sprawling suburbs that absorb and divide wildlife habitat. And we can try to slow down population growth by not directly contributing to it.