Ted Cruz was in the news lately saying that leftists view humans as a disease. This is a common narrative tension in environmentalism, and it tempted my attention long enough to write a brief retort. The simple version is that while humans are not inherently disease-like, people like Ceuz are trying hard to make us function like one.
The truth is that any part of the natural world, if allowed to grow so large and careless that it wipes out all other life and degrades the ecosystem on which its survival relies, is toxic in effect. But there’s a big difference to being toxic in effect and toxic by nature.
Humans have created the sixth mass extinction in the history of the natural world. Humans are ushering in a rate of planetary change that very plausibly could trigger scarcity, migration, and war on a scale greater than anything in history. These are uncomfortable truths. These are the risks that I see defining the back half of my life, if I get more than a half-century or so.
And yet, humans are also growing in marvelous and awe-inspiring ways — reaching huge, peaceful, prosperous, increasingly tolerant and connected numbers unlike anything in history. We don’t have to go back to pre-industrial standards of living or populations. We don’t even have to marginally reduce our population numbers or standards of living. But we do have to be selective about how and where we grow in order to maintain a healthy amount of planetary biodiversity and maintain the climate system on which our civilizations rely. And yes, that requires consideration of the ways in which we could function like a disease, and avoid them. These are not complex changes: they require fuel-switching, more protected natural areas, perhaps some market reforms to help achieve these goals efficiently, and effective international accords to incentivize nations to participate. When we talk about avoiding catastrophic risk, we are not even talking about dramatic changes. We can be the dominant species and yet maintain natural systems on which we rely, preserving ourselves and our planet’s evolutionary heritage. This does not condemn our human nature over any other living system, and should not trouble you unless your moral view was so simple that all things pleasant for man even in the short term were holy and morally privileged. I do fear that this is the psychology we’re working against.
So if we do not take simple steps to control how and where we grow — if we do not consider our capacity to function like a disease on this planet and wisely correct — we will become what people like Cruz are encouraging us to be: a people so morally simple and blind to their impacts on the natural world that they overwhelm the systems they require to survive. Ted Cruz and his ideological brethren should hear their own argument and realize they are the true objects of its critique.