This article is a summary of Roy Ratcliffe’s recently released book ‘Life on Earth’ (Past, Present and Future)’.
Of all the millions of species of life that have existed on earth over billions of years of cellular and multi-cellular evolution, only the members of one species have consciously and systematically done the following.
Over-polluted seas, lakes, rivers, air, top-soil and land in general.
Destroyed – on a huge-scale, members of its own species.
Dismembered on a massive scale, members of many other species (forests, animals, insects, fish).
Elevated a minority of its own species to live in obscene luxury.
Relegated huge numbers of its own species (male and particularly female) to low and subordinate status.
Have attained the most profound amounts of knowledge.
However, it is only in the last five or six thousand years, out of the 500,000 plus years of hominid and Homo Sapien evolution, that the human species began to initiate such actions and only in the Middle/Near East and Europe. Until then, the rest of the planet remained populated by humans but largely unpolluted and ecologically undisturbed, by them. Now in the 21st century every corner, every height and every depth of the earth’s biosphere is extremely polluted and ecologically and climatically imbalanced.
The world is now in such a disintegrating turmoil that before moving on to suggesting what might be solutions it is important to understand a few, often taken for granted, fundamentals about life on earth in general and how humanities specific social evolution in particular, has interfered with life’s biological evolution. For it is the latter process that has ultimately led to the current global turmoil.
Fundamental biological basics
As far as we humans can ascertain, life as it appears on our planet, is an occurrence which is an exception within the entire universe. This is both with regard to the huge expanse of our solar system and within the even larger expanse of the Milky Way Galaxy of which the huge solar system is merely a small part. Moreover, the Galaxy in which our solar system resides appears to be just one of many millions if not billions of other Galaxies within the vast expanse of inter-stellar space. Clearly, there is as yet, no tangible evidence that life in any form, let alone the forms which exist on our planet, exists beyond the outer gaseous boundaries of the planet we call earth.
Yet life, as it exists in its many various forms and myriad of shapes on earth, is actually not exceptional. Life is everywhere. Life is under our nails, on our skin, in our mouths, within our stomachs, up our noses and even living in our butts. In the form of microscopic cells, organic life forms make up our skin, and are inside and outside of our bones, our body organs and tissues, blood, urine and faeces. Furthermore, life in the form of plants assisted by pollinating, wind, insects and animals, captures the sun’s energy and transforms this and other inorganic gasses and minerals into the air we need to breathe and into the food we need to eat.
We humans could quite literally not exist without the ceaseless activity of millions of life forms both symbiotic and non-symbiotic within us, upon us and all those billions of forms existing outside us. Life in some form or other also exists in the coldest, the hottest, the driest, the wettest, the most acidic, the most alkaline, the highest and deepest parts of the planet, whether on land or in the sea.
Indeed, it is estimated that life on earth has existed in single celled bacterial forms for billions of years, and in multicellular forms for multiple millions of years. On planet earth, life is literally almost everywhere. Consequently, in contrast to what we know of the universe beyond the planet earth, ‘life on earth’ cannot be regarded as exceptional at all. Indeed ‘life on earth’ is normal, quite routine and ubiquitous.
However, minute life forms harnessing energy from chemicals or the sun and converting this energy into forms suitable for human and animal life to metabolically process internally in order to continue to exist and to reproduce, is not just an interesting biological fact. These bio-chemical processes, underwrite everything that life on earth does – including everything human life does. Therefore, although humanity, as a life-form species, is far from exceptional in this bio-chemical dependency regard, this realisation has yet to thoroughly sink in and be sensibly acted upon by most of us.
The social evolution of humanity
Yet despite this fact and in spite of the fact that humanity is totally dependent upon the whole interdependent chain of life forms on earth, from the smallest cells and microorganisms to the largest plants, insects and animals, a problematic trend was set in motion during the previous five or six thousand years of human existence. Sections of the human species during a particular historic part of their socio-economic evolution became aggregated in hierarchical mass societies and came to see themselves as so exceptional that they needed only their own skills and intelligence to survive and prosper.
This trend was a form of anthropocentric exceptional arrogance and conceit which was (and is where it still exists) totally at odds with the actual existential dependency of humanity upon every other aspect of organic and inorganic life on earth. So, although human life on earth is in a very real sense, the opposite of the anthropocentric ideologies humanity has created concerning its own exclusive and ‘privileged’ place on earth, the anthropocentric intellectual paradigm has come to dominate all forms of human thinking, from religious to secular, from art, literature to science.
Although the rest of life on earth (the billions of visible and invisible species) are not at all dependent upon the human species to survive, humanity is different. The human species is certainly totally dependent, for “every breath we take and every meal we make” upon the rest of the interconnected and inter-dependent organic/inorganic support functions of life on earth as a whole. Despite the concept of Gaia, (life as a whole planetary system) being suggested in ancient Greece and re-stated in the 20th century, we humans are only just beginning to understand that we absolutely need the complex inter-connected web of life for our own existence.
Moreover, the exceptional and narcissistic, short-sighted self-regard and ecological disregard of some human beings reached a tipping point in the 20th and 21st centuries. It was then that many people were encouraged to not only damage and destroy each other by the millions, in two world wars and do the same to most other forms of life on earth, but to do so in pursuit of personal or collective acquisition and satisfaction. This damage and destruction was done at the most extreme levels to plant species (by forest and prairie clearances), to insect and animal species (by chemical dumping, spraying and culling) and to the human species at the levels now known as crimes against humanity and genocide.
Anthropocentric domination
Of course, from the earliest historical times, the study of life on earth has been motivated by many considerations; economic, religious, military, industrial, commercial and scientific, but whoever produced these studies and whenever they produced them they have always been filtered through and adjusted to the anthropocentric perspective of a hierarchical mass society class of educated elites. Only individuals from the elites were provided with the time, resources and skills necessary to both study, record and publicise their findings and of course they did so from within their class perspective.
Therefore, the study of life on earth (nature) from the perspective of life on earth – as a whole – has been consistently neglected and is well overdue. Furthermore, I suggest that what is also long overdue is the reverse of this human-centred process – a critical study of humanity from the broader perspective of ‘life on earth’ or nature. Moreover, in the 21st century I would go further and suggest, a study of mass society humanity from the perspective of life on earth – as a whole – has become not only a possibility, but a pressing necessity!
The natural sciences have revealed sufficient evidence to confirm that nature in general is not a separate realm from humanity, but humanity (as a late development of multicellular life forms), is only a part of a networked continuum of life linking all organic and inorganic materials into an interconnected, inter-dependent global system. The planet earth, therefore, contains more than just a bio-sphere, clinging onto a huge ball of inorganic rock, liquids and gasses. From a life on earth perspective the inorganic and organic have become one-sidedly co-dependent: the one cannot exist without the other.
This is because the organic, bio-chemical elements of earth, in the form of life itself, depend upon the inorganic contributions of energy and materials, provided by the earth’s rotation around its own axis (creating weather patterns) and around the sun (creating consistent, but alternating summer and winter levels of solar energy transmission) all of which enables biological life to constantly metabolise by photosynthesis, that energy into essential gases and into essential forms of organic nutrition in order to renew itself.
Since the twentieth century, with its accumulated wars, pollution, ecological destruction and climate changes there has been a developing awareness of the need for a new perspective on the role of the human species within the totality of life on earth. The embryonic biological awareness of species inter-dependence and the growing problem of a consistent human alteration of ecologically determined evolutionary balances, was initiated and sustained by explorers such as Humboldt, Bonpland, Marsh, Muir and others in the 19th century, but it was not completed by them.
Toward a Gaia-centric perspective
However, I suggest that this perspective now needs a different form of social motivation and needs to be combined with a radical readjustment to humanities eco-destroying production practices. A century or more of government reforms by limited acts of ‘Conservation’ and ‘National Park’ exclusion zones, have failed to halt the insatiable appetite of entrepreneurial exploiters for ever new natural resources to extract, process, sell and have consumed. Preserving limited areas of undisturbed ‘natural beauty’ or ‘pristine wilderness’ or to protect ‘endangered species’, as occurred during the 19th and 20th centuries, is no longer good enough to ensure the long term viability of life on earth.
It has become glaringly obvious, to those who are not blinded by excessive self-interest or ideological dogmatism, that we humans, sooner or later, (preferably sooner) need to embrace a more appropriate level of intellectual humility and a more sustainable level of practical interaction with the amazing galactic occurrence of the animated material we call ‘life’ on this planet. Given current levels of individual self-interest, whether such a radical re-adjustment of general thinking and acting will come before or after a huge natural or sequence of human assisted cataclysmic climate or extinction events is impossible to say.
However, it is possible to say that the accumulated material evidence now available means a serious readjustment in thinking can at least be started by those with sufficient motivation. As long as large-scale human communities continue to exist, an alternative perspective on life on earth to the current hierarchical, exploitative ones – in all their 20th century political and religiously led forms – may well be a valuable resource to be aware of and to have on hand. For a start, the abstraction ‘nature’ no longer contains sufficient useful biological species information to process thoroughly or accurately. So, the essential phases of all forms of life on earth which I have chosen to condense or abbreviate are the following;
Nourishment designated as (N), Metabolism as (M), Growth as (G), Reproduction as (R), Ageing as (A) and Death as (D). I have further condensed these as the formula; (N-M-G-R + A-D) = life. My reasoning is as follows: All living organisms need Nourishment; all nourishment sources must be internally Metabolised; all metabolism enables Growth, whether as basic bio-chemical tissue and molecular renewal or as an incremental increase in organism size or complexity.
It is commonly understood that the nutritional (N) source for all life-forms (from the smallest to the largest) is a mixture of inorganic substances (water, gasses and minerals) and organic substances (plants, insects, animals or fish). However, what I consider is often overlooked or taken for granted are two crucially important facts. The first crucial fact is that the organic material used for (N) is itself always something that is going through (or has already gone through) the (N-M-G-R + A-D) processes of living. Life actually lives from metabolising life.
The second crucial fact is that the nutritional intake (N) for most life forms is more frequently required than the rate of reproduction (R) of their particular or preferred sources of nutrition (N). This latter fact reveals a fundamental biological contradiction between the need for most life-forms to consume their preferred organic food sources far more frequently (i.e. daily) than those food sources that grow (i.e. periodically or seasonally) can reproduce themselves (R). This contradiction has only been overcome by two additional biological and planetary factors.
First, the available sources of (N) in species terms are part of a much larger species pool of millions of plant, insect and animal species; and second, the additional fact that some species, (such as microscopic plants and insects) reproduce in such prolific numbers that their life processes form a mass foundation of (N) for the basis of many other interconnected food chains. The fundamental contradiction between the rate of any species (N) intake and the rate of reproduction (R) of its preferred nutrition, therefore, only seriously manifests itself when a species arises whose numbers consume the available (N) sources in larger amounts and at faster rates than these sources can be naturally (or artificially) reproduced.
Hierarchical expansion leads to extinctions
The human species since the inception of its hierarchical mass society form of aggregation – has become that particular species! By its hierarchical class structure two classes emerged within human communities which consumed extravagantly (the ruling and administrating classes) without producing anything essential; and one class that produced everything essential (the working classes) whilst consuming very little. By means of this combined development, each hierarchical mass society over-extracted from its local natural resource supply and as a consequence therefore constantly needed ever larger natural areas to extract from.
As the hierarchical mass society system expanded in class numbers and was expanded into new areas of natural fertility, the over extraction from nature grew exponentially. This led to wars of resource conquest, forest clearances, pasture erosion, soil degradation, over fishing and eventual desertification etc. Even successive vast empires numbering millions, primarily collapsed from this fundamental contradiction (among others) between the higher rate of human species consumption of natural resources, than those natural resource species could reproduce themselves.
The global reach and increased productive capacity of the latest hierarchical mass society now dominated by capital has merely accelerated the progress of the hierarchical mass society system until it has begun to both exhaust the global supply of species which are useful for nutrition and those useful for essential non-food requirements. Moreover, the hierarchical mass society systems over-extraction has even begun a process of extinction of those species essential for maintaining an adequately oxygenated atmosphere; an adequate temperature gradient and humidity range for plant growth; an extinction of insect population levels essential for crop pollination and the existence of an unpolluted ocean and rain water system.
I therefore contend that any movement or tendency – of any kind – which remains Anthropocentrically focussed and avoids placing a Gaia-centric (whole species) focus at the centre of its campaigning, risks becoming or remaining part of the problem for life on earth – including the future of its own species. Once human social systems and biological systems are adequately understood something becomes obvious.
Whatever other secondary social problems need solving, humanity needs to remove the entire hierarchical class based systems along with the political system which enables the control of them by a minority and at the same time collectively agree to solve the fundamental biological problem by reducing the level of natural extraction for its own species use, to below the level of the species reproduction rate of humanities essential nutritional species for its own organic and inorganic requirements.
Solutions?
However, no elites (not even liberal minded ones) are going to voluntarily agree to such a revolutionary Gaia-centric transformation. And in any case revolutionary changes to socio-economic systems are never top down, elite-led mass initiatives. They never have been. Such changes always begin as local, small scale initiatives which by success and example are copied and replicated by other small and medium local initiatives.
The first herders were small-scale local collective shepherds, before that caught on. The first horticulturalists were small-scale local allotment type female and male collective planters, before that caught on. The first farmers, using sticks to make furrows by hand, were small-scale local male and female collective initiatives before that caught on.
The first merchant capitalists were local merchant sailors on small-boat trading journeys, trading surplus production, before that caught on. The first Finance capitalist bankers were small local goldsmiths, holding local deposits, before that caught on and became wholesale fraud and international based capital exploitation.
The romantic fantasy of some revolutionaries who imagine themselves leading the masses in a heroic revolutionary upsurge to introduce a ‘green’ top-down ‘ten days that shakes the world’, has no basis in historical or evolutionary reality; nor in logic – once logic is deprived of its creative virtual world of imagination. So, the future of humanity as a species – sooner or later – lies in starting again with small and moderate sized groups of individuals living in classless egalitarian small-scale communities living frugally and sharing biosphere resources equitably and sustainably.
And doing all the above, whilst nurturing the rest of nature’s species, rather than destroying or damaging them. This type of social system has already been successfully trialled in many parts of the world and whilst these intentional communities are viewed by our hierarchical mass society elites as being made up of idealists or deviants, that is only because these elites are blinded by their own socialised self-image.
Nevertheless, from a biological understanding of life on earth as a whole, it turns out the actual idealists and deviants are the ones that think humanity can go on indefinitely polluting and extracting from nature, at a massive level and volume, that clearly nature can no longer sustain, without terminal problems occurring.
The real fantasists and idealists among the climate and ecology deniers, then think that when nature can no longer sustain humanity – in its present hierarchical mass society form – the privileged ones remaining can just rocket off to another planet and having got there (?) re-create in a short time a viable supportive biosphere which took billions of years to fully form on planet earth.
Whether such small scale initiatives noted above based upon sociological and biological reality continue to be developed sooner (preferably) or later (predictably) after one or more serious existential collapses of the hierarchical mass society mode of production and those dependent upon them, is uncertain. However, one thing is certain. It is that small scale, classless, egalitarian forms are the only preferable ones that biological life on earth – as a whole – can maintain, whilst the human species continues to exist and evolve within earth’s limited biosphere.
This article is based on some of the contents of my book, ‘Life on Earth’ (Past, Present and Future)’. In exploring the main species categories of life on earth, this book is intended for those who are puzzled by how in one relatively short period of human evolution their activities resulted in the six characteristics listed above. This book is my contribution to redressing that historic and devastating imbalance, and it will be of interest to those who have begun to consider what can be done to halt and even reverse those unnatural symptoms. ‘Life on Earth’ (Past, Present and Future)’ can be obtained in ebook form from Amazon or in paperback book form from Amazon, Browns Books, Bookshop.org, or Ebay. You can read more of my writings in my blog www.critical-mass.net.
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