You sure are one lucky #!%. By accident of birth-species, you are conscious, feel love, and are intelligent enough to marvel at life’s wondrous complexities. By accident of birth-time, you can survive a broken leg, a tooth abscess, a childhood virus, and a bad case of diarrhea. By accident of birth-place, you can read, drink clean water, and fall asleep in safety. You might be one of the ultra-lucky who drives a car, air-conditions a home, and owns a computer hooked up to the internet. You have more health, hope, comfort, understanding, and safety than most any other past or present life on earth. You live high on the hog, better than royalty just a few generations past.
Who do you thank for your good fortune?
For the religious faithful, the answer is the Almighty: God will provide. For the humanist, the answer is creativity: inventors solving urgent problems get rewarded with market riches. Both the religious and the humanist explanations can be problematic if they distract us from respecting mounting environmental challenges. Faith in God can lead to environment apathy and ignorance in this life in deference to preparations for the next. The humanist risks hubris—seeing no challenge as insurmountable and human ingenuity more important than soil, water, or climate.
I’m more pragmatic, and much more humble. I thank random chance and dumb luck. The dice of evolution could have fallen differently: Homo Sapiens might not be here had the dinosaur-killing asteroid missed earth. I thank accidental gene mutations that stumbled into body symmetry, visual acuity, consciousness, and compassion. I thank fossil fuel. The food, water, shelter and comfort so cheaply and readily available to the fortunate few would not be possible without pools of power gifted from past generations, conveniently stored just a pin prick below earth’s crust. We would live very different lives if we relied on our own energy to produce what we consume. Cheap energy grows corn, powers earth movers, smelts steel, and purifies silicone. Coal, gas, oil, and tar are free. We pay a modest fee to process these ancient stores of power, but mostly we pay only what it cost to transport it from where it lies dormant to where it gets used: gas tanks, electric outlets, fertilizers, and plastics.
I thank tinkerers who stumbled onto gears, antibiotics, and transistors, and I thank courageous politicians willing to invest in very expensive, very risky, and much more difficult technologies such as nanotechnology and genetic engineering, that likely hold the keys to our future. I also thank ancestors who had the courage to invest in social experiments that gave us science, banking, education, and democracy.
I hope we have the good sense and humility to realize that our success as a species is tenuous and not guaranteed. I hope we accept our good fortune and turn our attention to the significant challenges awaiting us. It is time for us to grow up and recognize what we have been given. Mother nature can no longer suckle us; she is abused and worn. It is time we accept responsibility for our future, see through our ignorance, overcome arrogance, act sustainable, and practice stewardship. From here on out, we are responsible for our destiny. Humility, not complacency or arrogance, are required if we are to thrive in a finite biosphere dominated by human industry. The natural life-support systems and resource reservoirs we chanced upon and used to build human civilization are now failing and exploited. We might not like our chances when our luck runs out.