For humanity to survive, it will have to learn to reconcile with other species. Humans have relentlessly been altering their environment to increase their own survival and quality of life. Often these actions are at the expense of the other animals and the planet. The sobering realization that climate change affects our wellbeing is causing increasing public concern about the environment. Less obvious to the public now is the fact that continuous exploitation and extermination of animals will lead to ecological catastrophe and will make the earth uninhabitable. To continue living and thriving on this planet, humans will need to change the way they treat other living beings.
With more than a third of the habitable land used for animal agriculture, it is the leading cause of deforestation. By 2018, the biomass of humans and their farm animals outweighed the biomass of wild mammals and birds by over 100 times. The current rate of species loss is 100 – 10,000 times the background extinction rate.
With the human population doubling in the last 40 years, it is easy to see that unless we drastically change our food source and protect the wildlife, there will be no forests or wild animals left in the next few decades. At that point, people will start dying too of the extreme heat, drought, and lack of oxygen, as the atmosphere of Earth will be significantly altered. It is unlikely that technology to colonize Mars or other planets will be ready by then.
The technology to source food in a more efficient and eco-friendly way is already available. That each Big Ag company is investing in an alternative protein line shows they see it as a way for their business to survive in the future.
Our species is extremely adaptive. The positive change has always been driven by adaptation. Compassion and tolerance emerged as a benefit of social cooperation and a way to increase the survival of the tribe. With improvement in quality of life, technical progress, and growing networks of human interactions, compassion had to be extended to the members of other groups. Practices like slavery, serfdom and discrimination had to be ditched for humanity to thrive.
Now it’s time to extend compassion to the members of the other species if humans want to survive and continue to improve their own life.
Catch a Glimpse 