The terrible child of the biosphere | Press

Humanity is both a tiny and very powerful part of the living. To give you an idea, the human biomass on Earth is comparable to that of termites. In 2018, the biologist Yinon Bar-On, of the Weizmann Institute, and his collaborators estimated the carbon biomass of the main taxonomic groups of living things. A fantastic work which has made it possible to highlight the impact of humanity, so small, on the rest of creation.

Humanity weighs 55 million tons. Which, in terms of biomass, is only ten thousandth of that of all life on our planet. For comparison, even if we only see their fruiting bodies, the fungi weigh 12 billion tons and the bacteria, which occupy the second place in the ranking, have 70 billion tons on the scale. The great champions of this quantitative evaluation are the plants. With their 450 billion tonnes, plants constitute 82% of the terrestrial biomass, including the 10 billion tonnes of cultivated plants that grow in our fields.

So, although we like to talk about the planet as if it were our private property, it is above all a habitat of plants. Earth is a plant, fungal and bacterial planet. Taken together, fungi, bacteria and plants represent 96.7% of the terrestrial biomass.

Always wanting more

With 200 million tonnes on their account, we can even say that there is approximately four times more viral biomass than human biomass in living organisms. However, however infinitely represented it may be, humans are the species that most affect the balance of the planet.

Despite our featherweight, say the authors, we have already destroyed half of the biomass of plant species and 83% of that of wild mammals.

To put an image on this last figure, it suffices to think of the European settlers in front of the gigantic herds of bison of the great American plains. Think of sordid characters like Buffalo Bill who the movies tried to pass off as heroes. Also consider the death toll caused in Africa’s immensely diverse savanna ecosystems when European explorers opened the way for missionaries and, later, colonizing forces.

All of these large exotic mammals were treated like clay pigeons by trigger enthusiasts who dreamed of bringing a lion’s head, giraffe skin, rhino horn or elephant tusks back to their country. Trophies which they certainly regarded as ostensible testimonies of their courage and, consequently, of the size of their testicles. If hunting to eat is understandable, there is always, Freud might say, a story of the size of roubignoles hidden in this incomprehensible trophy hunt.

But long before modernity, Sapiens slaughtered much of the megafauna at the start of his planetary odyssey. In America, Eurasia, Australia and other distant islands, wherever it landed, a few thousand years later the megafauna bowed out largely because of its predatory activities. Sedentarization in the Neolithic era, the domestication of animals and plants, colonial businesses, the industrial revolution, the explosion of world demography, intensive animal husbandry and agriculture, the drifts of capitalism were all significant factors in the stranglehold of Sapiens on the living.

In our skull is the organ of our evolutionary success, but also of our great destructive potential. Our brains are extraordinarily creative, but they have a manufacturing flaw.

For good reason, evolution has left programs there from the bottom of the ages. This defect is our genetics of dissatisfaction, the main mediator of which is dopamine. Dissatisfaction is an impulse of human life, but also a curse for the planet and its biodiversity. It is a part of our humanity that has been very beneficial for our distant ancestors that has become a big problem for the descendants of the hunter-gatherers that we are. If our ancestors had only eaten mushrooms like cows graze on grass every day, Sapiens wouldn’t have gotten so smart. The human being is the animal who, once the pirogue has been invented, wants a larger boat, more efficient oars, a sailing boat, a motor boat, etc. It is this constant desire for change, perfection, beauty and comfort that has made it possible to go from the wicker or tree bark canoes of our ancestors to those yachts which are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars and these cruise ships which exceed the excessiveness, but which one still seeks to improve.

How to live sustainably in this biosphere with limited resources when our brain carries a program that explains that people who are attributed a fortune of 100 billion dollars still want it. Some are even prepared to slaughter vulnerable ecosystems to add a few billion to their fortunes or illegally hide this money to avoid paying their fair share of the tax burden. However, in resource equivalent, 100 billion is enough to live comfortably for 25,000 years. This way of excessively harvesting without sharing or of harvesting for his heirs, as my grandfather said, is a specificity of our species incompatible with sustainable development.

By comparison, owning $ 100 billion for a human life is like, in late fall, a squirrel picking up enough acorns to fill the parking lot of a Costco store.

If such a situation were to occur, all the television channels on the planet would come and cover this abnormality. For the same reason, many of us should be offended rather than deifying Jeff Bezos with 177 billion, Elon Musk with 151 billion or Bill Gates with this 124 billion. All these great fortunes have left immeasurable ecological footprints in their wake. If all these disproportionately rich people want to be of service to humanity, he should reinject a large part of their fortune in the fight against climatic and ecological upheavals and their consequences on vulnerable populations.

Maybe we need less economic logic and more wisdom. There is a little legend that says that at the height of his glory, Alexander the Great once asked a wise man why he did not want to bow to the power of the great conqueror that he was. The old man would have answered him: “King Alexander, no person can take advantage of a surface of the Earth larger than the place where he lives. You are always traveling and subduing other peoples with arms and terror. But soon you will be dead and then, of all these conquered territories, you will only be left with the small piece of land sufficient to bury a human body. ”

Unfortunately, we are all, to varying degrees, carriers of this manufacturing defect which leads to selfishly monopolizing resources as if we were going to live forever. What do you want ? Humans are animals who are always looking for more and better. More money, power, comfort, sex, recognition and less effort, such is, according to scientist Sébastien Bohler, the slogan of this program housed in the old parts of our brain which leads us to saw the branch we are sitting on. An appetite which, when mixed with neoliberalism and consumerist ideology with these advertisements reminding us that our happiness depends on what we are able to buy, constitutes a real potential for self-destruction.

We start to know the song

The 26^e United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, is coming. As usual, the world’s decision-makers will come together to drink good wine, eat gourmet meals and make good promises. But we are starting to know the song. Once the lights are out, all of these leaders will disperse as quickly as their promises. Let’s say that in the end, only cosmetic achievements will remain, because it is economic growth that wins elections in our societies. How can unlimited growth coexist sustainably with the health of a small planet with limited resources? How to make unlimited individual enrichment coexist with the survival of the rest of biodiversity?

Climate change, COP26, biodiversity, a green shift, sustainable development, environmental protection, for 30 years political blablas have continued. Meanwhile, hundreds of species are disappearing on the planet like the grains of sand in an hourglass that can never be turned over. All the large wild mammals that impress and touch us like lions, giraffes, rhinos, polar bears, tigers are just a few steps from the precipice. During this time, with machetes, humans walk on corpses and destroy this extraordinary picture that nature has taken more than 3.5 billion years to paint.

In fact, we behave with the planet exactly as the COVID-19 virus behaves with us. Like SARS-CoV-2, humanity claims many victims, many sick and increasingly confines the rest of life to small areas by destroying its habitats. This is why more and more scientists now think that our relationship with the biosphere is parasitic. The only positive point in this whole story is that the Earth has a great capacity for resilience. It would survive our passage as we will survive the COVID-19 microbe. The proof, the planet has already experienced five mass extinctions and each time, after a few million years, it has rebuilt itself. This is what the American comedian George Carlin explained differently when he said: “Those who talk about saving the planet are wrong to think so. It is humanity that we must seek to save. ”

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