Monday, July 6, 2020

Life as a Pyramid Scheme



"Life is precious" is an often repeated adage. Since the humans who share that sentiment are living things themselves it feels to me inherently biased. Taking a step back from the apparent beauty of life around us, as I though experiment, I wonder if there might be a more nuanced perspective.

Throughout our lives we too frequently take for granted the other living things that are killed to sustain our health, personal growth and entertainment. Whether it is the life of a juvenile pig slaughtered for protein, the hectares of crops that we plant where wildlife once thrived, or the trees we turn into paper for our books (or burn as biomass to charge our e-readers), the nearly eight billion consumers in our species dramatically continue to change the natural landscape in devastating ways.

In part, because the Earth is rather large we have ignored human impact. In part, because we've all be acculturated to the norms around us we focus on our selfish individual goals and desires. To be sure, humans are atop the pyramid of life when it comes to extracting the energy and resources from all other living things on this planet, by far, by magnitudes, by ginormous proportions unmatched. 

Still, nearly every life-form consumes below it, ostensibly to further its own life and the lives of its offspring. Are we so different? Can we cite "oh it's just the cycle of life" when we overlook the billions of sentient creatures in the deadly human processing scheme?

I think not. If there is one thing that sets humans apart from the animals it is the too often unharnessed ability of bringing philosophy, reason, empathy, science and compassion actively into our decision trees. No other creature has the power to reach beyond its evolutionary trajectory. Humans have access to wisdom in such large and varied quantities, that it often competes with itself, in particular with ancient ideas that don't stand up to modern analyses.

Standing from atop the pyramid, I am privileged to conjecture and to share the resulting ideas across the world here on my blog. Perhaps in some small measure that will have influence globally as well, but in the end my daily action and inaction in the world are what determine the goodness of the pyramid I in part am building.

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