The Anthropocene: A response to Holmes Rolston and the wake up call to the human ego.

     On April 25th, 2017 I attended a lecture presented by Holmes Rolston at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. He delivered background as well as his perspective and solution to the Anthropocene which defines our current geological time as being the dominating force above nature.  He called humans the “god species”, meaning that we are the first species to think we could manage the planet ourselves.  Holmes emphasized that he does not believe this should be our attitude, and that we should focus more on our ability to prevent the loss of a quality biosphere, rather than to use our human abilities to geoengineer systems and organisms because it does not solve the main problem. Essentially, humans should not domesticate landscapes, but perhaps humans themselves should be domesticated from our “get more” attitudes which evolved from our “Pleistocene genes”, which lacked the “genetic controls” to stop us from overconsuming.  This idea metaphorically fits not only our obesity epidemic, it highlights the source (humans) of our environmental degradation problems as well. 

In response to Rolston’s presentation, I will comment on and respond to his emphasis on the need for human responsibility to be pro-active versus re-active with regard to preservation of the earth. First of all, I genuinely appreciate his attention to the fact that humans are both “natural” and “cultural” parts of the ecosystem, who are endowed with the ability to share knowledge in a “transmissible” way. Although I would say this is a matter of our biological nature and human consciousness, the ability to educate one another is certainly the most unique aspect of our human nature and (in my opinion) the most powerful tool to access for the purpose of evolving as a species. Biologically we are hard wired with an ego, which serves us in the matter of preservation of our own individual life.  However biologists such as Richard Dawkins would further explore our human ego and relate it to our genes and their expression into future generations which would lend themselves to a kind of altruism that does not seem to appear in relation to our environment, yet it does manifest in our relationship to other individuals of our own kind. If we were taught how to recognize our innate tenancies toward the self, and self preservation in ways that would allow us greater awareness of our impacts to the environment, we just might further serve "our-selfs" and save the planet. While on the surface this idea might not seem to be self serving (as it would require us to make sacrifices of time, energy and resources -- which contradict our biological self preservation nature), we would in fact know more of our innate altruism and while satisfy our innate biological programming.  We should capitalize on our ability to share knowledge in a "transmissible" way and expand on this lesson in our primary education, however time will tell if we can offer future generations such depth in reflecting on one's own human nature, instead of looking outside of ourselves as the cause of environmental problems.

  Holmes refers to the human ego and says we should “manage people instead of the planet”, and offer justice to our environment instead of having the “just-us” attitude toward mitigating our overconsumption of resources. I certainly agree however the difficulty lies in the ability to re-condition humans to not be egocentric.  Holmes comically acknowledged the difficulty of this fact, buy “assigning the homework” of this ego eradication, specifically to the generations that will outlive him. Clearly he is too exhausted in his dealings with the problem of “humans driving themselves extinct”, that he hopes we as a species will catch on to egotistical demise and remedy its own actions, instead of assuming everything else needs a remedy.

Written by:  Kristy Medo 

kristinemedo@gmail.com