The Greatest Parasite: Humanity?
I hate to say it and some of my best friends are human, but I have to call it like I see it and all evidence points to the unnerving fact that humans are infact an “invasive species” and a parasite bent on killing its host—the Biosphere. No, humans will never kill The Earth (unless one of those labs creates a mini-black hole or some sort of anti-matter catastrophe). The Earth will shrug us off like so much dandruff and proceed to evolve another species in our place, no matter how long it takes as it has done millions of times. Much tougher creatures will survive and thrive through anything we do. And I’m also not talking about our own self-destruction through AI, nuclear war, biological agents and CRISPRs. Those are merely extinction helpers. I’m talking about how we behave every day and how we interact with our host—exactly like an infection or a parasite.
Unlike the bacteria in the dish above which is thriving, the city shows us anti-thriving, a sort of dead zone. Sure it’s highly organized and the people are thriving in the streets but the biosphere has been greatly compromised and killed, producing a grey scar where green once was. Presumably this is caused by paving over Nature with asphalt and concrete and deforestation and general toxicity. And unseen in this photo are the torrential toxic effluents of the city pouring into the air and local waterways and dispersed well beyond the city limits unto the whole Earth. Perhaps it’s more accurate to characterize us as an antibiotic, thriving like the mold that makes Penicillin and killing our surroundings. One thing for sure, we are anti-biological in our current form.
If we were to measure the output of most non-invasive species on Earth we would find a trail of eaten plants, excrement and urine and dead bodies (fertilizer) and that’s about it. But with humans, we leave a trail of chemicals, plastics, garbage, toxins, pollution, metal and other such non-biofriendly substances. We leave a trail of poisonous destruction. Repeated in nearly every city, large and small around the globe, it becomes clear that we have a detrimental, negative effect on life overall. I wish I could liken us to coral polyps or termites or ants who create amazing communal structures which are akin to cities on their scale but those creatures generally provide a benefit to the ecosystem and live in harmony with the life around them. Very much not the case with humans!
If we examine other parasites, even some of those know better than to kill the host and ruin their own chances of survival. Many of these develop a symbiotic relationship with the host and in some cases are even helpful to the host’s survival. But we can certainly find examples that have a complete disregard for the life of the host and in fact are happy to use the host right up to and even after its demise. Many such bacteria left unchecked will become a fatal infection, first irritating the host, then overwhelming its defenses, then vanquishing the biological systems of the host. Pine beetles will turn a large green forest into a brown wasteland in a matter of years. Most parasitic plants have evolved a dependency on other plants for some lack of its own and steal one nutrient or another from its host, usually in a measured way that keeps the host alive but saps some of it’s life away.
A major difference between all other parasites and humans, is they have no choice in how they behave. They merely follow the program they were born with and automatically fulfill their biological mission. Whereas humans consciously understand their actions and willfully decide to cut trees down, pave over fields, dump garbage in mass quantity, spew endless toxins into the water and air, etc. Humans know better and there was a time when we didn’t and still exist humans that co-exist with nature, leaving very little trail behind them. But since the Industrial Revolution we have greatly accelerated, amplified Nature’s destruction and lost all regard for our host and its needs. And the host is now showing signs of illness.
The Earth has a fever and we are the cause. We all know how we feel when our temperature goes up a couple degrees or so. At 101° we start to feel quite listless, warm and uncomfortable. At 104° we become quite ill and can’t survive very long at that temperature. So too, the Earth’s Biosphere has a fairly narrow range of comfortable operation regarding its overall health and average temperature. Too warm and species start changing their migration patterns, insects have greater range and longer growing seasons, more delicate plants and species die off, upsetting the local ecosystems. Life out of balance. There are those that say, “Well the Earth has been much hotter in the past,” and that is true. However, one needs to be careful harkening back to Primordial Earth temperatures where life consisted of large plants and insects, trilobites and other hearty sea creatures and no warm-blooded mammals. Also, previous temperature variations tended to be very gradual, taking place over millennia and thus giving life a chance, over many, many generations to adapt and evolve according to the conditions. We’ve done no such thing in our man-made warming.
But pouring carbon 24 hours a day into the atmosphere is only one of the host-killing activities we perform. There are many others. But first, we should mention that we are also operating outside of Nature and its rules. Our survival as individuals is no longer tied to biological traits in the traditional Darwinian sense. We have vaccines and antibiotics and myriad medical, pharmacological and agricultural miracles to cheat death and to thrive regardless of our fitness for survival. This success has led to our burgeoning overpopulation, now outstripping the rate at which Nature can accommodate and provide renewable resources for us.
We have an overfishing problem, emptying the seas of its once-teaming fish, sharks, crustaceans and mammals. We have a drought problem (see above map). We have a flooding problem. We have a plastic in the ocen problem. We have a pharmaceuticals in the water problem. We have a deforestation problem.
Stop. We have a MAJOR deforestation problem. Trees make oxygen. Trees absorb carbon dioxide. So at a time of maximum need for this important biological exchange, we have a minimal of native forests. In the lower 48 states it is estimated that 90% of the original forests have been cut down. So it’s not even far-fetched that at some point, if this trend continues, we will have an Oxygen problem.
We have a mining problem where vast tracks of pristine land are exploited in ugly ways, often denuding the Earth of all protections and exposing rocks that then leach acidic waters into the ecosystem. We have biodiversity problem where species are being lost at an accelerating rate and monoculture and cloned crops and animals are replacing what was once rich in diversity. We have a bee problem, where the world’s primary pollinator is dying off in record amounts. We have a bird problem where billions of birds in the United States alone have died off and are now missing from the ecosystem which is leading to an insect problem because the birds that ate them are gone.
Nature knows how to deal with a parasite. Inevitably, either the host will die or the parasite will reach a point where it can no longer thrive and so its population gets reduced. Like in the petri dish above, once the edges are all filled in and the agar is used up, the bacteria will die. For humanity, this can come much sooner than is filling up the Earth with cities. Long before that, the cities would be starved of nutrients or scorched out of existence by an amplified and unmitigated Sun.
The Sun doesn’t care. It keeps sending its 276 Trillion Horsepower to the tiny spec of the Earth 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It’s sort of like we are inside a Cosmic Easybake Oven with a giant lightbulb. The ice caps and glaciers will melt and release their methane and the pace will accelerate.
Try Not to Be a Parasite, Humans
Free will allows us to change course, unlike so many animals who have been shown the extinction door over the Eons. If we were to Reforest as enthusiastically as we deforested and switch to 100% Renewable, carbon-neutral energy, and create biodegradable packaging and chemicals, and stop using internal combustion engines, and understand the full life-cycle of our activities, and embrace biodiversity, and live within our means, and make our cities greener and our agriculture sustainable, we could pull back from our host-killing trajectory and instead become true stewards of our one and only planet. However, that only solves our “parasite problem” and we’d need to still keep ourselves from going extinct in all the special ways only ego-driven humans could do. Good luck!
