Magius,
You’ve brought up a good point. We humans are surely guilty of fouling our own nest. You asked how I fight myself?
For the past 16 years I’ve made all my domestic electricity from a tiny hydroelectric turbine on my brook, that is; I don’t have commercial power lines running to my house. I grow roughly a quarter of all the food I eat in my organic garden. I use a composting toilet. I’ve not eaten at a fast-food restaurant in many years and have been a vegetarian for nearly 25 years. I’ve never placed a foot inside a Walmart (or other Box-type) store, and can’t remember when I last visited a shopping mall. I have no debts. I walk or ride a bicycle whenever possible instead of driving a car. My wife and I have voluntarily decided not to have any children. I live in a tiny house built with my own hands, and voluntarily own very few personal possessions. For example, I love to read, but only own eleven books. I gernerally borrow books from the library, rather than buy them (it’s only ideas that I hoard). I don’t own a television, and never read a newspaper. I’m neither a Samaritan nor a saint, however, I believe that a world of people living in a like manner would be entirely sustainable. Of course not all of us are content with a life of mathematics, garden flowers, and hiking in the forest. I’m afraid I haven’t been able to devise a general antidote for greed and a lust for power. My life is by no means a perfect life, but my hope is to one day live as close as possible to Shakespeare’s shepherd, Corin, from As You Like It, when he declares:
â€I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm.â€
Ah, finally Magius, a point on which we might disagree! 
It’s my contention that a wise (as opposed to merely sophisticated) human would settle into a life on this planet that is entirely sustainable and benign. The problem is not that we are more intelligent than the squirrel, the problem is that we are not wise enough. An old theme of mine is that nearly all of us already know how we should live.
â€We know the good but do not practice it.†Hippolytus
The problem is not in getting people to understand how their life is ruining the planet for everyone, the problem is getting people to care enough to live in the way that they already know they should. Wisdom isn’t something that only resides your head, it’s something that constantly exudes from both your heart and mind. It’s something that shines forth in your day-to-day life. It’s there when you’re bored, there when you’re angry, and certainly there when you love. It permeates one’s life. (Wisdom isn’t actually the word I’m looking for, the ancient Greeks had a better word for it, though this word escapes me at the moment.)
Do you think squirrels are morally better than men? I say that animals are amoral, while men alone are moral beings. The physical world contains only “is†and not “ought.†Men create the notion of “ought.†Lions don’t bother culling the oldest or the weakest members of the herd if there is a chance of ripping apart a more easily caught new-born Thompson gazelle, for example. I recently jotted into my journal this quote from a book titled, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson:
Chimpanzee gang assault and murder is marked by a gratuitous cruelty – tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, or drinking a victim’s blood – reminiscent of acts that among humans are regarded as unspeakable crimes during peacetime and atrocities during war.â€
Chimpanzee males spend most of their adult life in the quest to become the Alpha male. They employ any means at their disposal to achieve this: trickery, intimidation, conspiracy and murder are commonly practiced. I suspect that if I could teach a Chimp to use a handgun, he would think nothing of using it on his enemies. If one could teach the Chimp to fly an F-16 he would have no compunction about using this attack aircraft to strike the neighboring tribe of Chimps. Ditto for chemical weaponry. The reason that Chimps are not a threat to our survival on Earth is not that Chimps lack the will, they merely lack the means to nuke and pollute us to death. High technology to a Chimp comes in the form of a broken tree branch used as a temporary weapon.
Men, rather than Chimps possess F-16 attack jets because they are more intelligent than Chimps. At the same time, men possess F-16 attack jets because they lack a ubiquitous wisdom (oh, where is that Greek word?!). We have unfortunately acquired the intelligence to invent the means to inflict great suffering, in fact our own extermination, before we acquired the wisdom to produce a culture where such things would be superfluous. Despite the fact that it’s all come to us backwards, that’s just the way it happened. We will deal with it or perish. We’re presently on a precarious and exposed slope of the human learning curve.
That human upstarts came to this place on the curve at all is a fluke of nature; a mere chance. Had the climate not changed such that we were forced out of the trees and on to the savannas, where we gradually assumed an upright posture, then perhaps the planet would still be the mythical “Garden of Eden,†before Adam so rudely turned up. On the other hand, chance might have favored or cursed (your choice) Giraffes or Ravens with the ability to make oil refineries for petrol and napalm. Perhaps this has already happened in at least one universe in our hypothetical Multiverse? In any case, it didn’t happen that way in this Universe. In this one, it was the men on Earth that first obtained higher intelligence, and men will either profit or suffer the consequences for this intelligence. For good or for bad, the other higher life forms on this planet have no choice but to go along for the ride. Men are not going back into the caves voluntarily, and the other animals can’t get off the planet. Our fates are necessarily intertwined. The question is whether “wisdom” (to be replaced with that forgotten Greek word) will arrive before extinction.
Nature set large asteroids on course with the Earth’s orbit as surely as it elevated men among other animals to acquire advanced technology. Will an asteroid hit the planet or miss? Will men continue their destruction of this world, or will we suddenly acquire a paradigm shift great enough to set us on a new course of benign co-evolution? It’s still too early to tell if mankind will be a catastrophe or a blessing to the other life on this planet. For the moment, the Squirrels can only watch and wait.
Michael
