Seeking a Sustainable US and Canada: Chapter 2 Physical Environment

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Introduction
 

I don’t believe in magic. I believe in the sun and the stars, the water, the tides, the floods, the owls, the hawks flying, the river running, the wind talking. They’re measurements. They tell us how healthy things are. How healthy we are. Because we and they are the same thing.
–Billy Frank, Nisqually[1]

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
- Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)

If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?
- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

The ultimate failing of domination and instrumentalism may be that they try to freeze man at too low a level to ethic awareness.
--Donald Worster, 1980[2]

           

Humans live in this world and are a product of its beneficence. Our being is a mirror of our surroundings. The healthier the world is, the healthier we are. We are connected with everything around us. It only makes sense that to know the world is to know ourselves. While humans from many different times, places, and education have stated similar views, this has not been the practiced ethic of most Americans and Canadians. 
     
In Canada and especially in the United States, the population has been trained to separate themselves from the rest of the natural world. Many residents no longer relate to the landforms, climate, and ecological communities they live within. The general tone of the two countries has been one of having “conquered” nature, rather than being part of nature and nurturing the community of life. While many intellectuals have realized this folly, recognized that conquering “nature” was the equivalent to conquering ourselves, the general consensus and educational model has been one that defines progress as more conquering, more domination, more technology, more short-term solutions to the problems created by such an ideology. 
   
The increasing dependence on success defined by economics alone has resulted in a consumer-based lifestyle. Resources are used without unaccounting to ecosystems and the land. The results—pollution and waste---requires rethinking how we use our economic and technological prowess. While the conquest and power ideology continues to dominate, many people have shifted toward human interaction with the rest of the physical and biophysical world.

One of the shifts away from traditional approaches in this book uses a systems approach that studies how the living and nonliving interact. Knowing and understanding the physical environment and its connections with the living community is a first step toward living sustainably. Sustainable science and geography is not about conquering; but about humans living peaceably and comfortably with Earth and maybe even each other!

The human urge to conquer has been long standing, beginning perhaps with the first agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago, but human impact has been most extreme since fossil fuel dependence and the resulting change in quantity and quality of life. Since the Industrial Revolution the exponential growth of human population has resulted in unheard of luxury for developed countries, but has also spawned multiple unintended consequences from the exploitation of other humans to reliance on non-renewable resources. For example, dependence on fossil fuels resulted in the unintended consequences of increased toxics, pollutants, and carbon dioxide levels. The sustainable mindset requires moving toward being a part of the ecological world. Instead of treating Earth as the giver of all, we need to reconsider our relationship.

Understanding how unique physical regions and distinct landforms may be affected by human intervention requires a basic knowledge of the complex physical and ecological landscape and an appreciation of its natural beauty (Figure 2.1). That would result in reconciling the natural landscape with human demands so that minimal harm is done. Minimal harm? Every action has both positive and negative consequences, depending on perspective, and that is a challenge for living sustainably. Humans need to minimize their impact but seek a quality of life across the physical and biophysical spectrum. The world population has grown and now consumes at an unsustainable level. Globally lifestyles now require 1.5 Earth’s to support human activities.[3] For all humans to live as the average American would require 5 Earths. Humans can grow beyond current understandings and live within the limits of Earth but that will require a new way of thinking.

Studying our environment has evolved from studying fragments to the holistic systems approach that studies the interaction of systems components and external factors over time scales that vary from seconds to millennia. This chapter will introduce the physical and ecological environment so that we begin once again, to live as part of Earth’s systems, instead of apart from them.