OCEAN SCHOOL

Ethics of the Human Footprint

We also need to consider from an ethical perspective that we are part of an evolutionary system of life forms on this planet. In a very real sense we are part of a living system. We carry the genes of the first invertebrates, the first fishes, and the first land vertebrates. We carry a miniature ocean in ourselves. We are connected backwards to every living thing for the last 3 billion years. We even carry the cellular mechanisms of the organisms which made the oxygen on our planet! Our mitochondria are ancient organisms which still live inside every one of our cells. The gill slits of the first fishes can be seen in our embryonic development.

 

Yet we try to separate ourselves from all other life forms by simply using them for our purposes. We are using the oceans as a food basket and dump at the same time, creating bare wastelands out of systems which took hundreds of millions of year to evolve. Some of the existing coral reefs on earth today might be hundreds of million of years old – and it has taken us less that 100 years to destroy them. Our economic plans and justifications span decades or perhaps for long-range visions centuries. We destroy resources in economic and political endeavors which will be less than meaningless in perhaps 1000 years.

 

What will the earth look like in millions of years? Will we have destroyed it to fuel or civilization for a tiny fraction of that time? Will we as the dominant life form have become the only life form? How can we assume to be able to survive as the only life form? Different species are different expressions of one fascinating force – life. Maybe we should reconsider our assumed right to limit that expression for our personal gain.