The ordinary is not ordinary. We become accustomed to it because it is what we experience and do everyday, so it usually evades careful examination and evaluation. The normal is supposed to be normal. And yet, from the perspective of our human history and our planet’s biophysical history, what is happening now is unprecedented in almost every regard. Our knowledge is rising at a rate unparalleled in our past, while our influence on the ecosystems that have kept our planet stable and reliable for our purposes is being transformed by our activity.
What we don’t seem to realize is that continuing to do what we consider to be ordinary is suicidal. By conducting our lives as we usually do, we are burning too much fossil fuel to supply our energy, occupying too much land to grow our agricultural crops, overfishing our oceans for protein, and intruding on ecosystems to the extent that we are initiating a mass extinction of species. We are also acidifying and warming our oceans, melting our glaciers and polar ice caps, and causing climate change that is instigating devastating weather extremes. And we are making and discarding massive amounts of plastics that begin by poisoning our land, soil, water and air, then end by entering our food and bodies as micro particles. We are also adding to this problem by producing and releasing into the environment toxic “forever chemicals” that won’t break down by natural means. We have inadvertently embarked on a planet-wide experiment with consequences that are rapidly moving beyond our ability to control.
It would be comforting to know that this is not happening. And yet it is, confirmed by multitudinous quantitative measurement by multitudinous empirical means in multitudinous areas of investigation. Almost every study of the natural world comes with a message of warning. Indeed, these alarms are now becoming too numerous, diverse and complex to even list. And they are all pointing in the direction of something that is profoundly wrong with the notion that our ordinary behaviour is ordinary.
In defence of ourselves—if any justification is valid for a species that is self-identified as Homo sapiens—this behaviour is difficult to change precisely because it is ordinary. It’s what we commonly do, so it evades consideration, evaluation and judgment. If politics keeps drawing our attention away from environmental issues to our conventional values, economics and consumption, then alternatives will not register and alarms will not be heard. If everyone is flying away to distant places for exotic vacations, then the deleterious environmental effects of carbon dioxide emissions will be difficult to critique. If everyone is buying large SUVs instead of efficient compact vehicles, then the normal will seem acceptable. If our meat consumption stays too high for a sustainable form of agriculture, then the old practice will persist.
During more than half a century of warnings, the science identifying our environmental problems has become more refined, sophisticated and ominous. The actual consequences of the ecological deterioration are no longer theoretical. Indeed, they are becoming increasingly obvious, usually exceeding the worst-case scenarios of earlier predictions.
But none of this has changed our individual and our collective behaviour enough to be commensurate with the unfolding environmental crisis. The tragedy is that we know what is happening. And we individually and collectively know what to do to prevent the consequences. But adaptation has become a strategy of avoidance that prevents us from acknowledging what is actually happening. It’s the survival mechanism that we use to convert the extraordinary into the ordinary until we cannot even recognize a crisis.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top image credit: Wildfire smoke, during a drought – Photo by Alabama Extension via Flickr (Public Domain)