When you visit NASA’s website on the causes of climate change, the message is clear: “Human activities are driving the global warming trend observed since the mid-20th century.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency echoes this sentiment, attributing climate change to “human activities.” The narrative is fixated on humans and our harmful practices. The thought arises that humanity should vanish to protect the Earth from our detrimental influence.
Climate change skeptics, now unable to ignore the strange changes in weather patterns, argue that climate change stems from natural, non-human factors. This perspective is decisively incorrect. The current climate crisis and global heating are abnormal phenomena that would not have occurred without human interference, a point I am not disputing.
Considering that climate change would not exist without human intervention, it’s reasonable and not entirely misleading to claim that “human activity” is the culprit. However, we and future generations must scrutinize this narrative more critically.
My concern lies with the terminology: attributing climate change to human activity without clarifying which groups of people or how these individuals came to engage in activities that alter the climate.
Stating, “Human activities cause climate change” is akin to saying, “Human diets cause heart disease and obesity.” While it’s true that specific human diets contribute to these conditions, unlike, for instance, dolphin diets, this generalization needs to be more complex and helpful for tackling the underlying issues.
This goes beyond a simple matter of semantics. The way we discuss climate change influences how we perceive and address it.
Not all human activity collectively leads to climate change. Most human actions throughout history have not resulted in the climatic changes we are experiencing today. The current climate crisis is driven by the activities necessary to support the economies and lifestyles of a subset of the population. Not all human activity entails ecological harm.
In her book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Potawatomi botanist and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer challenges her ecology students to identify human actions that damage the environment, which they can readily do. However, they need help when asked to list human activities that benefit the environment.
Kimmerer’s work emphasizes examples of how humans have historically been and can continue to be, positive and reciprocal contributors to our ecosystems. For much of our history, and in various cultures around the globe today, human activity has been sustainable and even advantageous to the environment. It is only within certain societies, such as the Euro-American industrial capitalist model I grew up in, that the notion of human activity being beneficial to the environment seems far-fetched.
At a particular juncture, the notion took root that humans are inherently detrimental to the Earth. This idea has become widespread in the contemporary West, particularly within the environmental movement. There’s frequent wringing of hands over the alleged perils of overpopulation instead of engaging in far more beneficial discussions about how our populations exist. Visions of utopian—or perhaps dystopian—futures feature hypermodern, densely populated urban areas that segregate human activities into isolated zones, leaving the natural world (from which we are presumably excluded) undisturbed by human interference.
The misguided belief is transparent: humans are harmful to nature. Exclude humans from nature. Problem addressed.
Even among proponents of the degrowth movement, which champions reducing economic production and consumption to live more collectively and sustainably with less, there persists a common notion that shrinking the economy equates to diminishing human impact on the planet. In a movement distinctly concentrating on lifestyle and economic models, the focus often still falls on restricting human activities rather than reshaping them.
To be explicit, human activity is not inherently damaging to the Earth. It is the industrial, capitalist, and colonial practices that are. Suppose there’s a need to limit anything (and I hold the view that there is). In that case, it should be clearly stated that we aim to curtail economies reliant on extraction that disregard the well-being of non-human entities (and economically disadvantaged humans), along with our collective commitment to lifestyles that wreak ecological havoc.
Humans can construct complex societies, cultures, and economies not predicated on indiscriminate extraction. For millennia, humanity has coexisted with the Earth ecologically and reciprocally. Like all other living beings, we inevitably influence our surrounding ecosystems by simply being a part of them, yet influence does not equate to harm.
Consider using fire, which is likely humanity’s earliest significant tool for landscape management. Burning can be conducted in a manner detrimental to ecosystems, but it can also serve as a powerful means to enhance ecological health. Indigenous communities in what is now the American West have utilized controlled burns to maintain forest health and mitigate wildfire severity for centuries. It was the European settlers who, erroneously believing such practices were damaging, prohibited them.
Due to this flawed perspective on human environmental impact, forest health in the American West declined significantly, and wildfires became increasingly severe. Without a doubt, European settlers engaged in numerous environmentally destructive actions, but they mistakenly deemed Indigenous practices like controlled burning as harmful as well.
The U.S. Forest Service is beginning to acknowledge the advantages of controlled burns. Nevertheless, Euro-American culture and its institutions still show reluctance towards embracing what Indigenous peoples globally have long understood: when appropriately conducted, human intervention is vital for ecological well-being. Humans are another species within our ecosystems, integral and indistinguishable from the flora and fauna surrounding us, like the birds, the bees, and the sycamore trees.
It would also be inaccurate to attribute climate change solely to “European activities,” as there’s nothing inherently catastrophic about Europeans. The Sami, an Indigenous group primarily located in Scandinavia, have lived ecologically and sustainably within their territory for thousands of years. If we delve far enough into history, my ancestors from Central and Western Europe once lived in environmentally regenerative ways.
My forebears’ lifestyles, cultures, and economies gradually evolved. Their communities began to adopt more harmful practices towards their environments. Some ventured across the Atlantic Ocean and extended their destructive tendencies to North America. Through a history marked by genocide and colonization, the United States emerged, spreading its version of industrial colonial capitalism worldwide.
Consequently, the planet is heating up.
This transition from ecological ways of living to the stark dystopia of devastation we see today isn’t an inherent flaw of human nature. It’s the product of human culture, or specific cultures, among the myriad that have existed since the beginning of humanity. Although the harmful behaviors contributing to climate change may be unique to humans, they are not familiar to all humans. The lifestyle of today’s industrial societies represents an outlier, not the standard.
Many in these societies overlook this fact. We forget that the harmful lifestyles we continue today are not our sole choice, and this oversight is perpetuated in our discourse on climate change.
This error is significant.
Attributing climate change to “humans” narrows our creative vision, obscures our collective history, and overlooks that numerous human societies are not contributing to climate change. Most crucially, it shifts focus away from the actual causes of climate change: capitalist economies and industrial ways of living. It also reveals that these economic systems and lifestyles are not inevitable.
The more we discuss climate change as a human-induced issue, the further we stray from the solution: systemic lifestyle alterations, mending the fractured ideology of human dominance and our estrangement from nature, and radical adjustments to our economies, behaviors, and standards away from industrial capitalism.
We are fully capable of implementing these changes.
For those among us whose communities are driving climate change, it’s essential to recall that our ancestors transitioned from regenerative to destructive lifestyles and economies. We, too, have the potential to revert to more sustainable practices.