Читать книгу The New Environmental Economics - Eloi Laurent - Страница 20

The general mistake so often made in studying human environment is to set apart humans and the natural world. Humankind depends on the natural world (climate, biodiversity, ecosystems) and the natural world now depends on humankind because of human domination (“wild” species for instance must be preserved by human ingenuity in order for them to survive human expansion). Strictly defined, humans are organisms within ecosystems (an ecosystem⁵ is a community of animals and plants interacting with one another and with their physical environment, echoing the definition of ecology coined by E. Haeckel in 1866 as the “relation of the animal both to its organic as well as its inorganic environment”).

The biosphere is the ecosystem of ecosystems: It is composed of biomes (different types of ecosystems with certain climate, fauna and flora such as tropical rainforests or deserts), which themselves contain smaller ecosystems (like rivers, lakes) in which live natural creatures, among them human beings (who are ecosystems themselves, home to thousands of bacteria). Because humans have literally colonized the biosphere (see Chapter 6), they have formed “Anthromes” (or Anthropogenic Biomes)⁶ on the surface of the planet such as cities, villages, croplands, and pastures. But because humans remain part of Nature, they can learn a great deal from other natural beings in order to improve their own well-being.⁷ Natural beings are connected to their environment by energy and nutrient flow. Among them, humans interact with their physical environment, for example by extracting oxygen from the atmosphere and returning carbon dioxide (in too large amounts, as Chapter 8 will make clear), and have collaborated with other organisms in many ways for a very long time (the companionship between humans and dogs is at least 30,000 years old).

The idea of laws of evolution reduced to mechanisms of fierce competition between individuals for transmission of the best gene is indeed much too reductive. It has already been discredited a long time ago. The division of work exists in many species: Just observe the inside of an anthill or a hive, to be convinced. The British evolutionary biologist William Donald Hamilton even showed, fifty years ago, that individuals of certain species help members of their first circle to reproduce, which ensures an indirect form of gene transmission to the next generation. Research recently highlighted the ability of some insects not only to sacrifice themselves but to sacrifice their reproductive capacity, so that other individuals can perpetuate themselves. This is the case of “workers” among bees, ants, or termites.⁸ Collaboration among individuals of the same species is in fact a necessity for survival and reproduction: Some dolphins who know how to hunt alone decide nevertheless to associate with congeners to implement a sophisticated technique aimed at locking their prey in concentric circles in order to maximize the volume of the catch.

Where humans and other animals part ways is in the unique ability of humans not only to collaborate (for survival and reproduction) but also to cooperate in building, sharing, and passing on to future generations common knowledge.⁹ Yet this unique cooperation occurs in social systems embedded in and dependent on the biosphere.