Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What’s that smell coming from the basement?

…the sad reality is our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond…

We all know what happens to organisms whose ability to adapt fails to keep up with the pace of its changing environment. Humans are numerous and resourceful enough to be around for a long time (even if it is ultimately in only small numbers, in widely spaced patches). Civilization is another story. Its dependence on the combination of cheap, reliable energy, and immediate access to material resources on a planetary scale makes it vulnerable to disruptions of either. The unacknowledged and unprotected foundation of all of this economic activity is a healthy, thriving biosphere, which is needed to keep the soft, squishy humans who think they’re in charge alive.

A healthy biosphere means leaving leaving large swathes of Earth “undeveloped” so it can go on doing what it’s doing, unhindered. Civilization doesn’t do well with “undeveloped,” as it regards such “unused” spaces in much the same way an artist or writer might look at a blank canvas, or empty page, believing its plans for use can only ever be an improvement on what is already there. There’s always that urge to fill in this supposed emptiness, to “improve” the “wasteland, ” and the inability to know when to leave well enough alone. We’ve developed powerful tools and technologies, and claimed exclusive, unlimited ownership of the entire planet before we’ve even learned about everything that constitutes it and how it all works together. We’re clever, but not smart. We aren’t living up to Linnaeus’s wildly optimistic species epithet of “wise,” and have made insufficient progress towards his injunction to know ourself. We’re a bunch of hyperactive, barefoot, psychotic apes with nuclear weapons, throwing our weight around in a house of glass.

The normal operation of civilization, which is now geared to a recklessly dangerous degree towards maximized, short-term returns for only a few, is destroying this biogeochemical foundation. Civilization is autolytic; it is consuming itself, and there’s more concern about who will extract the most out of the world before the whole Ponzi scheme collapses (this is called “winning”), instead of the fact that that this collapse is hastened by continued pursuit of business as usual itself. It’s a game of musical chairs being played by chainsmokers on board the Hindenburg, where the last one left with a chair congratulates himself on his entreprenurial accumen and asbestos underwear, even as the chair he’s on ignites beneath him.