Chapter 16 – Are We Our Own Worst Enemy?

As human skills and populations grew, their societies became bigger and more complex. They initially formed egalitarian groups which had members that were dependent upon one another for their survival. Over time, humans established a sedentary lifestyle (about 3000 to 12,000 years ago) with increasing agricultural expertise, and as populations grew, certain groups formed complex civilizations and lost their egalitarian features due to the rise of despotic dominants. Within the past few thousand years, many individuals and their societies have transformed from an egalitarian status to become more independent, evolving from a quasi-eusocial existence to a more-or-less asocial (solitary or private) one, even though we live and work closer together in larger populations. Many humans have progressively become so preoccupied with modern life, their jobs, the political establishment, and individual desires that they have lost their connection with Mother Nature, the biological system that bore them. Except for a small but very valuable, sometimes heroic few, many contemporary humans could not care less about other species that they coinhabit Earth with or the ecosystems that support them. Many humans are even losing touch with each other. Within recent years, humans have raced almost unconsciously toward their biotic potential as an ultramodern, overpopulated cosmopolitan species. The question we must now ask ourselves is this: with all of the evolutionary changes the human species and its predecessors have undergone, have they managed to develop features that keep them from being overbearingly threatening to other species, themselves, and the world, or have they remained more animalistic and increased their high degree of arrogant dominance, aggression, and technological capabilities to the point of putting everything they know in harm's way? The human population has grown technologically primarily since the commencement of Mesopotamian civilizations in Sumer and the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires, all native to the territory of modern-day Iraq. Without predators to keep our numbers down and in spite of our wars, disease epidemics, flare-ups of genocide, and secret societies that have been adamant about eliminating what they feel represents the weaker segment of the human species, our cosmopolitan population has grown all too rapidly. The large-scale beginning of the oil industry has been attributed to the drilling of a well near Titusville, Pennsylvania. The first offshore oil well was drilled near Summerland, California, in 1887. It was only 300 ft from the water's edge and connected to the land by a long wharf. The first well in marine waters that was not connected to the land was drilled at Caddo Lake, Louisiana, in 1911. During the 1920s and 1930s, wells were drilled in the lakes, swamps, and bayous of southern Louisiana. The Model T was introduced in 1908, and by 1916, half of the cars in the United States were Model Ts ( Berger, 2001; Williams et al., 1992). By 2012, there were 240.5 million cars and light trucks being driven in the United States alone, the largest vehicle population in the world. In 2010, the global number of cars exceeded 1.015 billion. Buying and selling petroleum products around the world has been big business, and getting petroleum from one country to another requires movement over water. That oil was being harvested for some time under marine waters and transported to other locations has been a disaster in the making. By the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, there had been oil spills all over the world, caused either by naval accidents or during major wars. Oil spills are dangerous for all forms of life. Since at least half of the oxygen in the world is generated in the oceans, this is of particular importance to marine photoautotrophs and organisms that depend on them for an aerobic environment. Further, upon reaching the edges of a marine environment, precious mangrove environments and intertidal zones, areas that are extremely biodiverse, are affected, and this, in turn, affects terrestrial organisms. In addition to the ecological significance of mangrove and intertidal destruction, the die-off of sea creatures halts marine-related businesses and affects the livelihood of numerous people who depend on coastlines. As disastrous as these oil spills have been to planetary abuse, we may wonder whether they were the beginning of coastline destruction? The Gulf of Mexico, like many other areas in the world that lie close to human populations, was a deteriorating ecological disaster area long before the release of oil, and the roots of these disasters, also from the hands of humans, are on land. The Mississippi River is a mighty river that receives drainage water from terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems throughout its course. Small and large streams and rivers throughout the Midwest drain extensive areas and flow into the Mississippi. Pesticides and fertilizers used by humans enter runoff which flows into the river, and they, along with vast amounts of other pollutants, are dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. These chemicals, which have killed unknown numbers of terrestrial and aquatic organisms en route to the Gulf, have subsequently created a dead zone in Gulf waters off the coast of Louisiana. Some of the chemicals found in runoff promote the growth and reproduction of many marine microorganisms. Nitrogen-rich compounds found in fertilizer and waste material runoff provide nutrients that result in algal blooms. Upon the termination of a bloom, there is a great dying of organisms that sink to the bottom of the water and decompose, depleting the water of oxygen. It occurs in other waters around the world as well. The Northern Gulf of Mexico's hypoxic waters represent one of the Western Hemisphere's largest “dead zones”—areas where a lack of oxygen kills fish, crustaceans, and other marine life. The size of the Gulf zone varies but at its peak, it stretches along the inner continental shelf from the mouth of the Mississippi River westward to the upper Texas coast, covering about 7000 square miles, an area as large as New Jersey. Long-term consequences to biodiversity, species abundance, and biomass in the Gulf are not yet known, but experience with other coastal dead zones has shown significant ecological deterioration and depleted fisheries. One hundred and forty-six dead zones in the world's oceans where marine life could not be supported due to depleted oxygen levels were reported in 2003. Some of these were small, but the largest dead zone covered 70,000 km2 (27,000 mi). A 2008 study counted 405 dead zones worldwide, and in January 2011, the World Resources Institute (WRI) and Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) identified 534 low-oxygen “dead zones” and an additional 228 sites worldwide exhibiting signs of marine eutrophication (areas with an overabundance of certain chemicals, e.g., fertilizers and pesticides). WRI has since discovered 13 additional sites that are already eutrophic and in danger of becoming dead zones, bringing the total number of coastal areas around the world known to be suffering from nutrient pollution at the time of this writing to 775. Animal wastes, global climate shifts, anthropogenic influences, dwindling resources, pollution, and the destructive nature of humans are subsequently discussed in detail. Evidence provided in this chapter offers an eye-opening account of the influence of the world's most dominant animal, Homo sapiens.