“I” want to live off-grid or “I” want to live away from it all – Environmental loading 7

Almost a year has passed and science shows us that we have to give nature and wildlife more space and that is inconsistent with people wanting to go off and live on their own. We are probably around 7,900,000,000 individuals and slowly eating the planet in so many ways that are unsustainable.

21st March 2021

My eighth post of what many individuals have in their “I” view of the world is also number 7 in my Environmental loading category. They are very related in many ways. So just to repeat, there are 7,800,000,000 of us human primates and still growing rapidly by the day. We all rely to a certain extent on our “I” experience, what seems normal to us but in terms of what’s been normal for the planet throughout time and would actually work if it was normal for all those 7.8 billion+ others like us certainly cannot be “normal” without destroying our shared life support systems.

So we all hear about or read about people who want to live or do live ecologically sound lives with low environmental impact or as in the case of this BBC article want to move away from it all and all those other annoying human primates, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56359865. Now that’s all very nice for “I” but what does it really mean in terms of environmental loading. It means that if a lot of people do it then it’s an environmental disaster. If 7,800,000,000 and increasing number of human primates live off-grid there will be no off-grid for the wolves, bears, zebras, hippos, lions, elephants and any other creatures you care to think of. We have already killed countless numbers of them as the human population soared over the last couple of centuries to almost eight times its number. Not only have human numbers grown by almost eight times in those two centuries but in many cases life expectancy has gone up and in many cases they have electricity, flushing toilets, mobile phones etc and not only that but cars and motorways to connect them to places that were once wilderness two centuries ago. Take a look at us, the human primate from the “we” position and you will see that we are too many and we have taken and continue to take too much.