distorted equilibrium

In nature, God tends to ensure there is an equilibrium, in which animal and environment coexist. If animal gets beyond its means, it can rapidly get cut down to size, often through natural transformation; for example, disease, malnutrition and destruction of its means of existence and environment. This can sometimes lead to serious loss or even eradication of the species members.

However, humans have found ways to become resilient to natural transformation and even to exploit it. That is, medicine cures what ails you, safe and healthy environments increase our average ages, mass production, innovative means of travel and communication and globalisation have ensured we can develop and live off resources that we wouldn't have access to if we were another species.

But, resilience is not necessarily adaptation, and can be short sighted - this, not so resilient in the greater scheme of things. Importantly, what it also does is build up reliance on the systems, technology and infrastructure that we have developed to prop us up and keep nature at bay, so to speak. These systems, technology and infrastructures are not features of our species – that is, they are not part of our natural bodies and we are not born with them in our natural systems. They instead can take us away from our base capacity to survive, and should they be removed, our capacity to survive may be diminished or lost, just like a muscle that hasn’t been used for years. These things also enable us to distort the natural equilibrium and live well beyond our ‘natural’, base capacity means, in a anthropo-environment with an anthropo-equilibrium. 20 million people can live in New York, only because of technology and infrastructure to support an economy and livelihoods. The warm clothes, heating and shelter maintains this mass amount of people in the same area, for an extended time.

Anthropo-equilibriums have several thousand years of experience, compared with millions of years experience by natural equilibriums. Anthropo-equilibriums change decade by decade these days (contractions perhaps?), each iteration new and untested. Each iteration, much more reliant on unnatural features of our species. What is more, while anthropo-equilibriums currently must reside within the wider natural environment (we cannot change the temperature of the Sun for instance, even if we wanted to), they often detrimentally impact the natural environment at the micro-level, leading to loss of biodiversity, erosion, climate change, to name a few.

We strive to find comfort and security in our environments. Unfortunately, at the same time we run the increasing risk of having our balloon burst. Over reliance on un-inherent features of our species increases the consequence of great adverse event/s, while over-exploitation of the natural environment increases the likelihood of these happening.

While that may be an intractable problem and risk, what we have not done is nearly enough to compensate nature or reduce the tension between natural and anthropo-environments. Nor have we really considered our reliance on things (unnatural features of our species), let alone what we might do about it. Although we are arguably more resilient, the degree of resilience required may be many multiples greater than what we have now. We need to do much more than contemplate this. And the rest will be up to God.