where we went wrong

Every organism of every species does its best to protect itself.

Survival. Thriving.

Sure.

The human race is unusually capable, unusually clever. We went too far.

Organisms and species don’t inherently understand that bit about “ecological limits and balances.” Nature as a whole enforces that in general and long-term ways. Species population blooms do happen temporarily.

The human species population bloom has been a whopper. But it will eventually terminate as they all must and do. Ecology rules.

* * * *

The human species population bloom and “development” monstrosity is a mess of a thing. It’s not good for us, we’re not happy within it.

The population-bloom aspect of it has been a result of us becoming the Apex Predator of All Apex Predators.

OK. But the development-monstrosity aspect of it has been a result of something more particularistic: We made an effort to effectuate Control.

We’ve tried to Control all of Creation.

Religions intuit that this is kind of bad, wrong . . . “sinful.”

Original Sin . . . when when we attempted to clear land.

Our population numbers were growing so much that we could no longer thrive just from gathering the bounty of nature. We had to produce food. We tried to produce as much food as possible. We tried to clear the land of flora “weeds” and fauna “pests.” That turned into a certain kind of agriculture, what Daniel Quinn calls a “totalitarian form of agriculture.” And it modeled the idea of controlling all of creation.

Good luck with that, humanity.