por Luis Villa

Today is Earth Day, and I am remembering my years in Costa Rica, helping to plant trees with friends, colleagues, and local community members, including police officers.  I am also thinking about policing in America and its partial origins in the slave patrols of the South, which wanted to maintain slavery and stemmed from economic motivations.

Economic motivation may be as old as humanity itself.  It’s a derivative of the desire to prosper, which in turn, is descended from the survival instinct.

For many, somewhere along the way, the survival instinct became an unrelenting drive to accumulate and hoard wealth. This most visibly manifests itself in socioeconomic systems, capitalism and socialism alike, that become severely unbalanced, where the “haves” are few, the “have nots” are numerous, and the disparity between them becomes so great that the entire system becomes dangerously strained.

We see this in the natural world, when a particular species takes up all the resources, grows too big for its own good, and the entire ecosystem collapses.  Large scale agriculture offers another example.  Forest ecosystems that host rich and resilient biodiversity are cleared away to make room for a particular crop, a single species or monoculture.  At first, the soil and other growing conditions are excellent for that single crop to thrive.  Then, the diminishing returns become increasingly evident.  It takes more and more pesticides, herbicides, and other artificial inputs to suppress all the other species of plants and animals that also want to enjoy the soil, space, water, and other resources.  Eventually, the soil becomes too infertile and the groundwater too contaminated.  Nothing thrives on the land anymore.

“If we pay attention to Nature, we can learn about the importance of diversity and balanced ecosystems”

Luis Villa

Human systems are not exempt from the laws of Nature.

If we pay attention to Nature, we can learn about the importance of diversity and balanced ecosystems.  In human systems, pervasive and growing racial, economic, and other social injustices (along with our constructive and destructive responses to these injustices) are either signs or full-blown alarms that something is off-balance.  They are an indication that we must nurture more diversity, share the soil, and spread the wealth between ourselves and also with the natural world, which is where all our supply chains begin and is ultimately from where we source all our sustenance and wellbeing.

On this Earth Day, I am thinking about the connection between humanity’s social systems and the Planet’s natural systems.  On this day, I am thinking more about sustainability than I am thinking about race, politics, or economics. I am thinking about the need for peace among ourselves and between us and our Planet.