Seeing the Elephant: Embracing a Holistic View of Environmental Crises
By Manushi Sharma, March 11, 2024
Indigenous cultures have advocated and championed a profound relationship with Earth as a living entity, imbued with spirit, recognizing its intricate interconnected systems and advocating for respect towards all forms of life.
As a kid, I remember reading a parable about six blind men who came across an elephant. Each examined a different part of the elephant and drew a different conclusion without grasping the whole creature. This parable is salient to how we view environmental crises today.
Much like the six blind men, we each operate in our silos. We remain in an archaic notion of ‘civilization’ disconnected from nature, existing in our bubbles of safety, and operating in our limited worldview.
Indigenous cultures have advocated and championed a profound relationship with Earth as a living entity, imbued with spirit, recognizing its intricate interconnected systems and advocating for respect towards all forms of life.
Today, this ethos is called planetary boundaries which delineate nine interconnected processes within Earth's complex system that must be honored to maintain a habitable planet:
Deforestation and land use changes
Biodiversity loss
Particle pollution
Chemical pollution
Climate crisis
Ocean acidification
Ozone depletion
Nitrogen and Phosphorus cycle
Freshwater use
“The whole Earth System is a complex self-regulating system, if you push one [planetary boundary] too far it can cascade like a domino and impact the others.” - Rockström
Figure 1: Planetary Boundaries.
(Source: Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F. S., Lambin, E. F., … Foley, J. A. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461(7263), 472-475. doi:10.1038/46147
Since its introduction to scientific discourse in 2009, evidence points out that we have breached six out of nine boundaries. This implies that a global focus on climate change alone is not enough. Regional environmental catastrophes are manifestations of these breached boundaries and impact everyone! Let me explain this vicious, self-multiplying cycle.
Land use change due to the exploitation of the Congo Basin, the second-largest tropical rainforest, to expand cobalt and copper mining for ‘clean’ energy technologies, leads to deforestation, diminishing the amount of water released from plants through transpiration - a significant source of rainfall. Compounded with global climate change, it triggers extreme drought conditions. This abrupt transition from lush rainforest to degraded savanna unleashes a substantial store of ancient sequestered carbon, leading to more drought and tree death and decay, trapping heat in the lower atmosphere and driving global warming.
Deforestation of the Congo Basin has global consequences including severe and frequent droughts, tropical storms, heatwaves, and fire weather. Similarly, the water crisis in Sudan is a symptom of a larger problem, and it is everyone's problem!
The good news is that we are not starting from scratch. The ozone layer crisis is a reminder of humanity's innate ‘ultrasocial’ nature. We employed collective action, scientific innovation, and international cooperation to achieve progress in safeguarding Earth’s vitals or planetary boundaries. Similar to the blind men, we need targeted collaboration and action to understand the full nature of the elephant.
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