Grasping the stinging tree

The rainforests of the Australian east coast are revered for their age, beauty, diversity and richness. Among their countless species is the Gympie-gympie, a tree whose hollow, hypodermic like silicate hairs inject some of the most painful plant venom on Earth. Touching the stinging tree’s large, heart shaped leaves has been known to cause such agony as to induce delirium. No human in their right mind knowingly seeks out this plant to touch, but for those unfortunate enough to be confronted with it, healing cannot begin until all these fine, microscopic needles are removed. To heal the harm caused, someone must grasp the hairs of the stinging tree.

The dominant culture here in the “Global West” or “Global North,” even in Australia, is a culture of silence. For a culture that prides itself on knowing many things, and of girdling the globe with its communications networks, sharing far and wide media saturated with its stories, it remains a culture of silence, and of denial.

This is particularly revealing when observing ecological collapse. That we are approaching, if not already beyond, many of the tipping points of Earth—our parent organism—is not news. Even in the Murdochian swamps of mediocrity, one is confronted with warnings of “Faster than expected,” “Precipitous decline” and “Verge of collapse.”

However, deeper discussion of the causes of the various crises afflicting our big, beautiful world, and what actions are needed beyond the cozy, comforting feel-good gestures (be it buying a Tesla or bringing a reusable coffee cup to the local coffee chain) is not encouraged.

Silence.

There are two trends whose names cannot be uttered in polite company, and they both involve degrowth. Economic degrowth, and most unutterable of all, demographic degrowth. Both are needed. Both are inevitable. We must grasp the stinging tree before healing can begin.

Looking out for our brothers and sisters

Demographic degrowth is the conscious and deliberate cultural and social decision to embrace smaller families and thus brings about a gradual decrease in the human footprint among the entirety of life on Earth. This would allow us to take less land, water and resources of all kinds, ensuring that more is available to our sibling species, so that they may recover from the losses they’ve suffered and thrive alongside us. We don’t need to be 8,150,000,000 individuals (projected to be 10,400,000,000 within the next 60 years) while our siblings are being driven to extinction by a cultural fixation on a simplistic, toddler like demand for more, more, more.

We now sit a critical moment, where 99% of all vertebrate biomass on Earth consists of either humans, or “livestock”. All other vertebrate life – every one of our siblings from the Blue Whale, the largest individual animal ever known to have existed, down to the Amau Frog – share the remaining 1%. That is a tiny and shrinking slither of space in the biosphere that our obsession with infinite growth of our numbers (be it dollars on our spreadsheet, or the patriarchal encouragement of large families) has so far not cleared, starved, or “harvested.”

It should not need pointing out, yet it does, that this situation is not sustainable. Infinite growth, as we learn (or at least should learn) in high school science, is impossible within a closed system. Thermodynamics forbids it. Here on Earth, we are blessed to live within a holobiont system that is self-regulating, so as to maintain an internal rough homoeostasis that perpetuates her existence – much like how we maintain our own internal body temperature and the internal balance of gut bacteria. An explosion of any one species would, without any counterbalancing factor, destabilise and ultimately collapse the entire biosphere and end life on Earth. Fortunately, this does not happen (under normal conditions) as, while we have population explosions, the depletion of their prey species or a non-living resource such as breeding sites, water, and so on kicks in as a brutal but efficient balancing element, starving or displacing the explosive population to the point where it finds a new balance (even if that is a new lower level than which it started at).

Like all natural systems, this holobiont is efficient—and completely abenevolent. Gaia, Nature, the Biosphere—call her what you will—neither knows nor cares about the suffering of individuals, or even entire populations. For the sake of avoiding misery and suffering for our own species, we have no choice but to remain within balance and equilibrium with our sibling species – lest, my dear first-world reader, your own people experience that same abenevolent efficiency, normally felt only by those without the luxury of hoarded excess, the 2,300,000,000 people currently facing food insecurity, or those who belong to the Pacific, existing on smaller and smaller slithers of life-giving land as their home environments disappear beneath the waves.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

As much as those hard-boiled culture warriors of anthropocentrism bark and growl about “Ecowarrior cults demanding child sacrifice,” a culturally – not bureaucratically – led movement toward smaller single-child and child-free families and relationships is a culture that celebrates, reveres and treasures life.¹ The lives of the coming generations of humans will be of far greater quality and their odds of success far better in a world less overexploited and degraded. A smaller human population would provide more ecological space for the 46% of humans who live without any access to any kind of basic sanitation, or the 28% who are undernourished to increase their consumption of basic resources needed to live a dignified and secure life.

This is all the more important going forward, for the longer our current over-exploitation of resources continues, the further the long-term carrying capacity of Earth will be degraded, shrinking the possible footprints of future generations.

The lives of our children, and indeed the children of all our sibling species will still be incredibly hard, there is no sugar-coating it. The damage wrought by the unbridled consumption, expansionism and hubris of agro-industrial capitalism will leave deep scars on Gaia that have and will continue to compromise the wellbeing of all her diverse life for timescales we have yet to fully understand. Many, human and others alike, will not make it. But we can give them the best possible chance, with focused quality time, attention and love to impart them with the cultural, social and practical skills needed, and the resources to go with them. But first we have to pull out the venomous hairs of unfettered growth, before the healing can begin.

Endnote

1) No, I’m not being hyperbolic – the spectre of child sacrifice has been invoked by the right against advocates from demographic degrowth, such as in this op-ed.

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Krystal Jasmine Garnett is a Gaian living in Australia. A version of this essay was first written for Ayfpìlfya ftu Eywa’eveng.