In light of the destructive impact that recent human history has had on other species and our environment, suggesting that humans are the natural conservators of life might seem unrealistic, even ludicrous. But accelerating technological change challenges us to adopt to a very steep learning curve. While the problems that technological breakthroughs solve are often apparent, those same breakthroughs can cause problems that are less obvious. Even when issues with a technological breakthrough become known society is often slow to react effectively. Although accelerating technological change has been coming at us at a relentless pace for hundreds and possibly thousands of years, only in the past 150 years have we started to recognize its attendant damage, and only in the last 50 years have we begun to develop a scientific understanding of the global impact of human activity.
What we have learned is that human impact has been devastating. Humans have done deliberate damage, such as eliminating the Bison from the American west in the late 19th century, or the burning of the rain forests in South America which continues to this day. Human indifference and myopic focus on profits, such as producing the non-biodegradable plastics overwhelming our oceans, and not factoring in the remediation of industrial pollution as a basic cost of production have also caused great damage. And humans have also caused major damage unknowingly, such as releasing greenhouse gases now recognized to be wreaking climactic havoc.
Over the past century humans have destroyed natural habitats, polluted land, sea, and sky, spread invasive species, overharvested natural resources, and driven our earth dangerously close to runaway climate change. We have forced nature to its limits.
Although the worst effects of un-remediated human caused climate change lies ahead, it has already caused evermore severe storms, hurricanes, floods, wild fires, droughts, land erosion, desertification, deforestation, a global rise in sea levels, and hotter global temperatures. Additionally, the high levels of carbon dioxide driving climate change is also causing ocean acidification, posing a threat to a variety of aquatic life.
Human caused climate change is not only having a devastating effect on other species, but also threatening to wreak havoc throughout human society, creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees, intensifying global impoverishment, disrupting global food supplies, creating conditions that spread diseases, causing incalculable economic losses and increasing political instability.