Altruism, Ecology, and the Future of Humanity

Growing up in America, people make it seem like life is about going out for all you can. Now, I completely agree in a spiritual way, but that way of thinking has created an ecological nightmare that won't get better unless we do.

What if there was a happy medium, an optimal point between taking for your self and leaving room for the ecology?

I like this example, which was brought to my attention by Professor John Harte in a class called "Ecology and Society" in the Energy and Resources department at UC Berkeley.

Just consider bacteria and plants. The bacteria create nutrients that plants are able to take up, the plants in turn transform sunlight into sugar, which eventually becomes part of the soil when the plants die. The bacteria use the energy in the sugar to carry out their lives and continue creating nutrients for the plants.

But the bacteria need nutrients too. They compete with the plants for these precious building blocks of life. If bacteria consume too much nutrients and overpopulate, the plants become outcompeted, they die, and the bacteria colony to collapses soon after.

But how does this relate to humans? Consider our situation in the world, with 7 billion people who are consuming more and more resource as a means to make their lives "better."

Resources are what we need to survive, but complications from our extraction rate (soil degradation in the case of food, climate change and pollution in the case of fossil fuel energy) are surely setting in, compounding as our resource use increases.

So what is Altruism? Are the bacteria, the species that takes up just enough resources to survive but not so much that it destroy their life support system, truly "altruists?"

Altruism is usually defined as carrying out actions that benefit others but bring no gain for the actor or that bring harm (reduced evolutionary fitness) to the the actor.

The point I am trying to make is that the bacteria that have the best long term survival are "altruists" in the short term sense; but in the long term, they are much more fit to survive in the environment.

Can humans, especially those of us in a society that promotes and expects copious consumption and waste, learn to live in a way that values long term survival as something more than just altruism? Everything will depend on the answer to that question.