Do modern societies have a realistic path toward living in harmony with nature? How can population activists combine compassion and effective advocacy? We invite your answers to these difficult yet necessary questions.
by Gaia Baracetti
Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian photographer. His striking black-and-white photographs, taken during his long, immersive travels to forgotten or war-ravaged parts of the world, are both aesthetically beautiful and instantly meaningful.
In The Salt of the Earth, the documentary about his life and work, Salgado shows some of his work and tells the stories behind it. Well into the movie we see his images from the Rwandan genocide, both of the predominantly Tutsi victims and of Hutus caught up in the wave of revenge that came soon after. The photographer had already witnessed and portrayed the famine in East Africa, as testified by pictures of skin-and-bones bodies wasted by illness and starvation. He captured other similarly devastating conflicts, such as the war in the former Yugoslavia, in the heart of Europe, and the infernal burning of the oil wells of Kuwait – which appeared to spare those that had set the fires on their way out, engulfing instead the firefighters that had come to extinguish them, and the abandoned and trapped animals the fleeing humans had left behind.
It seems that, for Salgado, Rwanda was the final straw. Man is too cruel, he thought. We don’t deserve this world. For a sensitive artist who had made humanity and its plight the center of his life’s work, that was a monumental conclusion to reach.
Salgado withdrew to his family farm in Brazil, which had been stripped of the native vegetation and left barren by years of cattle farming, and, following an inspired suggestion from his wife Lélia, started restoring the forest. As a photographer, he now turned to nature, travelling around the world to document, as he saw it, life as it was at the time of Creation – for a breathtaking project he called Genesis. He became a nature photographer; he would also visit remote tribes dwelling in the Amazon forest, in New Guinea, or Africa, to capture ways of life that appeared so close to nature and removed from industrial civilisation as to look like they had been there since the dawn of time.
It is not my place to put words into Salgado’s mouth; his own documentary and pictures speak for themselves. But the impression I got from them, and from his journey as he told it, is that he wasn’t retreating into nature to avoid humanity, but rather to explore a different, healthier, less destructive way to be a human in this world.
A while ago, I published a blog saying that I believe humans to be so destructive and cruel that I sometimes lean toward thinking we don’t deserve to be here and should work towards our own, peaceful, extinction. I do not have or want children of my own. But I do love actual, specific people. I remember talking to a friend about this, summarising it as “I like people, I dislike humanity”, and he laughed: “I am the opposite: I dislike people, I like humanity”. Is there any difference? We are both just trying to give names and assign abstractions to our experiences and values, to the stories we hear, struggling with making sense of it all, with seeing the good and bad in the same things and in our very selves.
Here I am again, in a more recent blog, arguing viciously against people who consider voting for Kamala Harris, a candidate responsible for mass murder in Gaza, because they believe her environmental policies might be better, or for other reasons. “But think of the children!” I scream. Why won’t anyone think of the little humans being massacred on the way to electoral victory or global supremacy?
So what am I about? Humanity, or nature?
Both. Yes, the cruelty of humans is probably unprecedented in the history of this planet. We are more violent, more destructive and more collectively and irredeemably sadistic than any species that we know to have walked, swam, or flown over the Earth. An argument could even be made that our violence and disregard for life is key in explaining our organizational and technological success as a species and our expansion and (apparent?) dominance of the planet.
And yet one cannot be against cruelty and condone cruelty against the cruel. One cannot love nature and single out for hatred one species that nature created, among so many others. One cannot love life and hate oneself.
As long as we are around, however long that might be, we have a moral obligation to care for nature and for one another. I am not one of those environmentalists who believe that the human problem can be solved by the deliberate destruction of humanity. Maybe a rational, amoral argument could be made for that – you could kill as many humans as possible and thus reduce our footprint on this world. This is not guaranteed to work; war is destructive for the environment, too, and for humans as for other animals, a violent disruption can have the effect of increasing reproductive activity. But even if it did work, what would be the point?
We could never convince enough fellow humans to accept such a plan to reduce our collective negative impact on the planet. And who among us should go first? People who are openly or secretly fine with exterminating others or letting them die always operate under the assumption that it will not happen to them. Otherwise, why not just kill yourself?
It might seem like I’m creating a strawman here – no environmentalist is seriously suggesting extermination is the way to go. But I do see a subterranean current, occasionally bubbling to the surface, of this kind of thinking. The tolerance for mass human rights abuses in the name of environmental policies or as a price to pay for them: the expulsion of native populations from parks, wars against supposedly inferior peoples who breed too much or engage in traditional economic activities, the land grabs and human rights violations associated with renewable energy projects. Or the refrain “nature will do it for us” – implying that we should accept and be happy with the fact that, since we are unable to rein ourselves in, “nature” will cull our numbers through starvation, disease, war and a despair so existential we’ll give up our will to breed.
Predicting something, letting it happen and doing it aren’t the same thing, of course. But I often sense, more than an acceptance, a thinly veiled self-satisfaction among those who make such claims. As if they were floating above humanity itself, bathed in a wisdom in the ways of the world that others, preoccupied with their day-to-day survival, do not possess.
Even within myself, I have to check my own emotions, my own reactions. As I was watching those Salgado pictures, I admit to having thought about how Jared Diamond convincingly argues that the Rwandan genocide was also a consequence of overpopulation and conflict over scarce resources; about how, when Alan Weisman visited starving Niger, he saw that people who couldn’t feed the children they already had, and lost them, still kept trying to have more children, hoping to find the food they needed in the future. Should we really feel sorry for them? Do these people not realise that, to an extent, they have brought this upon themselves? What am I supposed to think – what, truly – about a mother whose saggy breasts can’t feed her baby, but is soon to be pregnant with another? About a man who, for lust or pride, mates with his wife in the squalor of a refugee camp or during a famine?
It is hard to balance the understanding of how someone ended up in a certain predicament with the desire to help them, to find empathy for people who make choices we do not approve of. Humans have extraordinary capacities for compassion, for reasoning, and for communication. Let’s talk to each other and respect each other and find a way that is not predicated upon violence, upon acceptance of the mass suffering of others, but that theorises and practices self-restraint and collaboration for the common goal of living well on a living planet.
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