The more the ecological sciences advance, the more a sort of strange and unsettling thing happens: a picture advances into focus that paints our industrial nature as radically incompatible with existing ecosystems. What we're beginning to realize - well perhaps it was known within various scattered fringe disciplines for some time - is that the entire human ecosystem as it currently exists is fundamentally antagonistic to the natural ecosystems which ultimately sustain it.
Antagonism isn't a particularly abnormal force. Anything with mass necessarily antagonizes the matter around it; it displaces and rearranges the matter outside of it, by virtue of the fact that two particles can't occupy the same space at the same time. Life is in constant antagonism with itself; it is in constant flux.
But what is new here is the scale of the mass in question, or this human aggregate which has exploded in scale, scope, and quality in the last 200 or so years.
There is essentially a new classification that has been introduced for human ecosystems called the technoecosystem, which takes its unique designation from its radically new nature and its frequent incompatibility with natural ecosystems. The technoecosystem is situated in what has been labeled a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
Our industrial civilization gets its own epoch because of the profundity of its effect on the global ecology. We are seeing the beginning of the end of a massive geological timeframe, initiated by an extreme metabolic process touched off just two centuries ago, the catalysts of which were fossil fuel and the post-Christian/industrial sensibility, among other endlessly complex and varied factors of course.
It is difficult to conceive entirely of what has happened, as we are immersed in the world we have created, but maybe a couple of empirical observations coupled with an imagination can help.
Our industrial processes have not only disrupted the climate, they've disrupted all of the major natural cycles, one of the most important of which is the nitrogen cycle, which carries with it a host of consequences, and far reaching effects which are fractal and exponential in their nature.
The production of nitrogen fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels has resulted in the hyperproduction of nitrogen compounds which in the past were limited to extreme energy disturbances. These compounds act as nutrients which essentially saturate ecosystems that paradoxically depend on controlled nutrient levels, resulting in acidification (a separate problem) and the loss of bio-diversity, since organisms which respond more quickly to the increased nutrients overrun other organisms.
An example of this is the eutrophication of a body of water which is caused both by the over-concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizer runoffs and other chemical flows, which upon introducing rich concentrated nutrients into the water, cause exploding algae blooms. These blooms proceed to suck the oxygen out of the water, making the water virtually unlivable for most organisms. This isn't just a problem peculiar to various ponds or canals that you see in urban areas: there are entire dead zones along the coasts of developed countries, which ultimately are going to affect entire coastal systems.
That's one specific issue; there are plenty more. You're talking about multiple simultaneous fields of disruption, whose grim waves fan outward and crash into each other, producing greater instability. The disruption of multiple natural cycles and climatic tendencies is one thing; add to that rapid resource depletion, record species extinctions, and increasing internal instabilities of the human ecology itself - which are doubtless caused in large part due to the environmental antagonisms washing back after previous antagonisms - and you have the development of what amounts to a gigantic powder keg.
A living system has a tendency to re-establish homeostasis fairly reliably, but there are rare events in which there is catastrophic failure of multiple regulating systems, or there is an extreme environmental or climatic shock which completely rearranges the board. This is a complex problem that goes far deeper than merely isolating various causal chains of imbalance, though that itself is a useful exercise perhaps.
It is not that the manipulation of physical reality is an evil, it is the scale and the magnitude with which it is being done. Every living thing engages in some sort of manipulation to preserve energy differentials to sustain itself (a new theory in physics is attempting to use thermodynamics to make the argument that living things manipulate to disperse energy, which is another discussion altogether). This is the basis for complex life: as life forms manipulate their environment, this produces changing environmental landscapes for other life forms to live off of.
What we are seeing is the runaway growth and imperialism of a single species, whose mass scrambling and rearranging of the basic components of matter is generating an increasingly turbulent environment, which disrupts the processes of other life forms, processes that ultimately sustain the imperial species in the first place. What works in a limited and short-sighted manner for one species denies agency to all others. Collective industrial humanity is literally sawing off the branch it is perched on.
This is ultimately a problem of imbalance, which seems to lie at the base of most existential problems. You could imagine a nominally "sustainable" society, upon undergoing a process of successful growth, run into the same sort of problems.
Success, growth, absolute mastery, all of these things paradoxically undermine themselves at their peak. What else is there to do? This is life. It has happened before.
The baseline input to this process is usable energy. Fossil fuel consumption and refining, along with other chemical processes has managed to artificially extend the duration of our experiment in mass matter manipulation and experimentation. Our powers of manipulation have produced a bubble within which billions of mouths can be fed (barely) with petroleum-fueled industrial agriculture, which literally takes petroleum and phosphorous-derived chemical compounds to artificially boost soil fertility. Otherwise we are talking about a carrying capacity of one billion or so (from most figures I've seen) if we are relying on natural processes.
Declining oil reserves - it takes more energy to pump less energy-rich stores from the ground - put a strain on this process. This process relies on a baroque, functioning human ecology to keep the machinery running, the fragility of which is showing itself in parallel to the increasing fragility of environmental supports.
Time will tell whether the energy runs out before we do lasting damage to the environmental landscape, rearranging the coordinates within which life conducts itself. Maybe we've already done plenty already. Or maybe we will learn the error of our ways and reverse course, or maybe not. Well, as they say, the earth will be just fine, and so will the universe. It just depends on what we as a species want for our future.
One thing is for sure: this state of affairs is producing a collection of events that is rarely seen in human history (though in geologic history that is a different matter altogether). The experience of these events will reach down into the deepest crevices of our collective consciousness (and unconscious), which will produce not just a revolution in thought, but a revolution in emotional sensibility, upon which countless future ideologies will be built.
