These circle graphs from "Four Fifths a Grizzly" depict the biomass of land dwelling mammals worldwide in 1900 and in 2000. Chadwick told the OBC group, "The blue is us humans, the gray is our livestock, and the green sliver up here is all the wild animals that still exist. Just in the last 50 years, the invertebrates-all the animals with backbones-has fallen by 70%. Where there were 10 animals half a century ago, there are now three. So it doesn't get much more serious than that."
SEELEY LAKE – Doug Chadwick presented his latest book "Four-fifths a Grizzly," to Alpine Artisans' Open Book Club Jan. 15. The book is less about grizzlies and more about us as humans and our continued survival.
Chadwick said, "The idea that we are separate and superior and entitled to do whatever we want as long as we want, that's got to be modified. We have to change that."
Chadwick advocates that humans view themselves, as scientists are discovering more and more to be true, in a symbiotic relationship with nature. He said to him a thriving grizzly population in an area is a guarantee of clean air, clean water and a variety of other wildlife. If that ecosystem can sustain the grizzly bear, it can also sustain him as a human.
Because natural selection favors organisms that have adapted to their environment, every living thing in nature has something to teach people about how to live on planet Earth.
"We're the ones who are doing more than any previous generation to eliminate the potential out there," Chadwick said. "We may lose half the species on the planet before the end of this century. And that's a lot of raw material: how to build structures, how to detoxify things, how to survive drought. Every creature out there has the right answer on how best to live on the planet under its own conditions. And we may need to know that. We may need to borrow from them because we're the ones changing the conditions."
While Chadwick sees a number of organizations doing valuable work to try to reestablish the balance, to him the only real answer is a fundamental reset of how humans think about nature.
"Things have changed," he said. "And how we view nature and how we think about nature and ourselves in relationship to it is going to determine the fate of all the other creatures we share this planet with."
Chadwick's entire talk was recorded and is accessible at http://www.facebook.com/AlpineArtisans.
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