How much of the planet should we harm for our comfort?
Becky Chambers’ gentle sci-fi on the right amount of carbon, AC, airplanes, and yachts.
This essay is part of TERRAFORM, an essay collection about the future of our planet. Support the project by collecting the digital or print pamphlet 👇🏻
Sibling Dex is a tea monk, traveling the world by e-bike to sell tea and peace of mind from town to town. They are also looking for their own.
In Becky Chambers’ beautiful novel and masterpiece, A Psalm for the Wild Built, Sibling Dex wants to leave the city behind for the allure of the wilds. Except, by today’s standards, the city already feels like a rewilded paradise.
Chambers’ utopian novel has all the accoutrements of a solarpunk world—a pastoral city with rooftop gardens, no cars—just e-bikes and elevated rail lines—everything is solar-powered, every building 3D printed, or retrofitted, and built to decompose. A Starlink-like network reaches every phone, and “fab shacks” keep devices running for life.
It’s also a post-industrial world.
Once the world was sufficiently automated, humans had little work to do and robots became conscious enough to request their freedom. A pact was struck and they left for the wilderness, never to be seen again. Now everyone seems to work a gig economy job, whether they serve tea or build houses or even fix a neighbor’s gutter, everyone is paid in “pebs” with a balance publicly accessible by everyone.
But the world is too perfect. “The City was a healthy place, a thriving place. A never-ending harmony of making, doing, growing, trying, laughing, running, living,” Chambers writes. “Sibling Dex was so tired of it.”
In our modern world, we think of going off to the woods to reset. Away from WiFi connections, social media notifications, and screentime—we can sit in silence, listen to the birds chirp, watch a river meandering down the creek. We come back with our lives refreshed, our perspectives shifted. But in Chambers’ novel, the world is already sufficiently wild. Dex can only venture further afield, breaching the boundary separating the human world from the rewilded one to leave human life behind.
If, in our modern world, we leave our technological world behind to find the analog, here Dex leaves behind their analog world to find… technology.
The first robot to interact with humanity in 200 years.
Through this relationship, Dex finds a similar perspective shift. In Chambers’ world, 50% of the land is left wild, and 50% is for human use, and still Dex manages to feel existential about it. “It was a crazy split, if you thought about it: half the land for a single species, half for the hundreds of thousands of others”
This is not how the world works. Worms and foxes and deer still live in the parts of the world that humans inhabit. But, Dex struggles with the harm humans cause. People aren’t allowed to dig, for instance, because it might disrupt ecosystems. “Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt,” Chambers writes. “Disturbing these lives through digging was a violence.”
Dex is even afraid to walk off the path because of the harm they might cause the grass and the creatures that live in it. The robot finds this strange. “Every living thing causes damage to others, Sibling Dex. You’d all starve otherwise. Have you ever watched a bull elk mow its way through a bitebulb thicket?... It’s a fine lesson in trampling. Sometimes, damage is unavoidable. Often, in fact. I assure you we’ve both killed countless tiny creatures in just the last few steps we’ve taken… I assure you the forest will forget you were here in no time.”
All life causes harm. Dex brings up the fictional Bluebank, where people killed all of the wild dogs because they wanted to go fishing and hiking in the area without getting mauled. Wasn’t that a violence caused by humans on nature? But then, what of the violence caused by nature on nature? The absence of dogs led to an increase in elk who “ate everything. Shrubs, saplings, everything. Soon, there was no ground cover, and the soil was eroding, and it was fucking up waterways, and all sorts of other species were thrown out of wack because of it.”
Who is more at fault for their grievances on nature? The humans who wanted a safe place to be? Or the Elk who also wanted a safe place to be?
“We’re all just trying to be comfortable, and well fed, and unafraid. It wasn’t the elk’s fault. The elk just wanted to relax.” Dex says. “And the people who made places like this weren’t at fault either—at least, not at first. They just wanted to be comfortable. They wanted their children to live past the age of five. They wanted everything to stop being so fucking hard. Any animal would do the same—and they do, if given the chance.”
Humans reintroduced wild dogs so the ecosystem could balance out. But the result is that people can no longer go hiking or fishing there because of the dangerous dogs, and elks can no longer live there because of the dangerous dogs, and the dogs are given free rein over the land for the sake of a “balanced ecosystem.”
Should a “balanced ecosystem” take priority over human flourishing?
After all, species go extinct and ecosystems collapse all the time—250 million years ago, 90% of species died, and then new species grew back in their place. It doesn’t matter to the Earth whether species go extinct and ecosystems collapse, it will keep creating new ecosystems and new species over millions of years. It only matters to humans, whose existence is much shorter, and could be at risk if ecosystems collapse in such a way that could harm us. And unlike other species, we are in a place to do something about it.
Shouldn’t we?
Shouldn’t we, for instance, eradicate the mosquitos that kill half a million children annually? Any animal on the planet would eliminate such a threat to their species if it could. And yet many are so concerned about hindering some plant and animal ecosystem that we knowingly allow humans to die. We prioritize the ecosystem over humanity, even though the planet would live without that mosquito just fine. It’s us who can’t live with that particular species, and as predators, don’t we have the same right to eliminate threats as any other predator on the planet?
What amount of harm to the environment is the accepted amount for our own wellbeing?
Anthropocentrism would say that human welfare is the most important thing: All harm is fine until it harms people. Kill the mosquitos! But sentientism expands that perimeter, saying harm is fine until it harms all sentient beings—human and animal alike. Kill the mosquitos, yes, but only because they have minimal sentience, while human and mammalian suffering from malaria is vast. Ecocentrism expands this perimeter even further, prioritizing ecosystems above all else. Don’t kill the mosquitos, they might say, even if humans and animals benefit. Every species has intrinsic value and plays an irreplaceable ecological role—food for bats, pollination for certain plants, etc. They’d prioritize interventions like mosquito nets and vaccines instead.
I tend to fit most with a stewardship or intergenerational view: Harm the Earth only at a “safe operating level” to protect not just us, but future generations from harm. I would prioritize human welfare first, followed by animals, and then ecosystems—though I would primarily protect ecosystems so as to benefit humans and then animals. So yes, kill the mosquitos, because it’s better for humans and also for most animals, and the mosquito’s impact on the ecosystem is minimal enough that it won’t negatively affect future generations.
This debate gets trickier when it’s not just human survival on the line, but human flourishing. The book’s sequal, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, opens with one of my favorite quotes: “The thing about fucking off to the woods is that unless you are a very particular, very rare sort of person, it does not take long to understand why people left said woods in the first place. Houses were invented for excellent reasons, as were shoes, plumbing, pillows, heaters, washing machines, paint, lamps, soap, refrigeration, and all of the other countless trappings humans struggle to imagine life without.”
I recently visited a historic town in Japan, a picturesque hamlet in the mountains where villagers once tended silkworms in their attics and is now preserved as a heritage site. A sign told that the village was abandoned with the arrival of the “Three Sacred Treasures:” The refrigerator, the washing machine, and the television set. In the 1950s, the arrival of these technologies, as well as the electrification they required, was considered an “economic miracle.” Until that point, every day was a struggle to get and make food before it spoiled, spend hours and even days washing clothes, walking or riding to the next town for news, and getting everything done before dark.
Those inventions created a much better quality of life, and people flocked to the cities to get it. For the first time, people had time in their day that wasn’t spent on the subsistence of survival.
But we forget about these benefits and take them for granted.
Now, we escape to small towns like these and wish we could spend our days cultivating silkworms.
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Energy provided a lot of this progress, and while fossil fuels created that quality of life for much of the past century, I see no qualms with continuing that progress using less harmful solar, wind, and nuclear options. The anthropocentrist would agree—these innovations help humans. The sentientist, however, would worry about the habitat loss caused by solar farms, though they might concede that they’re better than oil and gas. The ecocentrist would protest solar farms altogether or prioritize already degraded land so as to avoid ecological harm.
The steward, like myself, would say yes, solar farms are the best option for us and future generations. To power the whole world with solar panels, we’d only need to cover 2% of the Earth’s habitable land—roughly the size of Saudi Arabia. That’s a relatively small ecosystem loss for massive benefits to humans, and a moderate benefit to animals and ecosystems thanks to cleaner air and a reduction in global warming. And we could even develop more efficient solar panels, requiring less ground space in the future! I’d sooner eradicate livestock—which takes up nearly 50% of habitable land—than solar panels, if ecosystem preservation is the motive.
If, in our modern life, we see the ills of modernization and crave the wilds, these books flip that dynamic on its head, creating a utopian wilds from which we escape to see the benefits of modernization.
Dex describes their belief as “essentialism.” “I think we’re allowed to use whatever we want to make ourselves as safe and comfortable as possible, provided that we don’t damage the natural world or hurt one another in the process,” they say.
Chambers contrasts Dex’s ideology with another character, Avery who willingly forgoes certain comforts: “Paring things down makes the small comforts all the sweeter,” they say. “You don’t know how to be grateful for a well-sealed wall if you haven’t had a winter storm bust through a weak one. You don’t know how sweet strawberries are unless you’ve waited six months for them to fruit. Elsewhere, they have all these little luxuries, but they don’t understand that food and shelter and company are all you really need.”
They bring up an interesting question: I have no qualms with using the planet’s resources for human survival and even thriving. But exactly how much of the planet should we use for our own comfort?
And just how comfortable do we have a right to be?
Should everyone take bikes and trains, as they do in Chambers’ novels, but not cars or planes because they cause more environmental harm? And what about private planes or megayachts, where fewer individuals benefit from substantially greater harms? Is it worth building even more solar panels to encompass even greater luxuries?
The anthropocentrist would say no, the marginal happiness of a few elites is outweighed by climate damages to millions. Ordinary individuals can and should take advantage of cars and planes as needed, and policies should favor progressive carbon pricing to favor those essential uses. The sentientist would be against all leisure travel, and especially luxury travel. They might favor an emissions cap or rigorous environmental offset. The ecocentrist would ban flight altogether, unless urgent or necessary, and would favor widespread “rights of nature” laws to protect the air from our abuse. The steward would say no to the luxuries, but work to ensure bikes and trains are widespread, plane travel uses better fuel sources, and carbon harm becomes reversible. Make it more expensive to use more fuel, absolutely, to limit excessive harms and protect the world for future generations.
Like Avery, I’ve even personally felt the need to limit luxuries. For many years, my husband and I lived on one paycheck and saved the other. But once we paid off our house and had plenty in savings and retirement funds, my husband quit his job and we took off for a year of travel. We took advantage of every comfort—nice Airbnbs, eating out for every meal—but I found myself missing some of the life we had while living more frugally. When we could pay for a nice hotel, we missed out on the free van campsite by the ocean. When we could get an Uber, we missed out on the bike ride there. When I could purchase a box of pastries for $10, why bother to make croissants at home?
My life was more comfortable, sure, but maybe less pleasurable. I came to feel that there were certain comforts that were good, but I needed to forgo certain others to enjoy my life more. We recently imposed a budget again, this time so we would focus our money on the comforts we valued most, largely travel, while minimizing the ones we didn’t—Uber trips, fancy meals out, etc. I appreciate a certain artisanship in my life that money takes me away from. I could, for example, afford to purchase a fancy duvet cover for my bed, but it’s more fun to find fabric and tassels from artisans on Etsy and sew my own. I could easily buy a table that’s been mass-produced by Anthropologie, but there’s joy in finding a vintage table and resurfacing it the way I want.
If, like Avery, I prefer to enjoy fewer luxuries, Dex is also learning the value of more. “It had been important—vitally important—for Sibling Dex to see their world as it was without such constructs, to understand on a visceral level that there was infinitely more to life than what happened between walls, that every person was indeed just an animal in clothing, subject to the laws of nature and the whims of chance like everything else that had ever lived and died in the universe,” Chambers writes. “But the moment they pedaled their wagon out of the wilderness and onto the highway, Dex felt the indescribable relief of switching back to the flip side of that equation—the side in which humans had made existence as comfortable as technology would sustainably allow.”
Chambers’ novels grant us a noble paradise to work toward: A rewilded Earth, powered by solar energy, one that minimizes pollution by emphasizing e-bike and electric train travel. Buildings are 3D printed and retrofitted to avoid waste, and our devices last a lifetime. Satellites provide WiFi around the world, and automation provides more leisure time. It’s worth reaching for her utopia—a world that’s better for humans, but also animals and ecosystems alike—even as we realize we’ll still harm some of the world to achieve it.
Thanks for reading and thinking with me,
Great stuff! So true that the most luxurious experiences are often less interesting.
Terrific post. Thought provoking as hell. Now I’ve got to get my hands on some novels by Becky Chambers.