The Human Condition and the Consumption of Humans
To be human, many crucial characteristics, both conscious and instinctual, must develop and intermingle to support what we call typical human behavior. What we perceive to be genuine feelings are backed by hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary pruning of certain instinctual patterns. These patterns describe who we are, how we think, and what we do in a way specific only to our species. The wonder of curiosity, the meaning of life, the fear of death, the search for gratification and prioritizing the wellbeing of other; these traits make up the human condition.
The human condition in a nutshell is society’s personal and social features, good and bad, that have guided our ancestors throughout our long and ambiguous trudge up the evolutionary path. These features have provided every culture in history with an instinctual baseline for ideas to flourish from; schools of thought that have had the power to inform and improve, or unfortunately, to segregate and destroy. Our entire historical track record is littered with people preaching rights and wrongs, both with convincing justifications for their beliefs and actions. Situations that breached the moral and ethical limits of that time, permitting proceedings that may not have benefitted the whole of society, but that sculpted the purpose of our understanding and existence today. Our background, seemingly a battle over two sides of the same coin, all stems from humans’ specifically resilient instincts, our condition.
Over our evolution, through distinct trial and error and concept reasoning, we have acclimated our lives to suit our specific wants and needs, as well as society’s social expectations through behavioral, physical, psychological and even chemical conditioning. Our developmental patterns have grown from the primitive necessities of hunting and harvesting, to more complex functions such as driving cars, paying bills and attending school. These behaviors define not only who we are as people, but who we are as a society, and what we have fabricated to suit the lives we care to live today.
Humans are born one of the most defenseless creatures on the face of the earth. We can neither feed, nor protect ourselves for the first few years of our lives before we begin retaining methods of self-preservation. This lack of anatomical tools and survival abilities, forced us as early men to explore and interpret our surroundings, practicing and recording how we survived and prospered, so as to ensure a better understanding for our children, and our civilization. This practice allowed for a perpetual drive for knowledge and the perfecting of our way of life, strengthening our skills and beliefs with every lesson learned. This practice is still prominent today in the actions we make, vote for and fight against. As we mature as a culture however, it is up to us to understand where the line of necessity ends and where excess begins.
As our ancestors emerged out of the forests and formed the first communities, they began sculpting the foundations for modern civilization. They learned early on that in order to continue the race for the top, alterations and sacrifices to our environment would have to be made. At first our needs were somewhat meager, our growth leaving small but noticeable footprints on our world by clearing woods, damming rivers, digging mines and sowing fields. As we developed a taste for comfort and began to practice the art of efficiency, whether fueled by religion, science, peace or war, we delved into a trend of progressive expansion that is universal to our species. As we have repeated this motion, we have continued to feed our desire to develop, cannibalizing our mother earth by building roads, railways, shopping malls, cities, ports and freeways. We grow ever hungrier with each technological and cultural advancement we stumble upon. Today more than ever, we are devouring our resources at an exponential rate.
Our cause has always been for the preservation of our species. “Man’s intelligence permits him the conscious choice of goals and so differentiates him from the rest of animate existence. This is important because our ability to reflect and consciously choose the values we instill in our children enables us as a species to be whatever we want to be.” (Eisenberg) As we become more enthralled with the ease and popularity of efficient consumption today, we begin to lose sight of the modest needs we once lived by; needs that could indefinitely sustain even todays swelling population. Our goals have habitually superseded the preservation of our surroundings, and we have often followed a very narrow-minded practice of expansive waste beyond our means. Take for example the amount of food we as Americans throw away each year. In 2009, we dumped nearly 30 million tons of food into landfills around our country. (Walsh) This ‘waste’ constitutes roughly 200 pounds a year for every person in the U.S. (Walsh) Even just a couple hundred years ago, this practice would be taboo, and too costly for our ancestors to even dream of participating in.
The New Economics Foundation stated that the world consumed more resources between January 1 and October 6 of the year 2007 than the planet could replenish in that one year. We had reached, as the NEF puts it, "ecological overdraft" for 2007. NEF refers to this date as Ecological Debt Day. Apparently Ecological Debt day has been coming earlier and earlier, having come on October 9th in 2006 and October 12th in 2005. Ever so slightly, our world has been consuming a little bit more every year since the 1980’s when this data was first collected. (Gutierrez) This overconsumption of resources has mostly been contained to the leading countries on our planet such as USA, UK and European Union, however as the appeal of consumerism spreads to every corner of our planet, one can safely bet that eventually, overconsumption will be a concern of every culture in the world.
With every passing day, we delve deeper into a state of over-extension and over exertion of our resources. Continued on this path, soon we will no longer be able to right all the generally innocent wrongs we have put our mother earth through over our civilizations past. Over the past 10-20 years we have begun a very slow transformation (at least within the U.S. and other superpowers) into a greener state of existence. This is the right idea, however in order to guarantee the preservation of this wonderful world we inhabit for our children’s children, we must be aware of the mounting effect our condition has on this planet. Eventually, sustainable efficiency will be a tune we can all sing to.

Work Cited:
Eisenberg, Leon. "The "Human" Nature of Human Nature." Science, JSTOR. 14 Apr. 1972. 16 Jun. 2012 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1732969.
Gutierrez, David “Supporting World Population at U.S. Consumption Rates Would Require Five Earths.” Natural News 26 Mar. 2008. N. Pag. Web. 16 Jun. 2012
Walsh, Dylan “A War Against Food Waste” New York Times 15 Sept. 2011. n. pag. Web. 18 Jun. 2012