Nature, Nurture, and Humanity’s Self-Destructive Niche

H. sapiens shares two critical innate propensities with all other species: the tendency to occupy all accessible habitats and the tendency to use up all available resources. Humans are also a quintessential ‘patch disturbance’ species—a species whose normal activities intensely modify their immediate habitats (through competitive exclusion, local extinctions, ‘over-grazing’, soil erosion, etc.). These qualities are currently being reinforced by technological innovation and a cultural narrative that emphasizes continuous progress and unconstrained economic growth. Technology has greatly expanded humanity’s niche space and simultaneously eliminated the negative feedback that would otherwise constrain the growth of the human enterprise. Human patch disturbance is therefore now a global phenomenon affecting all major ecosystem types. H. sapiens has become a ‘rogue’ species whose accelerating expansion precludes co-evolution, destroys other species, and, unless consciously self-inhibited, will ultimately undermine global civilization.