I recently took my first English class at the local community college (about time!). In doing so I wrote a research paper on the effects of product obsolescence introduced in the 1930's and on. My paper covered the pro's and con's of the topic and continually touched on the issue of mass pollution and the detrimental effects on the world, it turns out we're poisoning everything. I've since come to the conclusion that what we've done can be explained easily as social evolution.
Social evolution is simply evolution of ideas in population centers to make the people in your social group "fitter", this idea transcends the micro scale to the macro scale. Some really good obvious examples of macro social evolution are those of economic systems like capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, etc. Those systems all derived from more primitive systems beginning in Mesopotamia. Some have grown in complexity and others are withering or dying out while yet others are simply unchanged and functioning as well as they have since thier implementation. While these systems seem complex today they all share their roots in the fundamental principles that started civilization. They have adapted and evolved since that time and should continue to evolve in the future. The stronger more popular systems are constantly in a struggle with each other and people are constantly pushing their boundaries in an attempt to better them.
With this very fundamental example of social evolution, it's clear that a ball has been set in motion now for about 7,000 years, if not more. We started off by assembling in tribes as pack hunters, then agriculture helped form the first civilizations then those civilizations formed into nation states and and eventually we'd mapped out the planet. With each phase the interactions between people became more and more complex and led to more interesting ideas. Generally the ideas have moved the quality of living, for the advanced cultures, forward.
Think about math. The earliest math was simply keeping track of quantities, eventually arithmetic came about for shop keepers, then multiplication which logically was followed by division and algebra and geometry for land irrigation and ownership boundaries, then probabilities and calculus and so on. Today math is ubiquitous throughout our daily lives, some extremely complex, and we are still working towards new proofs that can open up more doors that might one day help solve our most pressing issues. Thats not to say that the discovery of math is evolutionary, but the implementation of it has had evolutionary impacts.
I can go on with more examples, but I'll just get to the point, which is that our pollution and planet toxification is a result of our social evolution. The key method for human learning, and possibly other biological learning, is to make assumptions, test them and then store the results. Which is what the last 100 years has been, a period of trial and now error. Clearly some elements of humanity realized the waste and pollution issues earlier than the masses, but thats a whole different problem all together. The issue is no more an issue of evil agendas than it is of evolution and progress. To this end, I say that human kind is simply on a path of exploration and learning, clearly we don't want to kill ourselves and destroy the planet, en mass.
What is interesting is that we are now in uncharted territory. With the advent of atomic weapons, we learned that we were capable of self annihilation. Now with the advent of mass production and consumerism, we are now capable of destroying all life on the planet along with ourselves. The notion of complete and utter destruction is beginning to have a serious impact on our social conscience and will undoubtedly affect our next steps. Being creatures largely driven by reason and logic, we should inevitably find a solution to this problem and continue on our path of trial and error, becoming more intelligent with each step because of our past errors.
