The recent string of extreme weather events got me thinking about home. I mean “home” as in the Greek oikos (like the yogurt), which is the root of “ecology“: the study of our home.
Today we share our home with 7.7 billion people. We tend to focus on troubles and conflicts, but the dominant story by far is cooperation and mutual support. That’s the only way the population can increase so much. We live in all kinds of circumstances including extremely dense and sparsely populated areas, and by and large we don’t kill each other–that’s how the population can increase. (By contrast, it has been noted that if you put 150 chimpanzees in an airplane and flew them across the ocean, only one or two would walk off alive). The fact that we have 7.7 billion people living in our “home” is an amazing achievement.