Other living species

Ecological imbalances arise when some new factors exceed the adaptive capacities of ecosystem actors.

Examples: Most synthetic insecticides exceed the adaptability limits of bees and other pollinators, and have the consequences of serious biodiversity damage. Intensive fishing undermines the reproductive capacity of genetically determined marine species. Our intensive farming methods and our industrial productions generate an incalculable number of similar exceedances which result in the ongoing ecological impasse.

To this evidence, human ecogenetics adds a working hypothesis, “the so-called principle of harmful ecosymmetry”: any human activity that transgresses the limits of adaptability of plants and animals with which humans are in balance (or should be) may also violate their own adaptability limits. In other words: what harms the health of other living species may also harm human health and, vice versa: what harms human health may harm the health of the surrounding species. Each human disease can thus lead to certain behaviour harmful to the environment, and each environmental disorder can refer to a factor likely to be pathogenic to humans.

This equation may seem naive. However, it stems from the laws of co-evolution. As a species evolves, its environment also evolves. Every change in the species’ behaviour affects its environment, and every change in the environment affects the evolution of the species. The result is a balance linked to the interactions between the species and its environment, in other words, an ecogenetic balance.

It is therefore likely that a new factor that alters this general balance will harm both the species and its environment. For example, pesticides. They are harmful to both the environment and humans. When introducing them, only their positive effect on agricultural yields was taken into account. Some people were fighting the whole body of DDT to fight mosquitoes… The principle of the ecosymmetry of nuisances would have made it possible to suspect that they would have a negative impact on human health, as on plant pests, and at the same time on other insects.

The same question arises about any artifact. Food, for example, is based on cereal consumption. The cultivation of cereals is in the long term harmful to the environment, since it destroys the tree cover, causing soil erosion; Would it also be more harmful than it seems for human health? One could have doubted, by virtue of the same principle, long before epidemics of obesity, gluten allergy, Crohn’s disease came to cast doubt on the virtues of Demeter…

The production of milk and meat exhaust huge surfaces, we know the nuisances of overgrazing; Would the consumption of animal milk and dairy products have an ecosymmetry of harmful effects on our organisms? Some are now beginning to denounce the nuisances of milk. If they’re right, it could have been planned a long time ago. As for meat consumption: are the quantities currently consumed really useful or necessary for the human body? The mountains peeled by sheep rearing could have as symmetrical pathologies related to animal protein overload. Similarly for overfishing: is it natural for humans to consume large quantities of fish, especially pelagic fish? Here, too, some human pathologies could be sustained by harm to marine ecosystems.

The answers usually given to these questions are based on adage: what makes one unhappy brings happiness to another. We need to draw resources from nature to ensure our survival, even if they cause environmental damage. This simplistic approach covers a profound ignorance of the real demands of the human body and the complexity of ecosystem balances.

Better knowledge of the root causes of human diseases could put us on the path of disorder factors