This is an era of unprecedented human impact on the environment. You could say, as do Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry (1992, 4), that ‘the human has taken over such extensive control of the life systems of the Earth that the future will be dependent on human decision to an extent never dreamed of in previous times.’ But this is a strange kind of ‘control’: we have repeatedly failed to anticipate the real consequences of our collective activity. Maybe the delusion of control, or the lust for it, is the whole problem; maybe control of one’s environment, in the absence of self-control, is a self-contradictory concept.
As individuals, we all feel the need for some degree of control. It is a component of ‘flow,’ and works as a ‘coping’ mechanism even after real control has ceased to exist. This is part of our biological heritage; a 2006 study conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health identified a ‘circuitry of resilience’ in the rat brain which functions so that ‘experiencing control over a stressor immunizes a rat from developing a depression-like syndrome when it later encounters stressors that it can’t control,’ according to the NIMH news release.
In any case, we have to live with the consequences of our decisions, and with the unpredictability of those consequences, and with the fact that – due to circumstances beyond our control – we have no choice but to make choices.