Alberta Tar Sands, soon to cover an area larger than NY State; its toxic sludge ponds alone are large enough to be visible from space. Photo by Dru Oja Jay, Howl Arts Collective, for The Dominion CC-BY-2.0
I have often described myself as “the world’s most blessed agnostic”. I have been incredibly fortunate both by the accident of my birth and with the events (almost all outside my control) that have transpired at critical points in my life. I should be grateful, and in many ways I am.
But I am not grateful to have been born into human civilization culture.
Many people I know have a regular practice of taking time to identify, write down, acknowledge and appreciate the things they are grateful for. They believe this makes them happier, healthier and more positive, optimistic and productive citizens, and I’m sure they’re right.
I’m also sure that this process of convincing ourselves everything is all right and will turn out fine, while essential for our personal state of mind, represents precisely the folly of human cultural adaptability that has led to massive human overpopulation and desolated our planet. Our civilization culture is both our lifeline to sanity and the cause of our disease.
There is now fairly compelling evidence of the following (though of course we can never be sure):
- Pre-civilization humans (prior to the invention/discovery of agriculture and the simple weapons — arrowheads, knives and spears — that led to the massive extinction of large mammals on our planet) generally lived long (until they were eaten by predators) and very healthy, stress-free, leisurely lives. Our modern and false belief in the “progress” of the human condition and our culture conveniently starts with the nadirs of humans health and leisure time (the Roman era, when average life span had plunged to 29, or the eras of wide-spread genocide and inquisition, or the early years of the Industrial Revolution when life expectancy plunged once again).
- Wild creatures intuitively self-regulate their populations for the optimization of the health not only of themselves and their species but for the entire ecosystems in which they live. This is a feature of evolution that has taken 2 billion years to reach its current level, and in that context it makes perfect sense. Creatures whose fertility (via subtle hormonal adjustments) adapts to the carrying capacity of the place they live are inevitably going to be more successful and joyful (and hence enthused to propagate the species) than if population numbers have to be corrected by massive coercive die-offs. Famine is substantially a consequence of inability to self-regulate, a consequence of human civilization culture and its disconnection from attention to balance with all the other species we live with. This disconnection stems largely from urbanization (physical separation) and the mental illness of believing we are the master species on the planet empowered and evolved to control and run everything, yet intuitively aware of our utter incompetence to do so, and the consequent turning away from and inurement against honestly looking at how much suffering we inflict on all the other creatures of this planet (emotional separation).
- Our culture is so successful at indoctrinating us that no matter how horrific our situation, we generally end up feeling about as happy as if we had recently won the lottery (Dan Gilbert exaggerations notwithstanding). This is in the short run (a few millennia) a successful survival strategy: Most wild creatures that have experienced freedom and joy and then are put in a situation of captivity, chronic stress and suffering, quickly stop procreating, whereas in our culture we actually breed more humans so we’ll have more offspring to help deal with the costs of chronic disease, the burdens of chronic shortages and dependence on centralized cultural systems. And we put up with lifelong misery and struggle that any wild (undomesticated) creature would surely consider worse than death. But in the long run this human optimism-in-spite-of-everything leads to where we are now: a desolated planet with a climate shifting disastrously, the immiseration of all, and the rapid advancement of the sixth great extinction of life on Earth.
For all this I am ungrateful. Our global and increasingly-homogeneous culture evolved with the best of intentions (possibly to deal with the Ice Ages; possibly to deal with the unintended consequences of our too-smart-for-our-own-good brains’ discovery of agriculture and weaponry). But that culture is killing our planet.
So each day I express wonder and joy at the magic of life, and gratefulness for where, in the spectrum of life on 21st-century Earth, I have lived and continue to live my life. And each day I curse our civilization for what it has unintentionally wrought, for what it has inflicted on me and every struggling, suffering creature on this planet.
This is the worst of times, and we don’t even know it, and won’t, even as it gets worse still. It is in our nature to know, and to bring the failed human experiment to a quick and merciful close. But it is not in our culture, and we have withdrawn so far from nature that now, it is only our culture we are listening to.
Nature knows what to do, and will do it, reluctantly, when all other self-managed options have been exhausted. We will learn, alas, the hard way. The madness will soon be over. The fire this time.
Awkward enough for me to express appreciation and gratitude for all you continue to write and feel.
Uou write, “Wild creatures intuitively self-regulate their populations for the optimization of the health not only of themselves and their species but for the entire ecosystems in which they live.”
Could you give me a citation for this? I ask because it’s completely opposite to my understanding of animal population dynamics. I’ve always thought that animal populations are limited solely by external factors like predation, food shortage or disease, and that no internal regulation is available, except for a down-regulation of fertility under famine conditions.
No single citation, Paul, and many of the studies are new and threatening and hence challenged by defenders of Hobbesian scientific orthodoxy, but lots of work done in this area is slowly overcoming our anthropocentrically biased, oversimplified mechanistic view of complex system dynamics. The most recent study I have seen is this one (http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/top-predators-limit-their-own-numbers). There have been studies primarily of mammals and birds that contrast models of extrinsic (caused by external factors like predation, food shortage, disease) vs intrinsic (self-regulatory) factors in birth rates, that tend to suggest (by 3:1 according to this study http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/49624/PDF) that most of the change is intrinsic/self-regulation.
A number of studies suggest that the major factors have to do with social organization (“blocking” of overpopulated populations by neighbouring balanced populations from expanding into their territory; aggression within the stressed group “eating their young”; infanticide etc.). But the most interesting ones suggest the endocrine systems of many animals “sense” population stress and automatically reduce fertility e.g. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jyio1952/15/2/15_2_156/_pdf).
But above and beyond all this, it just makes sense to me that, over 2 billion years, the staggeringly complex adaptations that life has undergone would include more merciful (and hence less drastic and disruptive) self-regulation of population over extrinsic, disaster-response extrinsic methods. Alas, it’s just human nature to assume that non-humans are incapable of such a subtle and Gaian response, when paradoxically it seems the opposite is true — it is humans, who have lost our sense of belonging to larger more-than-human ecologies, who have lost this capacity and now “breed like flies”. Even so, there is evidence that human fertility rates have also fallen significantly as stress has increased, suggesting even humans, deep down, have an intuitive appreciation that we are overbreeding, and some vestige of hormonal self-regulation remains even in our sad disconnected species.
“it is humans, who have lost our sense of belonging to larger more-than-human ecologies, who have lost this capacity and now “breed like flies”.”
Yeah, nah…!
Please qualify your statements in future articles and comments by going to either “civilised” humans or modern industrial humans, rather than humans.
It really pisses off remnant indigenous folk who deeply understand the need for population control and balance within their ecosystems.
I sent this out to my email list and got this comment back from one who is also a subscriber here:
“the other relatively new factor in human and animal population control that is starting to come into play is exactly what’s pictured below, the toxification of the food supply: colony collapse of bees from GMO plants and being winter fed corn syrup…the effects of radiation on all species…and a whole litany of other atrocities that weaken immune systems and will all contribute to the 6th mass extinction.”
Background radiation levels continue to rise. There is still going to be 100 years of plutonium raining down on us in Australasia according to Dr.Helen Caldicott, from all the atmospheric nuclear bomb testing in Australia and Mururoa. The combination of nuclear bomb fallout, Chernobyl and Fukushima pushes that radiation level up. Spent fuel is highly toxic for 20 million years, way beyond our imagination. Some say just throw it all into a deep subduction zone, but if there is volcanic activity on the uplift side of that zone any time in the next 20 million years, it may come out both thermally and radioactively hot. What a legacy!
WCASFU
(We “civilised” are sooooooooooooooooooooooo f**ked up!)
Thanks for your response, Dave. That will bear thinking about.
Dave, I agree with Paul Chefurka. I have done a lot of reading about population dynamics over the past 20 years (related to the teaching I’ve done in human ecology), and while there are some examples of what you are talking about (in your comment), resource deficiency including hunger, thirst, and predation are far more significant in regulating population size than instinctual “self-regulatory” functions…in fact, from my in study of evolutionary mechanisms over the past two decades it seems pretty clear that “drastic and disruptive” is the primary engine of evolutionary change (read Wonderful Life by Gould for a very cogent explanation of evolutionary process…it is not what most people imagine, but rather during stable, beneficial environmental periods life explodes exponentially, only to be drastically disrupted during less benign periods extincting the majority leaving only those species with the necessary adaptations)…evolutionary history long before humans is far more chaotic than you think….this is not to say that there aren’t biological adaptations that specifically restrict fertility (such as keying fertility to seasons, limiting size of off-spring pool, etc.), not all species “breed like flies” but many do…I’m a little uncomfortable with attributing endrocine changes to mystical “sensing” of conditions, endrocine systems do respond over long periods of time to nutrients, light, water availability, etc – from things that I’ve read I think that the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic is merely a matter of time displacement – today’s so called intrinsic cues are a result of previous extrinsic clues of food availablity, nutrients, temperature, etc. (often even previous generations extrinsic clues coded genetically) …you also might want to explore more about how human foragers use cultural means to limit and balance population growth (and how those means get disrupted by the development of agriculture)…one place to start is Nancy Makepeace Tanner’s On Becoming Human…I presume that you have read Jared Diamond who totally agrees with you on the assessment of the development of agriculture, but if you haven’t start with Gun, Steel and Germs…I am not disagreeing with you on the basic point that human civilization has distanced people from the natural cues necessary to balance and control population…however, all demographic research also suggests that more civilization (in the form of more education and more participation by women in the workforce) reverses the impact and reduces fertility drastically…
Please credit photograph: Garth Lenz http://www.GarthLenz.com or better yet, get permission for its use.
You can tell by the responses to this piece that Mr. Pollard is pressing a “hot button” here. I guess it was meant to raise the blood pressure (of some) at least a little bit.
I read it and liked it, although I think there’s something missing from it, something that lurks in the background (and very probably sits at the heart) of many of humanity’s current societal disagreements. I’d like to make a small attempt at defining what that issue is.
The question is this: “Who built the world you live in?”
If you cannot immediately and confidently answer that question with, “People just like me!” then you’re living in somebody else’s world. Simple as that. And, viewed from the perspective of those who can answer that question in the affirmative: You don’t belong, you’re an outsider, you’re a caveman, you’re marginal at best, you don’t throw any real weight and you’re an anonymous, disposable, replaceable, fungible unit of force or labor…
The “Modern World” is defined as the world since the start of organized agriculture because that’s when our societies first began to grow beyond the small-group Hunter-Gatherer template. This only happened about 11,000 years ago, which amounts to “yesterday” on the human timeline. We were suddenly able to support larger and large populations and higher population densities.
This was all just fine progress, except for one thing. To retain/maintain the necessary societal agility and responsiveness to threats (i.e. other neighboring societies) this larger population required a new organizational style: Hierarchy, a.k.a. a top-down power structure. And while there may be many positive facets to that oft-flawed thing we call “leadership”, there’s one completely unavoidable requirement to carrying out the job: You have to be able to view/use other human beings as things, units of force and/or labor. And you have to be able to treat those units as disposable (although it’s also very important for “leadership” to be able to act/pretend that it actually has empathy for those disposable units, to be able to convincingly say that it, “feels their pain”).
History shows us that people with this talent portfolio also tend to have no shortage of other repugnant traits such as megalomania and narcissism. All it takes is the cover of a feel-good smoke screen of high charisma and we’ll happily turn over control of our society to one of these people.
As the centuries since the beginning of the Modern Age of Humanity have so obviously demonstrated, there’s no shortage of these people. So, in the end, you’re living in a world that has been and still is, on the whole, built and run by the cruel.
Which means if you are unlucky enough to have been blessed/cursed with true Empathy for your fellow man and your society and the environment you can’t help but feel at odds with the modern world. You can’t understand why things keep going the same way over and over again. As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
Thanks Peter. The omission was unintentional: I googled for images of the tar sands and got the image on this page (http://extremeenergy.org/tar-sands-oil-sands/) of the Extreme Energy site, which does not include a credit to Garth. But I see he is credited elsewhere on the site. I have credited him and will contact him to request permission to use the photo on my blog post.
Thank you, commenters here and on the Facebook and Google+ reposts of this article.
Greg, love the Twain quote. I agree with most of what you say, though I am increasingly willing to accept that “the cruel” are as much victims of the industrial systems they exploit as the rest of us. Even Cheney and the Kochs are doing what they think is best not just for themselves but for the greater good. As you say, pathological people are unfortunately drawn to and given power in our culture, so their “best intentions” have especially disastrous consequences. It’s also interesting that many students of anthropology now say that overpopulation is the consequence of surplus food production (at least in species disconnected from Gaia, like ours), rather than the other way around. In that sense, hierarchy is not so much the product of overpopulation or even urbanization, but of (what Manning calls) catastrophic agriculture — the capacity to produce vast amounts of food from labour- and energy-intensive monoculture.
“Our civilization culture is both our lifeline to sanity and the cause of our disease.”
Very thoughtful post. Your quote is the best summary of the predicament I have seen. The symptoms and prognosis we can debate but not the diagnosis. I would put sanity in air quotes :)
Original tar sands photo removed at request of the photographer. This one is creative commons licenced, and was taken by Dru Oja Jay, hardworking investigative journalist for The Dominion and other progressive Canadian media.