DIVERSITY of SPECIES

Someone questioned that loss of diversity is an indication of human overpopulation, as I had suggested in a recent blog on that topic. Granted that perhaps only a naturalist would think so today, when most people are divorced from Nature.

   Birds, city people think, or any other living group, are just out there, on their own, like us perhaps. But, since Darwin, those who study these things have agreed that all of us, bird or man, have a common ancestor. We no longer need “missing links’ to close the deal. The more we study, the more realistic it becomes to consider every living thing as evidence of a successful evolutionary experiment.  Predecessors are history. Birds evolved from reptiles (from a small dinosaur, indeed); and mammals were another offshoot. Some mammals still lay eggs, as though to remind us.

   In 1927 Charles Elton of Oxford, one of the first world-class ecologists (see his Animal Ecology), demonstrated that the whole realm of life is inter-dependent, by drawing a pyramid of numbers. The broad base is occupied by plants, from lichens to grasses, to trees. Only plants, through photosynthesis, can harness the energy of the sun, and thus manufacture carbohydrates from which proteins and other edibles are formed.  This food base allows various animals to specialize as herbivores, whether as insects, mice, or ungulates; they occupy the middle of the pyramid. No plants, no animals. It takes almost ten pounds of grass to make a pound of flesh. Finally, at the apex are carnivores who subsist on herbivores, but only if these are in sufficient quantity. Hence the taper of the pyramid, and the basis of predation. A similar relationship exists in the marine realm.

   In addition, mature terrestrial plant communities make and anchor soil, and modify regional climates. So much so that the planet has at least six rather distinct large plant-animal communities, sometimes called biomes. Within these are niches that we call habitats, occupied by the multitude of species.

   At about the same time, but this time at Harvard, A. N. Whitehead the philosopher gave us a working concept of existence in this corner of the universe.

   All of us borrow from the same pool of building blocks, the atoms and molecules, enriched as this pool may be regionally by the accumulation of evolutionary experiments. We may add a bit of style in our use of these materials, but we pass them on within a century or so. Whitehead said that his studies had yielded no evidence of subjective immortality; but that since we change the world somewhat in passing through it, for better or worse, we achieve some objective immortality.

   Whitehead summed up the process of existence thus:  “The basis of democracy (the common sharing) is the fact of value experience as constituting the essential nature of every pulsation of actuality. Everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole.”

   Given this valuational process as the basis of existence itself, a question of morality arises.  He suggested that we have no right to deface the process, but should help maintain the value intensity achieved thus far (see his Modes of Thought, p.111, 1938).

   Practically, then, our numbers, and the greed of too many, currently preempt the evolutionary system’s potentialities for ourselves, at the expense of too many other species. To be responsible members of the life community we should reduce our numbers, fence out the greedy, and let natural processes continue the experiment.

    

GOD as Social Construct

                                           

To understand reality in a reasonably concrete way we must know something of the historical processes that shaped that reality. If we can do that we feel at home in that environment.

    However, we have been at this type of enquiry for less than 50,000 years, whereas our corner of the universe is now known to be about  fifteen billion years old. So we are still groping. Our predecessors, the hunter-gatherers, also groped.  But we know very little of their early attempts to make sense of the complex world they were adapting to, continent by continent.

    In a 1984 book, Relativism and the Natural Left, William P. Kreml suggested that a consequence of this life-long probing of reality tends to scatter us along a left-right behavioristic spectrum. Those of the right, the conservatives, have more angst and feel that they need to control more. The left-leaning liberals are more accepting of Nature’s flux, and are more sympathetic to human hopes. But it is the same hopes that scatter us.

    The Chinese, apparently, had less existential angst and accepted as fact that their world was a self-sufficient, self-perpetuating environment. They honored  wise men, but invented no Gods, and needed no churches. The people of India somewhat similarly, though they were more inventive in trying to explain reality.

   Western thought about these origins suffered from the paranoia of the Hebrew who were marginalized in the semi-deserts of Mesopotamia; and the bureaucratic impositions of Roman emperors who shaped Christianity as their state religion. Paul Shepard, in Nature

and Madness (1982), outlined these tensions as few others could. We should ask why Westerners have seemed more aggressive.

      Science is the most disciplined method of enquiry we have so far invented, but it is only now coming into its own after a long mechanistic detour based on the positivism of first physics, then chemistry. The challenge now is to make it serve our understanding of environmental realities, rather than mere commercial ends.

    Like art, religion is apparently a search for togetherness, and thus a reaction to the stress of existence, particularly for a social species like us. Europeans have probably had more exposure to these questions  than most. The Reformation that rent Christendom five hundred years ago was a first-hand rehearsal. A Frenchman among their successors. Lukacs, recently expressed a novel perspective in a book, History and Class Consciousness.

    God, he suggested, is a projection---as myth—of our frustrations  with the beginner’s intellectual failure to understand reality as a historical process. Adding science to one’s keyboard may answer a lot of the remaining questions that still plague so many. 

Human Overpopulation

                                              

Starting from different bases on different continents, and different cultural assumptions, all three major civilizations had nevertheless overpopulated their environments by the turn of the 20^th century.     

Although biological evolution had given humans a high reproductive potential to compensate for the high mortality of hunter-gatherer life styles for the first 200 millenia, it was the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago that initiated our unbalanced relationship within Nature’s productive systems. Indeed, that is what  Nature is: a set of evolving, mostly living, and interdependent systems and their byproducts.   

So long as our numbers and our technologies were modest, we were just one species among many, adding diversity and contributing innovations in the use of the same building blocks that the rest of the life process utilizes to maintain itself, the atoms and molecules.  At first nomadic, our demands were scattered and replenished in a few seasons of vegetative growth. In fact, native vegetation is the mainstay of all higher animal life on planet Earth, hence a principal index to Earth’s carrying capacity for animal populations.

Agriculture is a specialized form of exploitation for seasonal crops grown especially for human use. Such crops therefore contribute much less to the larger biotic community than native plants. Being seasonal, they also induce more erosion. And since we contest the tithe competing insects impose, we end up with impoverished biotic communities, a high price for the maintenance of one species, since we resorted to chemical pollution to do this. 

Of course, agricultural specialization (a competing land use) produced more food, but since this mostly enabled more growth in human numbers, it also demanded more food production, hence the sacrifice of more and more  natural environment to cropland.   A no-win economic game, though we called it production.

But human mortality remained high, since as populations grew, so did crowd diseases. Being sedentary, agriculture soon fostered urbanization, at first in small villages. Village life, and more so city life, encouraged specialization and invention.  Having by now lost the sense of Nature as a community, we developed a new mind-set: everything out there was “things,” awaiting some clever application for our use. This was reductionism: a useful but unfortunate mental short-cut: an “it works for me” attitude, yielding a false sense of creativity and blinding us to long-term effects. And the more things we made, the more leftovers accumulated, another crowd problem, pollution.

Mortality was at last greatly reduced by the invention of public health engineering, perhaps originating with the Roman aqueducts but culminating in the 19^th Century, with buried sewers. Antibiotics were discovered in mid-20^th Century, thus controlling most infections; and medical science soon learned to control trauma, mend bones, and transplant organs.  This was the turning point. Human population graphs spiked.

The tragedy of all this “progress,” especially these last 200 years, is that we did not see that our successes in controlling mortality also reduced the need for compensatory human reproduction. We had built that need into our religions, and specialists, even medical doctors, did not want to challenge the conventional wisdom. They still don’t. Who will lead the way?

Fortunately, and hopefully just in time, the new science of ecology is demonstrating that this world is a system of interdependent processes whose functions, especially in the last few hundred million years, have made it inhabitable for us.

It is this comfort zone our excess numbers and our thoughtless utilization now threaten.  Global warming is a negative feedback warning. The decline of biodiversity is another. Despite a handful of nay-sayers, there is consensus among that minority capable of reading the computerized data-sets, that we are pressing life-support systems to the brink.  The tipping points may remain iffy, but it should be obvious that the costs of climatic disruptions will be infinitely higher than the costs of exercising prudence. We should act now and reduce both our numbers and our demands.

Rather than the demographic winter that a few pessimists envisage, we can substitute a focus on perfecting our cooperative and aesthetic capabilities, and end up with smaller but more responsive and happier human populations.

RCC  2/28/11          

Life’s PURPOSE

                                                                   

To study Nature in order to fit yourself into its productive systems without diminishing their life-support functions;

To develop your talents and apply them to the general welfare;

To help others do so, since you are part of a community.