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.

RACHEL CARSON’s LEGACY

Every anniversary of Rachel Carson’s contributions brings new books and a flood of reviews, this more than forty years after Silent Spring, the 1962 book that woke us up  to the hazards of poisoning the world with chemicals. May this continue.

Of course not everyone cheers her wake-up call. There are many with vested interests in the commercialization of everything, no questions asked about  environmental effects. So beware.

Even her friends too often distort her message, and who she was. Some of this is inevitable because we always reinterpret things form a current point of view; but some of it is careless language and perhaps over-enthusiasm.

For example, one reviewer enthused that Silent Spring brought “immediate results” by prompting the federal government to regulate persistent pesticides uses. But it took ten long years of stubborn legal advocacy by the nascent Environmental Defense Fund, from 1962 to 1972, to force EPA to adjust to these embarrassing facts. And few have noticed that although most uses of DDT were restricted in the U.S., no hindrances were put on industry to continue producing and exporting this chemist’s panacea.

Language is a climate of opinion: it frames and encumbers what we are trying to say. This is why Ecology was called a subversive science. Carson was said to have subverted  the fundamental values of her time, partly to encourage a less homocentric world-view. But are our fundamental values dependable?  What oversight of the history of ideas confirms or questions such self-confidence? The notion that the last few hundred years have been marked by Progress still rules, if increasingly shaky.

More aware of our own mixed history, we must learn to see, and value, Rachel Carson as the sensitive prophet and naturalist she was. Not scientist, or biologist, or even ecologist. These specialists are all still too reductionist, too controlling, as even one of the  greatest among them, Carl Woese the microbiologist, warned  in 2004 when he called d for “A New Biology for a New Century.”

Carson, who became an habitué of the Marine Lab at Woods Hole, and  the National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, knew their  work and respected their  insights. But she was already into that new biology Woese wants, listening to the wind, more akin to James Lovelock’s Gaia than to Watson and Crick’s  double helix. Naturalist was title enough. She knew that we must relearn to let Nature be.

COSMIC PIETY

                                                 

The 2009 Terry Lectures at Yale were well-presented and technically fascinating, but can hardly be said to have delivered on their promise to integrate a new creation story and our place in the universe so as to better address the global warming challenges of our day.

What was missing, it seems, was a sense of the cosmic piety that might help us combine new cosmological insights with existing religious commitments in better fitting us to planet Earth’s carrying capacity. In a continuing exploration of  these questions, therefore, we may do well to begin with a critique of  several existing assumptions, both scientific and religious. Some of these are ancient and hallowed, but they have obviously not sufficed to guide us safely.

For example, the concept of dark matter and its associated energy fields is so new, and so esoteric, that it can hardly be expected to inspire a lay public, especially one beset by  seemingly more personal problems, like those of the economy.

Indeed science, thanks to the mechanistic positivism it imposed on us for centuries, is vaguely but widely distrusted by the general public. This is not a know-nothing’s blind spot. The inadequacies of “hard science” and its reductionism are increasingly obvious, as Stuart Kauffman, a good physicist, reminded us in a 2008 book, Reinventing the Sacred.  Academic people need to be more sensitive to this dilemma. It implies the tragic fact that  although scientists are at the vanguard of  today’s new knowledge, they may hardly be ideal advocates for the cosmic piety we need. Belief requires trust, and professional specialism gets in the way. Again, merely as example, we confuse and distract the public when we parade the details of  three million years of fossil history for the genus Homo.  Those were just other hominids. What really concerns us is the much more recent history of our own very different large-brained species, even though perhaps prematurely labeled Homo sapiens.

As though this questioning were not irreverent enough, what can we ask about the many biblical dicta we lean on, directly and indirectly?  For one thing, we forget that these tenets were articulated, transcribed, and translated for and by an oral society. There are usually many a slip between the tongue and the word in such transmission. When is the time for emendation at hand?

We realize now that the artful one-week creation story was designed for youthful ears.

Does this make us more open to the billions of years that geologists say were involved in the processes that gradually made Earth habitable?  After all, we didn’t learn to date the rocks until the mass spectrometer was invented in the 1940s! 

And although Genesis I and its emphasis on dominion has been most often quoted to us, there is an alternative account, Genesis II, that emphasized husbandry, or stewardship, as the proper human vocation. We should keep in mind that the land of  Israel was and is a semi-desert, where “dominion” over scant resources would be mere boastfulness. A shift in quotation may very likely be in the province of  those who do the quoting, especially if one keeps in mind all the self-serving quotes we’ve heard about Adam Smith’s “hidden hand,” when the master himself put the emphasis on “keeping the firm small” if one wants it to serve the public interest.

Similarly, one may question whether the churchly emphasis on sin and the superiority of spirit over the body, were not constrained by the agricultural existence of  that day. This would hardly have occurred to me, a city boy, except for the intimacy of  life in barracks

during three years of World War II military service. It then became clear as farm boys laughingly admitted that their early sexuality included considerable beastiality, simply because they grew up with farm animals. Nor were they worse off for that. We are still struggling to bridge the seemingly obvious dualism of mind and body, but success here may soon open the way to reinterpret much of our ten millennia as agriculturists-cum-urbanites.

So, perhaps what we need is not cosmology but a bit of old-fashioned natural history. Darwin pointed the way when he saw that we are all cousins.  But we demurred, again probably because of our agricultural past. The young of farm animals may be cute, but we just didn’t like the idea of being kin to pigs and cows. Debasing, if not actually humiliating!  Of course, as urbanites, we had long lost contact with the admirable skills and alert demeanor of our wilder evolutionary compeers. They became caricatures in a diminished vocabulary.

Shouldn’t, by now a century on, the millions of people who say they love birds, have effected the rapprochement with nature the times call for, since the crucial task is that of reducing the human footprint on the planet?  But their voting record obviously did not match the proclaimed  love, else the generation of neoliberalism that followed WWII leading to the fiscal debacle of 2008 might have been averted. You may say that the birdwatchers didn’t make the political connection. True enough, but the real failure was in not seeing that all the destructive land use we complained about as “habitat loss” was a failure to see that politico-economic institutions, the rules of the game, decide these issues, willy-nilly, unless we rouse ourselves sufficiently.

Were the birds we pursued simply Roger Peterson’s virtual field guide birds, each with its own field marks, rather than real birds perishing because they were enmeshed in the natural world we were destroying in the name of Progress?  It is difficult to reconstruct the attitudes of such sad episodes, and perhaps even a million politically sophisticated birdwatchers could not have averted the disaster.

So, why cosmic piety? Philosophers seem agreed that this is the foundation of all our religions.  It is the appreciation of, or one’s duty to the creative process. Of course, so few read philosophy that it is not common parlance. Besides, when we were all oral people, not much more than 500 years ago, we were also all pedestrians, so rather sedentary, localized, perhaps put-down as “country-bumpkins” by slightly more sophisticated city folk, even then. Such social isolation fosters dialects. Localization by trade or profession fosters jargon, really another dialect. This is why words are confusing; they have limited currency.

If you marvel at the night sky, this may be all you need to know about the cosmos beyond the planetary system which is our corner of the universe. The sun is our star, and our planet merits much more appreciation than everything else out there. At least right now, when our amateurish or heedless practices are backfiring.

It is amazing how few people know about the life-support systems, the continuing creation processes that make Earth uniquely habitable. Much of this naivety  may be a result of Western civilization’s notion that this world was ready-made for us, and that we were competent to take over as managers. The hunter-gatherers seemed more sophisticated than that. The lapse may be a byproduct of several millennia as farmers, a life style which involves a love-hate relationship with the Earth. 

Plant and animal capabilities are mostly a byproduct of our inheritances, and although Earth’s history provided most of these, the categories we recognize may not be the ones that matter most. A record of these accumulated changes is imprinted on the planet in the seven faunal regions that the geographers of life-form have mapped.  It helps to know how the interactions of precipitation and temperature constrain much of this distribution.   

Perhaps the most illuminating way of visualizing the life support systems that maintain all of us is ecologist Charles Elton’s three-tiered “pyramid of numbers” (see his Animal Ecology, 1927). This applies to both aquatic and terrestrial environments. It integrates almost everything.  

Plants are the foundation of this pyramid of numbers because, generally, only plants can, through photosynthesis, utilize solar energy to manufacture carbohydrates that initiate an edible food supply on which animals maintain themselves.  Of course, a varied collection of microscopic bacteria paved the way in exploring life’s potentialities. But without plants, again generally speaking, no animals. Also, by penetrating or being

incorporated into various sediments produced by the erosion of rocky substrates, plants make and anchor arable soil. They thus enrich the environment for themselves and others, even modifying the climate.

The advent of nutritious plant life thus made it possible for a variety of preexisting organisms to learn to specialize in plant-eating; the successful ones became herbivores.  And the advent of herbivores, by providing a standing crop of flesh, enabled some herbivores to specialize in flesh-eating, thus becoming carnivores, all in good time, and all by now interdependent. As the pyramid suggests, the progression is systemic. It takes about ten pounds of grass to make a pound of mouse flesh, for example; and even more herbivores to make units of carnivores.

Humans, since they feed on both plants and animals, are omnivores. So long as we fed on natural surpluses, when our numbers were small, we were bona fide members of the planet’s biodiversity. We added diversity and enriched the process by introducing extra aesthetic elements. This is what the logic of evolution would seem to call for, and for millennia our numbers grew slowly because, since we pressed against other demands, our mortality was high. Our high reproductive rate was an evolutionary adaptation required to keep ahead of mortality factors, on average. 

                            

Brought up, actually or indirectly, on the notion of creation by fiat, and indoctrinated with the idea of our dominance and an otherworldly destination, it is no surprise that we so long neglected to study the processes that actually support existence on this planet. Not until 1929 did A. N. Whitehead show that life is a continuing, creative synthesis. We borrow from preexisting evolutionary accomplishments to maintain our short stay in the sun, add a bit of style to the process if we can, and pass it on.

It becomes exciting when someone recombines existing functions to accomplish new capabilities. This is innovation and may mark a great leap forward. Otherwise, change comes slowly, from selective pressures the environment itself imposes. Since our capabilities usually involve a range of skills, we adapt to modest demands for change. We are then said to have been preadapted.

If, however, too much change is imposed too fast, the resident populations may not adapt quickly enough. They perish instead. The accelerated human growth of the last two centuries, especially, has introduced such disruptive change. We have actually preempted living space essential to a host of other species.                                                                           

In a sense, we truncate the pyramid of numbers. We do this directly, by killing top predators who otherwise compete with us, thus lowering the pyramid; and by preempting space for agriculture and urbanization, and by polluting, thus reducing the pyramid from the sides, which makes it less productive for everyone. In 1997 Peter Vitousek and colleagues showed (see Science, p. 494-9) that we were consuming nearly 30% of  Earth’s basic productivity just for ourselves.  Another impressive illustration  of our imprint on what were once supportive natural systems is a map of  the road network we have imposed on the coterminous United States (see Science, 4 May 2007, p. 736-7).

We have diffidently called this fragmentation of habitat, and habitat loss, but failed to regulate it so as to maintain the diversity of life.

This failure, viewed objectively, should suffice to disqualify us as environmental managers of the four billion-year old evolutionary systems. The threat of global warming we have set in motion is another, more proximate accusation of incompetence. Our future is now threatened because the current ruling elites  know neither the language nor the science, and are thus tone-deaf  to the consequences. This is Greek tragedy writ large!

Our exaggerated individualism—nourished by monotheism, notions of an implanted soul,

and the otherworldliness already mentioned---conspired to overlook that (1) we are evolutionary end-products of cooperative systems built on interdependence (not mere competition); (2) that the persistence of current populations depends on the proper functioning of all the participating systems; and (3) that a continuance of the innovation we consider progressive depends on access to the whole pool of existing accomplishments, since we cannot know, except experimentally,. what adaptations will

be successful tomorrow. We know only that current assumptions have brought us to the brink.  Hence the need to acknowledge that the nearly seven billion people on the planet are perhaps five billion  too many, partly because of the greedy mismanagement of some, but also because of sheer overextension beyond the supportive capacity of the planet’s systems.

The only way for all of us to prosper, perhaps to survive, is to reduce the so-called human footprint. Currently, evolution is thought to have been reduced to human cultural change. This is too narrow a base, a sort of “all our eggs in one basket” dilemma. The challenge is god-like, but the dominant minority’s “one God” has yet to intercede. Our option seems forlorn. The humility involved in cosmic piety may be a last recourse. Succinctly, this means letting Nature run the planet. It may require that we zone the planet for use and non-use. Our parks and reserves are token contributions to what is needed.

                                                          

YOUR OWN TANGLED BANK

A friend recently circulated a newspaper account by someone who has learned to make a living by traveling the world, observing its wildlife, and writing about it.  Lucky guy. 

I pointed out that this had been my life’s approach also. Whatever the details, the commitment involves appreciation of  what Darwin called the marvels of existence observable in almost any quiet, reasonably “natural” environment, say the cut-bank of a brook. My favorite example is A.A.Saunder’s little book on the Birds of the Quaker Run Valley, Allegheny State Park, N.Y.  Henry David Thoreau chronicled such in Walden  and other writings. And Aldo Leopold’s posthumous Sand County Almanac was a more recent example. Unfortunately, I never wrote my own.

But it is timely to remind everyone that such “tangled banks” still occur in most neighborhoods. Adults can find fascinating involvements in simply observing these remnants of nature in our mostly urbanized landscapes, and children especially need to be introduced to this complex “other” world, so that they may grow up aware that our man-made world is still largely dependent on the natural world.

Our predecessors, especially the more ancient hunter-gatherers who roamed the planet for some one hundred thousand years before we came along, knew this natural world intimately. They needed to know in order to make a living harvesting the surpluses. They obviously did this well enough to provide the leeway that allowed us latecomers to become specialists, thus beginning to think of ourselves as civilized. 

What reminded me of all this was a short walk I took last spring.  I live in an apartment house along a main thoroughfare  that serves as traffic artery for the exchanges that keep New Haven livable. Daily, hundreds of trucks bring food into the city, and then take away the wastes that would otherwise accumulate to the point of choking those of us who live here. Thousands of automobiles and busses move tens of thousands of people along this same route daily.

Surprisingly, behind  my residence, parallel to Whitney Avenue, is a quiet abandoned city street, Lake Road, itself paralleled by the long, narrow reach of  Lake Whitney, above the waterfall in East Rock Park. Lake Road is a quarter-mile-long shaded road available for quiet walks, from Putnam Avenue to Davis Street. All this within two-miles of downtown New Haven.

 On June 1st and 7^th I spent a morning hour watching the birds of this pleasant lane, curious as to how many birds are resident..   Robins are the most conspicuous, running a yard or two, singly or in pairs, to pick up insects, flowers, or buds that fall from the overarching trees. They also shelter or feed on either side of the road, on the steep bank of the lakeside, or the equally steep bank behind  the buildings on Whitney Avenue. They are at first difficult to count, because they crowd ahead, then exit, if you walk toward them.. But waiting quietly and watching the length of the road through binoculars I decided that there were four pairs of robins.

The same was true of Bronzed Grackles. They are less territorial, thus range more widely, and bunch more here and there. But there was a total of nine birds.  A pair of Gray Catbirds left the shelter of  tangles on the lakeside to feed on the road briefly. So did a pair of Cardinals, and a pair of Song Sparrows.  A single Northern Flicker flew in, checked the macadam driveway, but saw that it held little promise of food, so flew off again.

I left it to some other visit to check the nature of  the food supply that allows these eleven pairs of  birds to summer here. This would round out my basis for calling this a tangled bank. I know what to expect, but won’t just guess. A yellow Swallow-tailed Butterfly and a chipmunk rounded out my list this week. The chipmunk came from the lakeside, sheltered along a fence that closed the road, and came upon me quite unaware as I stood motionless next to a fence post.  It smelled my left shoe, then my right shoe, and moved on, apparently oblivious that I watched its every move. Happy day.