EQUINOX

[Note: March 20^th, at 7.21 pm., is the spring date when the sun  again crosses the equator to initiate summer for those of us in the New York City region. A good time to pay more attention to how we’re impacting the planet and how it is reacting. The Earth Society will celebrate the occasion at the U.N. See, also, my blog on an Anthropocene era. RCC.]

                                                                

The sun still shines brightly. It warms us and helps fulfill our promise. If we didn’t have computers to keep track of the numbers, we’d hardly know about the threat of global warming. The melting of the arctic ice would be just another puzzle.

But we’re learning fast: everything is connected to everything else, and we’re all in this together. It matters to everyone what we all do. As never before, we need to share and work together to avoid the worst consequences of the mistakes we’ve piled up.

Perhaps the most amazing meaning of the new discoveries about the history of the life process, its DNA and other mysteries, is that all we living things are much more closely related to one another than we thought. Our gene pools are amazingly similar. We borrow, swap and modify the same building blocks of Nature, the atoms and molecules, just to get through the day. And, of course, to explore the potentials we glimpse as the days and months pass. The very complexity of things confirms what we long felt—what our religions told us—that we must share more, and work together more. We don’t do well alone.

In fact, by now we should know well enough that this world is too complex to be competently managed by such a late-comer species as we are. Scientists and economists could lead the way. Our world councils must remind us of this constantly, and cajole us into letting Nature do most of the work. This of course means that we must not short-change the natural systems—the forests and wetlands--that have always done this constructive work—for us and the rest of the tribe.     

                                                                                                 RCC

                                                                                                

An ANTHROPOGENE Era?

                                       

A friend who thinks of me as more scientific than she is has asked that   I comment on geological eras in order to orient proposals that we label our own impact on the planet as unique. The Ice Age (aka Pleistocene) is said to have ended when continental glaciers melted back about 13,000 years ago.

Geologists called the short intervening era the Holocene. Some now propose that humans are changing Nature so much that we should label our era the Anthropogene. This will hopefully initiate wide-ranging discussion as to when the new era began, what it did, and what it implies. It could be a fascinating exercise in updating world views for everyone.

Given that most of us are specialists in one area or another, the first hurdle to that broad discussion I hope for is the tendency to see the task as simply one of coining “a stratigraphic signal” to end the Holocene and begin the Anthropocene. This would be preemptive, more clerical than reflective. But it is to be expected after our long affair with reductionism as preferred scientific methodology.  It has already been suggested that the advent of the Industrial Revolution, about 1800, is a suitable marker.

That would discount too much neglected history. Our ancestors  were hunter-gatherers for some 200,00O  years, wandering afoot on all the continents. We were part of Nature because our numbers were low, and our technologies simple, mostly extensions of our hands. We were semi-nomadic  and lived off biological surpluses. Except for the use of fire to modify vegetation, our environmental imprint was perhaps ephemeral.

It was the invention of agriculture, mostly between 5000 and 10,000 years ago, that began separating us from Nature, and led to grandiose notions of our having been put in charge of the creation, however that originated. We then had no clue to evolutionary emergence, so we invented causes, left and right.

Agriculture’s food production enabled more people to survive. More people demanded more food production, so world environments were drastically altered by cutting forests and draining wetlands to allow more agriculture. This truncated the accumulated checks and balances that tended to soften climatic change, at first locally, then regionally, now globally, as global warming suggests.  As Barry Commoner pointed out a generation ago, everything is connected to everything else.      

As human populations grew, so did problems of organization and decision-making, since we differ so. Is religion a social tactic to help keep us together? In The West we should be more mindful of the likelihood that Christianity was the bureaucratic imposition of Roman Emperors, probably to mitigate the problem of too many people in a climatically marginal Mediterranean environment.

 With agriculture, a gradual urbanization of the population also grew. This gave human ingenuity more vent.  As economic activity and accumulation systems grew in favored environments, some learned to monopolize surpluses. Usury was born. The Church contained this at first, but the 16^th Century’s Reformation broke through that constraint, and Capitalism was born.  A free-for-all, so-called.

A chief problem of this economic mode, abetted by economists, is that it discounts innate value in most of Nature. Nature, we should recall, is the continuing creative synthesis of  accumulated,  successful evolutionary experiments on a climatic oasis, Earth, in the sun’s orbit: not created from scratch, but evolved one from another, and interdependent.

The concept of an Anthropogene era is timely, but not simply as marker in geology’s calendar of events.  The challenge is to make everyone aware that science, especially as ecology, now documents the ongoing interdependencies that religion’s insights early on glimpsed “as through a glass darkly.” 

Awareness demands normative guidelines, so there is much rethinking to do. A new marker in time must remind us not only of our accomplishments, but of failures like Mike Davis’ slum cities, which appear to be built-in end products of late-capitalism.  Is this how we want to be remembered?

 E  Era?

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.