What can be the fate of humanity? – anthroecologycom

What can be the fate of humanity?

There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the question of “Peak Oil” worldwide, and what our industrial civilization must do to deal with the problem. Off shore drilling (the “drill, baby, drill” school of thought) seems like a good idea… until the explosion and massive leak of oil from the Deep Water well in the Gulf of Mexico. There has been a hot on-going discussion these past few weeks about the way this is being handled, and suggestions have been made that if BP manages to stop the spill at all they will become much more liable in lawsuits already in preparation, for not employing an effective counter-measure sooner. So the Gulf of Mexico and much of the area touched b the Gulf stream may be devastated, as in “all multicellular life destroyed”.

Others have jumped in with reports of new kinds of biofuels (remember ethanol?) like algae oils that might “save” our global civilization from collapse.

I have been following this discussion with interest. It seems to me that it is not a question of some new energy source “saving” mankind. If we DO find a new energy source that allows us to keep alive all the humans currently on the planet and keep our economy growing, that will ultimately destroy not only our own species but lay waste to the entire planet.

Without a global recognition of the need to control human reproduction, we are better off with a die-off followed by a reboot with many if not all the remaining cultural remnants incorporating some kind of chagrined realization that humanity had taken a wrong fork in the road. Meaning future cultural systems make sustainability -not growth- central to their ideology. Let me repeat what I said earlier: if we DO find a new energy source that allows us to keep alive all the humans currently on the planet and keep our economy growing, that will ultimately destroy not only our own species but lay waste to the entire planet.

You can see the spread of sustainability concepts happening now in the transition town movement, and in many of the writings coming out of the Peak Oil “doomer” blogs. Sustainability and “saving the Earth” seem to be the kind of ideas that people easily incorporate into their worldview. Controlling family size, however, is still a kind of taboo idea in many parts of the world. And this is related to a denial of our animal nature – a denial of the fact that, like bacteria or rabbits or many other animals, we humans will increase our numbers exponentially when limits to our food supply are removed. Our population, then is a dependent variable. And it does not appear to be under our control. We humans, who think we are so smart and technologically advanced, cannot seem to keep our own fertility under check.

So far, aside from state measures like China’s one child policy, the only thing that seems to work to reduce birthrate is giving more education and choice to the human person doing most of the work involved in childbearing and rearing – the human female.  And it only works when there is some assurance that old age will not be destitute if there are no adult children to help a person survive.

I am pessimistic about our chances, as a species, of returning the human female to a position in society where her rights, education, and legal status are equal to a man’s.  I say this despite all the apparent progress that has been made in the industrial world. Most of that “progress” has been an ideological adaptation (which we know as feminism) to the incorporation of more and more females into the wage labor market, and it has had a huge cost.

I say “returning” because I think that we probably had a much more egalitarian relationship between the sexes while we were evolving as foragers.  Then the division of labour existed, but women’s gathering of wild plant foods accounted for up to 75% of all the calories consumed from day to day.  This meant that the relationships between men and women were seen as complimentary and marriages were economic partnerships.  That has become eroded somewhat since the development of agriculture, as often land rights were inherited along male lines (resulting in patrilineal corporate groups controlling most of the resources, with women leaving their own group to go into that of their husbands). In a few cultures, where land rights were inherited through the female line, the result was matrilineal groups – and , not by the way, matriarchy, since political power and position was passed from a woman’s brother to her son.  However, the economic contributions of women have been recognized in most systems of subsistence food production, and it seems to me that the erosion of women’s status with respect to men has had a lot more to do with the evolution of warfare.  Among mobile hunter-gatherers organized warfare and organized political hierarchy appears to be almost nonexistent, judging by the archaeological and ethnographic evidence.  We do not see much evidence of warfare in the archaeological record before 20,000 years ago, and then only in areas where human beings had begun to live in sedentary villages supported by the harvesting of things like salmon runs and wild wheat, maize, or rice. 

The human population today is far too high to be sustained by foraging anymore, except in fairly unusual areas where neither agriculture nor pastoralism is feasible and the humans are very thin on the ground.  Even if there is a horrible die-off, the survivors might not be able to take up foraging as so much of the natural ecosystem has been damaged everywhere.  Even among those who do, however, the egalitarian nature of that system will probably take a long time to be rediscovered, since the more newly minted hunter-gatherer societies (if these emerge after the collapse) will still be operating within a cultural paradigm (set of ideas) developed to suit several thousand years of agriculture-based “civilization”. That kind of paradigm favours hoarding, aggressive defence against outsiders, high birthrates, and control over female sexuality.

In fact, since many of the social/economic arrangements post-collapse will likely be based on various kinds of domesticated eco-systems the most likely outcome will be the rediscovery, so to speak, of social arrangements like those of horticultural and pastoral peoples, most of which are organized into kinship groups along patrilineal lines.

There will, likely, continue to be conflicts between groups over land, localized overshoot of resources, and success for any given group will be most likely still be measured in its expanding population, vanquishing or incorporating rival groups. A pacifist community dedicated to population control and ecological sustainability will be squashed like a bug. Even if not so pacifist, such a community would have to be well and lethally armed to withstand an onslaught with superior numbers, and I wonder how long this could be continued – how large the other group would have to be – before even sophisticated defences proved futile.

A lot may depend on whether or not we keep the electrical grid and the internet – and other systems of communication – up and running. The larger the pool of information being shared, the more likely human communities are to grasp the reality that led to collapse and to try to incorporate some corrections into their future ways of doing things.

So hang on to this thought: If we DO find a new energy source that allows us to keep alive all the humans currently on the planet and keep our economy growing, that will ultimately destroy not only our own species but lay waste to the entire planet.

Sure, we are facing a steep decline in certain resources like oil. But just because we are at Peak Oil now and about to slide down that long descent, we must not delude ourselves thinking that we need to “fix” the problem of Peak Oil.  Peak Oil IS the “fix” for the problem of humanity on life-support… it takes that life support away and lets the bulk of humanity die. Humanity cannot “fix” nature’s solution to our own stupidity. We can only hope to become less stupid in the future.

Several days later…

I have thought it through again. I want to make it clearer that there are some opportunities for good outcomes of the crisis we are facing. There are reasons to be optimistic despite the horrible fix humanity is in. For one thing, I agree with Frances Lappe -I agree with Frances Lappe – there is no real reason to believe that the problem lies in human nature – we are not born to be selfish hermits or arrogant megalomaniacs. We evolved in small mutually dependent communities with a great deal of sharing and cooperative behaviour at the core of our adaptation. Our brains, even today, bear this out.

Neurological Roots of Compassion Run Deep | Wired Science | Wired.com

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/neurocompassion/

(RESEARCH REVEALS BRAIN AREAS FOR TYPES OF DECISION-MAKING,

SHOWS HOW A BRAIN CHEMICAL UNDERPINS SOCIAL INTERACTION

http://www.sfn.org/index.cfm?pagename=news_110407a

The nature of human altruism

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6960/abs/nature02043.html

Altruistic helping in human infants and young chim… [Science. 2006] – PubMed

result

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16513986

Activity in the amygdala elicited by unfair divisions predicts social value

orientation : Article : Nature Neuroscience

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2468.html

see also: http://www.physorg.com/news175522198.html

How a simple mathematic formula is starting to explain the bizarre prevalence of

altruism in society http://www.physorg.com/news135580478.html

Study: Brains Want to Cooperate

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2002/07/53945?currentPage=all

http://www.physorg.com/news166337233.html

Seeking the roots of collective cooperation

http://www.physorg.com/news134909857.html

Hunter-gatherers: Marshall Sahlins- The Original Affluent Society

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

Impulsive Behavior May Be Relict Of Hunter-gatherer Past

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041206191407.htm

Cooperative Behavior Meshes With Evolutionary Theory

http://www.physorg.com/news153150016.html

http://www.physorg.com/news111145481.html

Revising the fundamentals: insights of neuro-economics for economic foundations

of performance related pay in management (Utz Helmuth)

http://www.transformations.khf.vu.lt/16/articles/ge16.pdf)

Children Are Naturally Prone To Be Empathic And Moral

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080711080957.htm

We also evolved -biologically- to use culture as our survival strategy. Hence the big brain – we are hardwired to learn a language and a culture. We also appear to be hardwired to feel good when we are fairly treated and to resent injustice and inequality – even though we like and accept that men and women will behave a bit differently, we still need powerful cultural programming to justify treating the sexes as unequal in terms of rights to fair treatment.

Getting Smart with Differences in Women and Men

http://www.drlindaklaitz.com/viewarticle.asp?ID=9

The Sunny Side of Fairness . Preference for Fairness Activates Reward Circuitry (and

Disregarding Unfairness Activates Self-Control Circuitry)

http://sds.hss.cmu.edu/media/pdfs/tabibnia/sunny-side-fairness.pdf

Gender biases in leadership selection during competitions within and between groups
http://www.physorg.com/news144587356.html

Researchers study the pleasure of punishment – Imposing a penalty for unfair behavior activates a pleasure point in brain

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5820379/

revenge: neural basis of altruistic punishment

http://straddle3.net/context/03/en/2004_09_10.html

BONOBO LAND

No-one Gets Left Behind

http://bonoboathome.blogspot.com/2003_10_05_archive.html

The Genetics of Politics

http://primatediaries.blogspot.com/2007/10/genetics-of-politics.html

Your Brain on Schadenfreude . . . Or Not

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2009/02/12/your-brain-on-schaden\freude-or-not.aspx

We also all evolved a neural capacity for experiencing awe and transcendence -especially in the presence of lovemaking, beautiful sunsets and a contemplation of the miracles of life in this vast universe.

http://www.shaktitechnology.com/

SHAKTI – Spiritual Technology for Altered States, meditation enhancement and

mood enhancement.

It’s confirmed: Spiritual experiences ‘are in the brain’

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/its-confirmed-spiritual-experiences-are-i/4015\06/

In Anthropology, there has been a lot of theoretical work (and head scratching) over the reasons why human societies, even when still based on hunting and gathering, might have developed a certain degree of social stratification

(unequal access to resources). I think the best model for this was offered by Boone (1992). Here is a description of his ideas, which fit into what we call the “evolutionary ecology” school of thought in our discipline:

“James Boone (1992) has developed the basic elements of an evolutionary ecological model of social in equelity as follows. The critical step in the emergence if inequality must be that which alienates some members of a community from equal opportunities for survival and reproduction through limits on the availability of quality foods, positions of authority, and prestigious status roles. We can assume that potential subordinates will rigorously defend their autonomy and equality from attempts at their subjugation unless they have a compelling reason to accept subordination. For example, people might accept diminished status if they find themselves in situations of high ecological risk.Individuals, families, clans, or villages with more stability and security and with the potential to produce beyond their needs on occasion might be willing to share some of their surplus with less secure neighbors. In return the needyneighbors could be expected to contribute labor or capital resources (such asraw materials or other storable or high quality resources) on a more regularbasis.Such unequal exchange could only develop where more secure individuals are able to defend their surplus. In times of hardship, disadvantaged members of the community must find it in their best interest to trade labor or tribute for security instead of seeking to take resources by force from more affluent neighbors. If resources are not defendable, we would never expect to see the development of a social landscape of unequal vulnerability.In this way, a patron–client relationship might evolve between people living in a relatively unproductive environment punctuated by productive and defensible resources. The resource landscape has to be uneven and there have to be enough people competing for those resources to allow for the exclusion of some of that population from high quality resource patches (or the materials and knowledge o fhow to be productive in a given environment).Unequal access to material resources and the social and technological knowledge that make a difference in resource production seems to underlie the evolution ofinequality. But there are host of ways that economic asymmetry could develop.Hayden has outlined many of these (e.g., 1995). In some circumstances defense of productive sites could be decisive; in others, accumulation of surpluses and their selective reinvestment in social alliances might be the key to social differentiation. However it is established, the evolutionary ecological model suggests that non–egalitarian hunting and gathering populations should arise where risks are unevenly distributed across the landscape and where some individuals are forced to make due on less than optimal conditions while still seeking to maximize their survival and reproductive potential under the constraints of their situation.The evolutionary ecological model outlined above is general in scope and allowsfor a wide range of variation in the ways hunter–gatherers might become increasingly complex. In most cases, population growth, social and physical circumscription, sedentism, defense of resource locations and residential territory, and control of resources through storage will be involved in the reorganization of risks. Highly mobile foragers living in low population densities and with the option to move to other areas or other bands as necessary can maintain more or less equal exposure to risks. Only when some people canprevent others from equal access to the best resources will the social landscape become unequally risky, thereby supporting the development of inequality (Boone1992).”

(quoted from “Thoughts on the Evolution of Social Inequality: A Paradigmatic Analysis” by Ben Fitzhugh of the University of Washington. Published 10 Oct, 2009 in “Social Collective”)

Our sense of morality is rooted in our evolutionary past as well, and evidently had – and continues to have – survival value. We may not have always needed religious texts to show us how to behave – our morality is older than religion

and in fact most religions only codify behavior that is universally considered to be right when dealing with each other. This allowed cooperation within and between human groups and reduced mortality and enhanced survival in the past when human beings were thin on the ground.

In more crowed and conflict-laden societies, such as those with social stratification discussed in Boone’s work, the levels of aggression and (possibly) treatment of younger children became more strict and demanding, it is possible that religious codes began to become more necessary to keep cooperation and compassionate kinds of behaviour alive. It is also possible that there were genetic variations among people that made some people more in need of these extra controls…

Study links genetic variation to individual empathy, stress levels

http://www.physorg.com/news177609171.html

Knowing When to Trust Others: An ERP Study of Decision Making After Receiving

Information From Unknown People

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/704026

Less Empathy Toward Outsiders: Brain Differences Reinforce Preferences For Those

In Same Social Group

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630173815.htm

Sticks and stones: A new study on social and physical pain

http://www.physorg.com/news139068314.html

Edward O. Wilson

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/biomoral.htm)

Hand of God, Mind of Man: Punishment and Cognition in the Evolution of

Cooperation*

http://dominicdpjohnson.com/publications/pdf/2006%20-%20Johnson%20&%20Bering%20-\%20Hand%20of%20God.pdf

Reasonable Doubt About Sin, Biological Bases For Behavior

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/02/reasonable-doubt-about-sin-biological.html

Religion may have evolved because of its ability to help people exercise

self-control

http://www.physorg.com/news149861062.html

Selflessness, core of all major world religions, has neuropsychological connection

http://www.physorg.com/news148736876.html

How we treat people on the basis of gender, social status, and age (especially how we treat women and children) may have a bigger affect than we originally realized on whether people within a given society are able to be self-disciplined, cooperative, and empathetic. The kind of bullying and punishment seen by people growing up in many stratified and/or industrial societies, as well as early neglect, may create adults with far less capacity for kindness and compassion than the childrearing among contemporary hunter-gatherers. Just creating some small inequalities within a social group, based on the ability of some people to keep others from getting equal access to resources formerly shared, might be enough to set in motion a cascade of changes in behaviour which lead to tolerance and even expectation that some people are “better” than others. This, in a species with a long evolutionary history favouring cooperation and sharing, may create stresses previously not experienced by individuals. And the stress can start at a young age…

Early life stress has effects at the molecular level

http://www.physorg.com/news177227567.html

Research explores the relationship between the mother-child bond and stress

http://www.physorg.com/news176124645.html

Children Can Inherit Mom’s Abuse-Altered Brain : Discovery News

http://news.discovery.com/human/abuse-brain-mother-child.html

New research finds breastfeeding stops neglect

http://www.physorg.com/news151931908.html

Early neglect predicts aggressive behavior in children

http://www.physorg.com/news126764603.html

Handling rejection: New study sheds light on why it hurts

http://www.physorg.com/news148056904.html

Adult crime linked to childhood anxiety

http://www.physorg.com/news144947322.html

The importance of grandmothers in the lives of their grandchildren

http://www.physorg.com/news176054402.html

Growing Up Amid War Affects Children’s Moral Development

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080715071436.htm

Summary: We evolved to use culture as our main system of survival – and are hardwired to learn language and culture. When in the recent 20.000 years we started here and there to bump the limitations of the carrying capacity of local environments our cultures adapted.

It has not always been a pleasant process for most of the participants even in the cultural groups that could count themselves among the winners. In cases of increased competition for resources, raiding and warfare, patterns of alliance

and political hierarchies which streamlined decision-making during warfare were highly successful compared to more ad-hoc and individualistic reactions.

The group that got all their weapons ready and pointed in the same direction, had a plan, and were well led tended to eliminate the groups that argued and tried for consensus.

The groups that developed strong cultural conditioning for males different from females (so that the young men went out and got killed and maimed and the girls stayed home to give birth to the next generation of warriors) tended to outnumber and outfight the groups that allowed excited young women to join their husbands and brothers in the war party. This was linked to a widened gap in status between men and women, and with the consequence that ill treatment or neglect increased female morbidity and mortality, including in some groups, high rates of female infanticide.  This led to a shortage of women and feedback into the pattern of hostilities as raiding other groups for women was added to the mix.  One way or another, the number of women was reduced, and this in turn reduced the rate of population growth, which is, after all, dependent on the number of women, not the number of men (within certain limits).  

In the game of cultural evolution, these kinds of systems might not have been all that nice for the individuals involved, but if higher rates of warfare kept the populations in a given environment stabilized below carrying capacity, the culture survived. IF a more peaceful and gentle culture, no matter how pleasant for its members, created constant overshoot of its carrying capacity, the culture ultimately failed.  I say, “ultimately” because we of the “civilized” industrial world are likely the tail end of a long tradition of pro-natalism tending to favour big families and to solve the problem of over-population by out-migration and taking over the territory of less powerful groups (leading to the “colonization” of the “New World” (which was in fact already fully colonized to begin with). 

Today do we have any ways of staying below carrying capacity (once nature gets us back below it) besides mass starvation, endless warfare, or constant tides of disease? Do we?

We DO!!! It is called family planning AKA birth control. and you can bet your boots that any human culture that is PEACEFUL, technologically sophisticated and affluent on this planet in the year 2500 will have complete control over its birth rate.

So we know what we need to do. We need to stop worrying about how much canned food we have in store and how well armed we are; instead we ought to start organizing communities based on democracy, equality and justice. And family

planning, unless we want to see infant and childhood mortality rise again.

We need to level out incomes. We need to tax the rich and stop the pattern of money making money without doing anything actually productive. This can be done, if the will of enough people is behind it.

We need, eventually. a revolution.

To bring about real democracy maybe we need to stop people from owning more land than they need for their own use for food production and shelter. Maybe we need to take control of food distribution out of the market and into a system of human welfare. Maybe we have to stop thinking of certain people as too dumb to take care of themselves and accept that human variation around the world is nothing compared to the variation found in the very small, very egalitarian remnants of subSaharan hunter-gatherers.

We need to give the very poorest people a chance and treat them with the same respect we would give the (eventually former?) Queen of England.

If anyone thinks they are just going to take advantage then you ought to wake up to the fact that wealthy “landed” classes have already taken so much advantage they nearly ran the whole human project right over a cliff.

I have followed up here with two articles on the nature of humanity that I found relevant.

Both nice and nasty

Mary Midgley

Published 13 March 2000

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Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior Christopher Boehm Harvard University Press, 258pp, £24.95 ISBN 0674390318

Discussions about the political nature of human beings have been violently polarised since at least the 17th century. Christopher Boehm, a professor of anthropology and director of the Jane Goodall Research Centre at the University of California, says of this feud: “One tradition is hawkish and the other dovelike, and they lead many scholars to view humans as essentially nice or essentially nasty . . . As an admirer of both Hobbes and Rousseau, I hope that my approach has been in accordance with the facts rather than overwhelmed by ideology . . . I have tried to straddle the polarised debate.”

Boehm does this by concentrating on the apparent clash between two large and central facts. On the one hand, it is now clear that all the three apes that are our nearest relatives live in societies that are notably hierarchical. On the other hand, almost all the surviving hunter-gatherer societies, or “foraging humans” as they are now called, which seem to represent earlier stages of human development are notably egalitarian. Hawkish theorists tend to concentrate on the apes and ignore the foraging humans; more dovelike theorists concentrate on the foragers, suggesting that Homo sapiens acquired an entirely new set of motives when he became a separate species. This would presumably mean either that genetic changes generated a new emotional constitution or that they somehow abolished that constitution altogether, producing a tabula rasa which left all behaviour to be determined by culture.

The tabula rasa theory was long preferred and had a huge influence in the social sciences. But, as Boehm notes in Hierarchy in the Forest, it is no longer possible to believe in such a change to complete malleability. The story is implausible not only genetically but culturally, because human beings constantly act in ways that are either new to their culture or that are forbidden by it.

However, there is a third large and awkward historical fact to add to the two with which Boehm starts: namely, the later revival of hierarchy. Since the time when human societies began to grow, hierarchy has returned to “most human political societies in the world today, starting about five thousand years ago. At that time, people were beginning to live increasingly in chiefdoms . . . From certain well-developed chiefdoms came the six early civilisations, with their powerful and often despotic leaders. But before twelve thousand years ago, humans basically were egalitarian.”

Thus there has been a U-shaped curve, dipping into egalitarianism and out again, and leaving us with a very mixed tradition. Why should this be? Well, Boehm writes that egalitarianism does not result from the mere absence of hierarchy. Rather, “egalitarian societies amount to hierarchies in which the flow of power has reversed direction quite dramatically”.

Language made all the difference. Among hierarchical primates, rebellion was always waiting to happen. Once the inferiors could talk, it exploded. Boehm cites plentiful evidence to show that apes feel this resentment against their irresponsible rulers, and that foragers deliberately protected their egalitarian systems by a constant social pressure against any self-aggrandising behaviour that might lead to a new domination.

Several interesting consequences follow. One concerns morality. When it was assumed that foragers were naturally harmonious, there seemed little role for morality among them; and some people remain puzzled as to why we later humans ever fell from this state of amoral grace. In fact, detailed anthropological evidence shows that, for foraging peoples, harmony was maintained very incompletely and with a great deal of effort. Homicide, feuding and minor offences were common enough. But what is significant is the consistent effort that is made to contain them. Morality, says Boehm, may have been an absolute prerequisite for the emergence of egalitarianism; without it – without some conception of a different and better possible existence – it would scarcely have been possible for people to change their way of life so markedly. Egalitarian society depends on a constant effort by its members to deal with their own ambivalence; to balance their conflicting aims so as to consider those around them.

So could this new way of living have had genetic consequences? Could it have altered human nature in the direction of altruism? Unfashionably, Boehm thinks so; and he gives detailed arguments for an impressive attack on the sociobiological zeitgeist. For instance, there are reasons to think that inter-group competition was particularly strong during the climatic disturbances of the Palaeolithic period. Groups with altruistic, generously minded members might well have survived such an ordeal better than those composed entirely of dedicated egoists.

Human nature is a puzzling topic. As Boehm points out, it brings out our own inner ambivalences – which is why the feuding is so bitter. His remarkably sane approach, comprehensive yet enterprising, helps us to understand it better.

Mary Midgley is a philosopher.

Okay, this is me, Helga again. And here, on a more somber note, here is an article I read recently from an Australian biologist.

This appeared in Pacific Conservation Biology V 15, No 4 Summer 2009 pp

230-231

Editorial

Good Luck

On last night’s (11 November 2009) ABC Television, I watched Sir David

Attenborough being interviewed for the ‘7.30 Report’ by Kerry O’Brien. Sir

David is a household name throughout the English speaking world, if not

universally. Since the beginnings of television, David Attenborough has

brought the world of nature into our homes. He has probably seen more of

the Earth’s wild animals and untamed places than any known traveller in

modern history; a compassionate, intelligent, thoughtful and articulate

man, Sir David’s views on the future of the wild planet merit respect and

careful consideration. In this interview, three things stood out.

First, Sir David commented on how humanity has been separated from the

world of nature, saying:

“Oh, there’s no doubt that we are becoming increasingly divorced from the

natural world. There are lots of people who spend their lives in cities and

never see a wild thing unless it’s [a] pigeon – or maybe a rat. So you lose

touch with the rhythms of the natural world. You lose touch with the

realities of a natural world. I don’t want to get too pretentious, but you

lose touch with both life and death, with both how life is created and how

death is inevitable.” (1)

Anyone living in Australia and who is knowledgeable about the Australian

environment will know immediately what Sir David meant. Outside of

naturalist colleagues, I meet few Australians of any age who have any

knowledge of the wild plants and animals they share the continent with. Not

only do most Australians no longer come in contact with nature, but natural

history is no longer considered a worthy subject for study at any level

from kindergarten to post-graduate university. Losing rhythm with the

natural world means that nature conservation is not an issue worthy of

government consideration. I cannot thing of any Australian politician,

current or past, who has demonstrated a knowledge and understanding of the

rhythms of nature, let alone being prepared to protect those rhythms. As a

nation, Australia is divorced totally from nature.

Sir David went on to say that:

“The world’s wildlife and the natural world is under such pressure, it will

disappear unless we care for it. And if it disappears, humanity will be

damaged very substantially. After all, we depend upon the wild world for

what we breathe and what we eat. So if that goes and we don’t look after

it, we’re in trouble.

Of course, conservation biologists know this, but I doubt many outside our

profession are truly aware of the current extinction crisis, much less

understanding the consequences for the human species, if nature and other

species are lost. The ecological consequences for humanity aside, I wonder

how many people in Australia or elsewhere really care about other species.

When you are so deeply divorced from nature, it is hard to care; there are

just so many more important things in life. For most people, a job, the

next holiday, the mortgage, and, for billions, the next meal are more

important than the survival of some bird, much less some insect, that they

have never seen and probably never heard about. That extinction of species

could mean “trouble” for humanity is incomprehensible; the idea that

causing the extinction of other species is immoral is even less

understandable.

I am reminded of the words of Paul Collins, historian, in his book God’s

Earth (p.2) when he refers to contemporary society.

“We will be hated by the people who come after us because we will have

denied them their birthright by destroying so much of the natural world in

our selfish and self-engrossed attempt to take everything for ourselves.”

It is not so much that we live in an immoral world, as that we have no

morality when it comes to considering the needs of other species, much less

other people and future generations.

Continuing with the ‘7.30 Report’, Sir David raised a point I often think

about, saying:

“The fact is nobody particularly gets any pleasure out of being doom laden

soothsayers and crying woe, woe, woe and disaster. But that’s the fact. The

fact is that you see these things going on and you can’t keep quiet about

it or shouldn’t.”

I could not agree more. On every occasion I have sat down to write an

editorial for Pacific Conservation Biology I have fought with myself about

what to say and how to be positive and uplifting – to give hope, even when

I see none. Sir David spoke the truth in saying there is no pleasure in

delivering bad news, so editorial writing has never been one of my more

pleasurable tasks. The real problem is I cannot keep quiet about the loss

of the natural world that I cherish for the abundant joy and sustenance it

has given me. It is important for humanity to live at more than subsistence

level. Yet that is where we are heading as a species; subsistence survival

in a resource depleted and obscenely crowded world. A world totally

dominated by humans and their artefacts.

A world devoid of nature.

Many share these thoughts and conclusions, including James Lovelock of GAIA

fame. In his 90’s, Lovelock has become increasingly outspoken in his

concern for the survival of human civilisation. In his most recent words,

Lovelock argues that global climate change predictions are too

conservative, failing to account for sudden and rapid shifts in global

temperatures – shifts that always trend towards higher temperatures, but

can include periods when it is much cooler. So severe are these changes

that Lovelock foresees the collapse of civilisation and the death of most

of the world’s human population, with the survivors living a Stone Age

existence. Is Lovelock a doomsayer or just a bearer of the truth? I know

what I think. I’ve been telling my daughter for some time now that the most

important things she can teach her children, my grandchildren, is how to

live from the land and grow their own food- talents few urban Australians

possess, but which were common only a generation or two ago.

A day or so before writing this editorial, I had a pleasant lunch

entertaining old friends; Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Frank and Sue Talbot, Andy

Beattie and Chris Turnbull, with their daughter Keira, and Graham Pyke. We

had an abundance of food, almost all of which my wife, Judy, and I had

grown in our garden or harvested from the estuary surrounding our island

home. The day was sunny, the temperature and breeze delightful. With all

that bounty available on the fringe of Australia’s largest city, Sydney, it

was hard to believe that the world faced environmental collapse or that

Australia was already grossly over-populated. Yet we, with our collective

500+ years of scientific training and research experience in biological

conservation embracing across all the world’s continents land and sea,

vertebrate and invertebrate, could find little to be hopeful for with

respect to avoiding the worst environmental consequences of humanity’s

impact on Earth. A lack of hope verified by the failure of APEC leaders at

their meeting two days later to set specific targets for the reduction of

greenhouse gas emissions.

At lunch, we did not agree about everything. We never do, but we were not

optimistic. This is not to say that we were beyond hope. There was and is

hope, but as ever the challenge is how to get people, especially the

World’s leaders (government, unions, religious, commercial, health) to

accept that humanity is part of a natural world and dependent on that world

for its survival. Wherever you look, the Australian government, for

example, there is insufficient action on even the most dangerous of

environmental threats, such as global climate change and biodiversity loss,

and their drivers – human population growth and an unthinking preoccupation

with never-ending economic growth in a finite world.

At my age, all I feel like doing is laughing. Then I look around and see my

precious world of nature diminishing almost as fast as the bean stalks

climbing the trellis in our kitchen garden and all I want to do is cry. Not

a cry of tears, but one of anguish and frustration. How do you get people

to care? To understand? There is no more time to start with kindergarten,

but even as I write this the Australian government contends that Australia

still has the capacity for more population growth and that ecologists who

argue the continent is already over-populated are wrong.

Most view my ideas as extreme. I advocate a one-child policy for Australia

and argue that, in the long-term, the continent cannot support even half

its present numbers at the material living standards Australians aspire to

without extraordinary environmental and moral costs. By mining and

exporting Australia’s mineral and energy resources, it is possible to

increase numbers, but not sustainably. By every environmental indicator

available – biodiversity, air and water quality, fisheries, urban

congestion, social welfare and equity, education, open space and wild

rivers, soil, and agricultural productivity – the ecological sustainability

of the Australian continent has already been exceeded. Don’t these things

mean anything to us?

If we were looking at any species other than ourselves, we would conclude

that they had exceeded the carrying capacity of their environment and were

doomed to a life of squalor and starvation. I used to say that I would

escape the worst and that only my children and grandchildren would be among

the losers of our society’s “selfish and self-engrossed” pursuit of

material growth and wealth, but I am swayed by Lovelock’s analyses and I

may yet live long enough to witness the collapse of planetary life-support

systems and with that, human civilization. I will certainly see the end of

the natural world as Sir David Attenborough knew it.

Good luck. We will need it.