We started by wreaking great havoc on the environment. We cut down forests and plowed up prairies, much of which ultimately turned into desert. On the other hand, this new road led to great invention, to writing, the plow, irrigation, the wheel, mathematics ... and inventions led to yet other inventions, and so on ultimately to atomic power and the computer. It led to civilization and to the modern age.
And what did we get from this transition? For most of us most of the time, not much. Those at the top of our various civilizations lived royally, but the great majority of us were peasants. Our standard of living was a step down from the hunter-gatherer way of life. We were smaller and weaker from being less well-nourished, and riddled with disease from living intimately with animals. When Europeans landed in North America, they were impressed by how tall and strong the indigenous people were compared to themselves. The Europeans also brought their diseases with them, diseases unknown to the Americans as they had not domesticated animals, and the diseases wiped out millions. A gift of civilization.
Not until the Industrial Revolution did a high standard of living became generally available to ordinary people. And a very high standard of living indeed. Today, those of us lucky enough to enjoy it live a life of luxury that would have been unimaginable to even the richest kings and queens of past centuries. In summary, agriculture brought millennia of hardscrabble for most people followed by a century or so of lavish living.
And now the technology that brought us this brief period of high living is about to destroy the very civilization it allowed us to create. It has brought global warming and species extinction, and it is greedily exhausting the resources it needs to survive. If we don't bring it under control, if we don't transition it into something sustainable, it will bring our fancy civilization down around our ears, perhaps reducing us to a state that will make hunter-gathering look like a golden age, or possibly even extinguish us as a species. The thing that set it all into motion, the invention of agriculture, will doom us. It will turn out to be a lethal mistake.
But there may be an even worse mistake. Taming technology is within our understanding and intelligence. But instead of simply recognizing the threat and acting sensibly to make yet another transition, this time to a sustainable way of life, we have turned the challenge into a political issue. Those who recognize the crisis are posited as enemies of the economy, indeed of society, as the world's most powerful leader recently insisted in Davos. Our greatest mistake, therefore, may turn out to be not so much agriculture and all the technology that flowed from it, but from the foolishness of turning an issue that should be about physics into a quarrel about politics. Of course, given our nature, that may have been inevitable from the beginning.
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Anthropologist Jared Diamond has studied the sometimes self-destructive behaviour of societies in his book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."
His conclusion is that societies that collapse often ensure that result through short-term thinking, sometimes even with an awareness of the mid- to long-term devastation it will cause. We act out of immediate wants.
He also observes that, when societies collapse, it is usually when they are at their zenith and it comes on rapidly, rather than gradually.
In the past a society could fail but there were always others that survived, even thrived. In the 21st century, however, we have a global society or civilization and, for the first time in human history, the power to control the planet, the biosphere, even our climate. For the first time the planet is undergoing a change in epoch driven by a single species.
It seems like a global repeat of the Icarus fable. We fly too close to the sun. We do it because we can without much regard to whether we should.
Bill, you're a fellow old duffer. At our birth the planet sustained an all-time record human population of around 2.5 billion. Today we're closing in on 8 billion. I received a UN report yesterday that predicts we'll add another 2.5 billion by 2050. NGOs that study our predicament, such as the Global Footprint Network, believe we've already degraded the biosphere to the point where it can sustain a population of around 2 billion. Yet we're expecting to grow to 10+ billion within 30 years.
We've reached a point where mankind consumes nearly all the resources on the planet. We are squeezing out other life forms at an alarming rate. We've lost more than half of both terrestrial and marine life over the past 40 years, a span that saw our population more than double. When there's not enough to meet our demands we pillage the planet's reserves to the point that, if we froze our numbers today, we would still need another planet Earth of resources to live sustainably.
We are now embarked on what is called the "Great Acceleration."
Whether it is climate change or over-consumption or overpopulation they all threaten our survival due to the same cause - man's refusal to live within the finite limits of our planet, Spaceship Earth, our one and only biosphere. All three of those are existential threats. We either solve them all or we'll fail on all of them.
There is a theory that the reason we don't share our sidewalks with little green men is because intelligent life is inherently self-extinguishing. Given our "progress" since the end of WWII that does seem plausible.
Very plausible indeed, Mound.
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