Is Humanity Suicidal?

[Brenda]

This was written in 1993 by EO Wilson and refers to the Sixth Extinction that the MSM still, STILL does not even mention.

The human species is, in a word, an environmntal abnormality. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself. This admittedly dour scenario is based on what can be termed the juggernaut theory of human nature, which holds that people are programmed by their genetic heritage to be so selfish that a sense of global responsibility will come too late. Individuals place themselves first, family second, tribe third and the rest of the world a distant fourth. Their genes also predispose them to plan ahead for one or two generations at most. They fret over the petty problems and conflicts of their daily lives and respond swiftly and often ferociously to slight challenges to their status and tribal security. But oddly, as psychologists have discovered, people also tend to underestimate both the likelihood and impact of such natural disasters as major earthquakes and great storms.

*snip*

Many, perhaps most, of the species are locked in symbioses with,other species; they cannot survive and reproduce unless arrayed with their partners in the correct idiosyncratic configurations. Even if the biologists pulled off the taxonomic equivalent of the Manhattan Project, sorting and preserving cultures of all the species, they could not then put the community back together again. It would be like unscrambling an egg with a pair of spoons. The biology of the microorganisms needed to reanimate the soil would be mostly unknown. The pollinators of most of the flowers and the correct timing of their appearance cotild only be guessed. The "assembly rules," the sequence in which species must be allowed to colonize in order to coexist indefinitely, would remain in the realm of theory. In its neglect of the rest of life, exemptionalism fails definitively. To move ahead as though scientific and entrepreneurial genius will solve each crisis that arises implies that the declining biosphere can be similarly manipulated. But the world is too complicated to be turned into a garden. There is no biological homeostat that can be worked by humanity; to believe otherwise is to risk reducing a large part of Earth to a wasteland. The environmentalist vision, prudential and less exuberant than exemptionalism, is closer to reality. It sees humanity entering a bottleneck unique in history, constricted by population and econoniic pressures. In order to pass through to the other side, within perhaps 50 to 100 years, more science and entrepreueurship will have to be devoted to stabilizing the global environment. That can be accopmplished, according to expert consensus, only by halting population growth and devising a wiser use of resources than has been accomplished to date. And wise use for the living world in particular means preserving the surviving ecosystems, micromanaging them only enough to save the biodiversity they contain, until such time as they can be understood and employed in the fullest sense for human benefit.

http://large.stanford.edu/publications/power/references/wilson/

[House of Roberts]

2. Only the Rapturees,

and they're SOL because it already happened.

[Lulu KC]

3. He is my hero

And I have often wondered the same thing.

[orthoclad]

4. Humans are a self-correcting error?

Something I said off the cuff a while ago, maybe I heard it somewhere.

Nature does blind experiments. There is no direction upward in evolution, only fitness to the environment. If we do not fit our environment, Nature will just develop something else that will. Our hands and brain and behaviors are adaptations to the drastic climate change in Africa that replaced forest with savannah, and we became successful at improvising to new ennvironments. Maybe, too successful. It's ironic that we children of climate change are causing another such drastic climate change.

But it was not the hunter-gatherer clans and indigenous American civilizations that caused this. We were just a very successful hominid which colonized every environment. Anthopogenic climate change was born from capitalism and its vast need of fossil energy to power its profits.

Sadly, we are taking millions of species with us. We are an asteroid. New species will emerge.

--------

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.270.5233.53
"Major steps in the evolution of African hominids and other vertebrates are coincident with shifts to more arid, open conditions near 2.8 Ma, 1.7 Ma, and 1.0 Ma, suggesting that some Pliocene (Plio)-Pleistocene speciation events may have been climatically mediated."

[Brenda]

5. I usually qualify "humanity"

with "the sociopathic greedy few" when discussing who is to blame for humanity's plight. Lots of people (not really referring to Wilson) like to blame all humans for destroying the planet (by driving cars, etc.) when we know the levers of power that control everything are not anywhere near our hands. The rich nuts use a good portion of their wealth ensuring the rest of us either do not know what's really going on or eliminating the resistance by controlling the economy, government and media. Throw in Big Religion to encourage growing the population beyond sustainable limits and here we are.

For example GM in cahoots with other power players killing the electric car in the mid 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

I agree with this totally:

Anthopogenic climate change was born from capitalism and its vast need of fossil energy to power its profits.

[orthoclad]

6. Good pic. And "overpopulation"

should be weighted by resource use -- how many Bangladeshis=one First Worlder. Let alone "one billionaire=how many migrant workers".

Market forces reward the worst of us the most. This notion refers back to the thread about The Mindset: The Ultrarich Ask: "How Do I Control My Compound's Security Force After Civilization Collapses?"
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1127&pid=155817

[Brenda]

7. Yes, that article shows how insane the super rich are.

Well, billions of people no matter where they live are still too many. A system that forces people to have more workers, erm, children so they can move up towards that carrot being dangled - middle class - where everyone has a car and smart phone is part of the problem.

The same powers that keep everyone down especially love to keep the women down. Simple things like education and birth control would go a long way to rectifying so many problems before it got this bad.

[orthoclad]

8. Which is why the Reich-wing

is so opposed to birth control and abortion: they need more poor and desperate people willing to work for peanuts, and they're relying on women to produce them. People of means will always have access to contraception and abortion.
(Plus they find abortion a convenient hot button)

A long time ago I read that the Catholic Church did not oppose abortion until the Hundred Years War, where Catholic France needed generations of arrow-fodder. I can't find a reference to that now.

To be honest, I've read that the Sahara was created by ancient slash-and-burn agriculture. I'd have to find a reference for that; I don't know that it is true, but if it is true then it shows that large populations of people modifying their environment (rather than adapting to it) can drastically change it, even without steam engines.

[Brenda]

9. Sahara

Found this:

https://sedimentology.uconn.edu/2017/02/08/formation-of-the-sahara/#

How did the mighty Sahara Desert form? This huge desert, the largest in the world not counting the Arctic or Antartica, covers roughly 10% of Africa. How does such a structure form? According to this article: (http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/paleoclimatology/science-sahara-desert-formed-7-million-years-ago-02160.html) the region in the north of Africa first started experiencing desertification over 7 million years ago during the Tortonian stage (7-11 million years ago). Before this time, Africa was bordered by the Tethys sea. This sea brought this region of Africa plenty of moisture, and allowed lush vegetation and deep soils to grow. Due to the cycles in climate and the movement of tectonic plates, the Tethys sea eventually dried out, and the region of the great desert became susceptible to arid conditions.

The nail in the coffin was the changing tilt of the Earth’s axis. The tilt used to be more severe around 5000 years ago. When the tilt decreased in severity the upper region of Africa stopped getting large monsoons, an important part of the ecosystem and vegetation that depended on the annual water surplus. Without these monsoons, plants couldn’t survive, soils couldn’t grow, and the Sahara began to form.

*snip*

Which sounds right to me. While slash and burn has been used widely around the world I don't think it was ever used to the extent of destroying the people's immediate habitat, in fact it is to rejuvenate it. That came later when the wealthy landowners or more accurately, the land stealers cleared the land for profit. Just like they're doing in the Amazon now. It's not the tribes doing this but the timber and cattle company owners and the multinational corporations who are ultimately in charge.

[orthoclad]

10. You're right,

Last edited Thu Sep 8, 2022, 12:58 PM - Edit history (2)

my decades-old memory of an article could be faulty, or the article could have been just wrong.

But I stand by the notion that large numbers of even low-tech, non-capitalist humans can have vast influence on their environment. For instance, an old Indian (for want of a better word) told me that they had actively managed the huge Eastern forests, which is why colonists were so amazed at the quality of timber. Not long after, NatGeo published work showing that Eastern Indians managed forests in three phases of use: farmland, regeneration, mature forest.

We really need to study how indigenous civilizations managed the Americas -- and themselves. For instance: did the Aztec Flowery Wars manage population to the carrying capacity? Indigenous impact was vast. They did not "conquer" the Americas, they modified the environment and let it thrive.

(edit: meant to reply to our conversation, not the whole thread)

[Brenda]

11. Unfortunately, you're right about one thing.

People with hand propelled boats can just as easily transport a fungus and cause the demise of all frogs on Earth as those large container ships or jets going all over the world, just in a slower fashion.

I read that some Aztecs used herbs and meat (hummingbird and ocelot, ugh) to manage population. Of course there were other things like warfare, climate issues including drought and disease that kept their numbers in check.

But yeah, most indigenous cultures were in tune with the cycles of nature and had enough sense to know killing all the buffalo or cutting down all the trees was just plain stupid.

[orthoclad]

12. I've read speculation

that the giant herds of buffalo were due to colonists' damaging the tribes, who had been managing the buffalo population.

I think a good case could be made that the tribes/nations were a keystone species in the ecology of the Americas. Notice that the megafauna, the mammoths and saber-tooths, disappeared around the time of the migration (a small asteroid strike is also implicated). Species like the Osage apple were spread far out of their native range because the tribes found them useful. But their management did not result in mass extinctions, for several reasons: they respected the world they were managing, and their rate of change was slow. They didn't suffer from the mind/body, world/spirit dichotomy that inflicts the civilizations tracing roots back to the Middle Eastern desert prophets.

Because they didn't use steel or wheel we think of them as minor. This is far from true. Think keystone species.