Gloom and Doom

Take 10 acres of lush woodland full of nut trees. There are 10 squirrels living there. Construct a tight squirrel-proof fence around it and also arrange to keep out all squirrel predators. You think you have created a Squirrel Paradise. As long as the rain keeps falling and the plant systems are not disrupted, there will be nuts for squirrels to eat and the squirrel population will grow. Eventually there may be 1000 squirrels in your preserve and things may start changing. Nuts will get scarcer, trees to live in will be contested for. Squirrel culture will change perceptively. Maybe squirrels will learn to form extended family gangs to protect resources for fellow DNA sharers, little squirrel armies with swords made from haw-thorns. Eventually they may be forced to augment the now scarce nuts with tree bark in their diet which might cause the trees to become less healthy and produce fewer nuts. As the trees stop being able to reproduce because there are no un-eaten nuts, there will be a crisis and many squirrels and many trees will die, maybe all of them.

At any point in this process which took dozens of squirrel generations, did a squirrel or two ever stand on a fallen log and propose remedies or solutions? Maybe one group of believers saw clearly the need to breach the fence—after many attempts ending only in broken teeth, they retreated to a religion waiting for the coming of a squirrel Moses with a pair of wire cutters. Maybe another group taught that all could live on fewer nuts, that if everyone would consume less, there would be enough for all. But these squirrels were just as horny as all the other squirrels and kept producing babies, so their efforts too were doomed. Maybe one group did in fact preach abstinence and vowed to have only two children; unfortunately after a number of years they died out and the squirrellier squirrels’ kids predominated. As the last nut tree sapling was nibbled off at the roots, the starving nibbler, if he thought about it at all, just assumed that somewhere in the 10 acres there were other shoots to chew and that somehow his genetic will to survive would keep him going. In the end, the limits imposed by the squirrels brain were in fact the limits for the squirrel world. Because squirrels had evolved to occupy unlimited territory, no squirrel could understand the inarguable fact of the fence and what it implied.

We are just in this past year or so, after Al Gore, moving out of the realm of denial. We can see the fence now. Those who saw it 30 years ago are shaking their heads in bewilderment mixed with relief and hoping it is not too late. But we all are still convinced that our wonderfully resourceful squirrel-brains can find a way out. We design recycling programs, we preach “sustainability”, we are convinced that the word “Green” has a magic to it that will solve our problem. But our brains evolved to search for and sequester resources on the Serengeti. We have a ferocious need to reproduce that literally takes over and makes us crazy. Our brains knew no fences on the savannah, and now, in our deepest mind, there is no concept for voluntarily giving up in the quest to dominate resources for our offspring. The word “survive” means literally to “live over” or to “live on top of”, in other words to win out, to live at the expense of others who will die. We really have no conceptual model for how to proceed in this kind of crisis, how to cooperate in self-denial. We easily fantasize escape-- any mammal trapped in a cage will try to escape, sometimes severely wounding itself in the process. We have strong instincts for flight but we don’t understand how the latch works, in fact we don’t even know where the door is, we just tear our fingernails off on the wire. The exponential increase in substance abuse problems, ethnic violence, general craziness, is just the normal mammalian response to increased stress in the environment. Drug use is an attempt at the individual level to medicate the psychosis induced by a crowded struggle for resources, ethnic competition an attempt by one DNA lineage to out-compete others. It is very possible that the crisis we can see ahead of us has no answer that we can conceive of, perhaps our evolution limits us too much.

Maybe only absolutely selfless involvement in the tiny ameliorations of tiny parts of the problem is all we have left. Even if we and our offspring are all going to die someday, the only way to die sanely seems to be to keep trying. The image of anonymous monks piling victims of the Black Plague into carts comes to mind. Maybe it helped in the long run. There will be more Plagues; we will need more monks.