Human Nature
By Callimachus | Related entries in EnvironmentAfter having spent part of the weekend with my hardcore environmentalist brother, who showed us many digital slides of the hay bale houses he thinks we all should be living in, I’ve been thinking. About environment, politics, and boys who cry wolf.
He does good work, in “sustainable” living, land preservation, anti-sprawl efforts. He does a lot of teaching on the college level. He’s big on educating people on these issues. Again, it’s a useful thing to do in the world.
But when you talk to him, he has an earnestness about it that can be kind of scary. You have no trouble seeing him as one of those environmentalists who would say with a straight face the earth would be much better off if three-fourths of the people alive on it were dead. I’ve never actually asked him that. I sort of don’t want to know.
His world-view, the unthinking part of it, seems based on a dichotomy of human = bad, nature = good. As though humans weren’t part of nature. Like creationism turned on its head.
I don’t know exactly what he studied for his graduate degree in all this, but my impression is of a lot of topic-specific courses, sociology and environmentalism as complete courses of study. Not much pure history. Not any geology that I can see.
We don’t inhabit quite the same earth.
We both, for instance, see the vulnerability of the Chesapeake Bay, an hour south of here, where we’ve both canoed over the years. We’ve seen the disappearance of the oysters through pollution and overharvesting. We’ve seen the waters turn murky and algae-choked. We’ve read about the vulnerability of the bay to sea-level rises.
Hell, you don’t even have to read about it; just stand there on the Eastern Shore and look around. There are no elevations. One of my favorite pictures I took down there shows a street sign: “Hilltop Road,” on a landscape as flat as a pool table. Either the Watermen have a highly evolved sensitivity to elevation or a highly evolved sense of humor.
But I also see something my brother apparently doesn’t see: The Chesapeake also is the corpse of a drowned river valley — which once was a vulnerable ecosystem of its own. As recently as 6,000 years ago, seawater rushed in and flooded the landscape, erasing what was there before and replacing it with what we now treat as God’s gift to oysters.
The same with another place I know well and love: The Florida Keys. When you stand on the Keys, you appreciate the fragility of nature, and the vulnerability of the world we know. The highest land elevation is barely higher than a two-story house. If you don’t have mangroves around you, you can stand on any of the Keys and turn left or right and see open water. Hurricane storm surges can sweep them clean. Any rise in sea level would devastate them.
But if you understand the land there, you know you’re standing on the fossil of a dead coral reef. Only 20,000 or so years ago, this was a thriving undersea oasis. Then the sea level fell as the climate cooled and the ice advanced, and the delicate ecosystem died a terrible death. Everything in the middle Keys, from the restaurant parking lot gravel to the 1935 Hurricane memorial in Islamodora, is built from the rubble of an ecological catastrophe.
The earth is delicate. Nature is the black sow that eats her farrow. Man is part of nature.
And the key to the boy-who-cried-wolf story is that there really was a wolf. My brother, for all his education and deep concern for these topics, is not going to be the right person to teach the rest of us about them. Nature will survive even the most dire forecasts of global warming. It has in the past.
Human beings would be able to survive it, too. By pulling inland, by abandoning the current coastlines, by shifting food production. But that would be an unimaginable catastrophe for the modern, industrialized world. With our land titles and coastal tourism and oil rigs — yes, all the things my brother most despises about us and probably wishes we would lose anyhow are the things at risk.
It is the people with the most commitment to the world as it is — not the idealists who long for a more pure world — who ought to be most concerned about environmental change, who ought to be most invested in keeping the world in roughly its current shape, in spite of nature, not in worship of her.
This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 and is filed under Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 15th, 2006 at 6:58 pm
Your brother sounds like a lot of people I know. Well-meaning, earnest, sincere, informed (on some level) and on a track of their own.
I have a friend who belongs to PETA — she feeds wild cats in Golden Gate Park and is a rabit animal rights activist. Every painting and image hanging on the walls of her house is a depiction of some kind of animal — usually a cow, chicken, cat or dog, which interestingly are animals created by humans over generations. The art makes her house feel like going to a born-again Christian’s house filled with crucifixes and images of Jesus everywhere.
She’s a perfectly wonderful person and on some level I have to admire her conviction. A lot of her friends are quick to judge her convictions, but I don’t see them acting in a similar manner on their own convictions. So at least, here’s someone who sees pain and need in her eyes and is working to heal it.
But there is also the wide-eyed, holier-than-thou aspect of it all that bothers me. And like your brother, it’s all on one track. I truly think this woman believes the world would be better off with fewer people and more cats. It almost seems like some sort of post-humanist-secularlist-atheist animal worship cult or something. I’ve known her for years, and I avoid the topic of animals as much as I can. She generally obliges and is pretty good about not talking up her religion. But occasionally, she can’t resist the call to arms.
Somehow, although I might admire her steadfastness and conviction on some level, I think it’s missplaced. And I don’t think that she’s saving the world one bit. When history is truly ended, I don’t know that her contribution will have mattered.
And I think she has taken the view that people are the lowliest of creatures, which speaks more to pathology than anything else.
Her boyfriend tries his best to conform to her religion, and doesn’t eat meat in her presence. He belongs to PETA and has attended many functions, and gone to animal farms to heal chickens and cats.
“To be honest,” he told me, “the people that go to these things are boring. They’re really stern and single-minded.”
No doubt.
May 15th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Yeah, I dated a PETA girl once upon a time. She had had a real rough childhood: nothing quantifiable as abuse, but her parents were truly mean people and she was a genuinely sensitive girl. I began to connect her identification with the helpless animals in the maw of the corporate system to her own feelings of needing to rescue her own childhood self (and her brother). But that might have been just so much pop psychologizing on my part. Still, I’ve met the same type. And I’m not saying they don’t do good in the world — they remind me a lot of what the old abolitionists were like, based on their writings and speeches. But they don’t play well with others and they’re prone to being about the anger, not the solution.
May 15th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Cal,
Excellent post … there are lots of folks like your brother (for them, people are truly over-rated compared with their causes) and there is some element of anger to them because they can’t stop the tide.
that whole Bay thing was nice to read … Chesapeake is beautiful in it’s current incarnation.
May 15th, 2006 at 9:56 pm
I once worked with a woman whose job was environmental concerns for a large public utility.
She hated it when I’d ask: “Why don’t environmentalists just do the studies to determine what level of human interference is acceptable, then decide what population levels would work given the acceptable interference? Then, we would know how many humans to kill off.”
Naturally, this was unacceptable logic to her. Nonetheless, it is logical.
I love nature and hate what we’re doing to it, but, we don’t seem to have arrived at way to balance the effect of humans on our earth.
I tend to subscribe to the belief that Earth will dictate the balance, either through catastrophic events or slow, painful re-education of the human species. We humans certainly aren’t bright enough to solve the problem.
May 16th, 2006 at 11:58 am
A closely related family member of mine (not me, DH or son) does indeed believe that there are too many people and that the world would be very much better with far fewer humans and far more animals. This is one of the reasons that this individual, far from being just pro-choice, is actually pro-abortion.
This is not extrapolation on my part, but based on explicit statements, many of them, and over many, many years. The individual is also self-described as a strong environmentalist and a moderate liberal. The “moderate” modifier is, in this case, an affectation.
Of course, not all environmentalists fit that profile. I just wanted to say that some, for sure, do.
May 16th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
It truly is the messenger, not the message. What is the saying? It’s 90% how you say it, and 10% what you say?
However, the the broader topic of environmentalism, I see the embrace of this topic by conservatives and moderates an extremely good thing.
May 16th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
A position that sayus no more than humans=bad, nature=good, is just a feel-good pose. Humans are not just going to die off in the desired numbers, so a serious person, someone interested in finding real solutions, would determine what works. Wealth works – rich people have fewer kids and can aford environmemtal remediation and the whole program. For all the noise about CO2 emissions and global warming, methane from rice padies that poses a comparable risk. For all the wailing about the rain forests, there is almost no discussion of the role of poverty and slash-and-burn agriculture, because that isn’t as easy an indictment of those wicked First Worlders. Poor people are a clas of stray kittens and can never be blamed for anything.
Blame and a moralizing mentalityare a big part of the ineffectualness of these crusaders. They seem to care more about morality than about solutions. Apparently rich First Worlders like them can afford that kind of nonsense.
I am a Californian (ex-pat) and I put more value on redwood trees than on human beings, because very simply, a human being is a lot easier to replace. More fun, too. We joke that the national epic of California is “Dune” where people kill each other for their body water and that is all people are worth. Well, if I want to “save the redwoods” as we used to call it, I had better find a way that accomodates swarms of humans, because they aren’t going away and more arrive every day.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
What really needs to be done is worldwide education about birth control and to do away with the outdated religious or cultural traditions that say manliness and godliness is determined by how fertile your seed is.
Fortunately, this is already taking place, and the population acceleration that has occurred over the past few centuries is at least slowing. Supposedly the world population will stabilize at 9 billion or so by the end of this century.
I like animals, and can certainly see how some could favor their innocence over humanity’s double-dealing, greed, insincerity, and often cruelty, but I am certainly no PETA extremist. I approve of (valid) medical testing on animals, I eat meat, and I think when pets get too old or too sick it’s ok to euthanize them.
However, I also think that if people get too old or too sick we should allow them to decide to euthanize themselves, or to allow their close relatives to make that decision for them (Schiavo).
I also think abortion (though a poor second choice to birth control) is a way to prevent unwanted kids from continuing to overburden our world beyond its capacity with even more humans.
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