Ecological Intelligence (27 page)

T
he future of humans as an interdependent species is precarious. It is difficult to name any other force quite as threatening to the planet as the growing human population and with it the increasing pressure on the land for housing and food production. The population factor is a challenge that is perplexing, painful, and awesome. Douglas Chadwick, writing in 1992, put the population bomb into perspective:

It took more than a million years for human numbers to add up to 1 billion. That mark was reached around the year ad 1800, two centuries ago. The second billion was added during just the next 130 years. Barely thirty years later, the third billion had arrived. Fifteen years later, the total was 4 billion. We reached our current 5 billion in another dozen years.

By the year 2000, we had six billion people on Earth. With this trend we can expect ten billion by the middle of the century. We have taken the Genesis admonition to be fruitful and multiply too literally.

To be fruitful is not only to be biologically fertile, but to be fruitful and fertile in our thoughts also. To multiply is not restricted to arithmetic, either. It does not only mean producing more of the same thing.Rather, it is to be expansive in our thinking, to be flexible and multi-faceted. It is to develop the capacity to embrace the multiplicity of all living things and living expressions on Earth. If anything, we are the ones who need to be a little more subdued, and by this I mean not only the subduing of our growing numbers, but of downplaying our inflated notions of human divinity.

And so, what are we to do about it? Can history help us? I’m afraid not. The present population of human beings on Earth is unprecedented. Let us not forget that. What we can do, however, is to become more aware of the harsh social realities of human reproduction. We would do well to remember that people who are poor tend to have more children than those who are materially better off. Paradoxically, it is part of their survival. Insurance and retirement annuities are the security of the haves and the inhabitants of the welfare state; children are the security of the have-nots in the developing nations. Carl Sagan, in his erudite and humbling book
Billions and Billions
, wrote:

There is a well-documented, world-wide correlation between poverty and high birth rates. In little countries and big countries, in communist countries, Catholic countries and Muslim countries, Western countries and Eastern countries—in almost all these cases, exponential population growth slows down or stops when grinding poverty disappears. This is called the demographic transition. It is in the urgent long-term interest of the human species that every place on Earth achieves this demographic transition. This is why helping other countries to become self-sufficient is not only elementary human decency, but is also in the self-interest of those richer nations able to help.

Saving the lives of children and prolonging our own life spans does not make objective sense, and yet no one would dare advocate that we abandon our attempts to do so. There is something in our psyche that will not allow it. We are survivors and we are a social species. We do care, but we are going to have to learn to care differently—about the land, about the animals, and about ourselves.

The choice is ours and it has to be made now. As E. O. Wilson says, we have to decide whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic. Urging us to look deep within ourselves and to decide what we wish to become, he chooses the hard path—volitional evolution. “Alter the biological nature of the human species in any direction you wish, or you may leave it alone,” he says. “Either way, genetic evolution is about to become conscious and volitional, and usher in a new epoch in the history of life.” It is going to present the most profound intellectual and ethical choices humanity has ever faced, which means, above all, that we are going to have to learn how to say yes and no to the forces of human nature. Without being naive, we must adopt a stance that promises a concern for the intelligence and well-being of every living thing.

Zoologist Jonathan Kingdon puts it this way: “We must remake our-selves in some fashion that retains and develops the countless benefits of technology and culture, yet does not cut us off from or destroy all the physical processes that created us as animals.” And then there is that other imaginative and courageous spokesman for the Earth, James Lovelock. Out of a deep concern for the human impact on our planet, he issues a bold challenge. If, because of the evolution of the cortex, human beings can reflect upon themselves, then we need to see our-selves as the reflecting cortex of the Earth. “Through human beings,” he says poetically, “the Earth can become conscious of itself.

I
n this book I have made several references to the traditional hunter-gatherers of the world, more especially to Africa’s ancient nomads, the Kalahari bushmen. As we review our present ecological thinking, we might be mistaken into believing that their way of life is a model for the ecological intelligence that we are trying to define. The bushmen no longer live in the traditional hunter-gatherer way that they used to, but even if they could it is obvious that theirs might have been a life to be admired, but not necessarily envied. Compared with our world of running water, electricity, flush toilets, and including our pursuit of material comforts, instant gratification, and insurance against the unknown, their physical existence was a tough one. There is no turning back.Very few of us would be willing let alone able to free ourselves from our first-world cosmologies and comforts in favor of their spartan, but by no means uncivilized, lifestyles and life views. To reflect on this is a reminder that the intelligence we seek will be meaningless unless it can be translated beyond the worlds of traditional hunter-gatherers into our complex world of cultivation and consumerism. We have to reexamine what Jacquetta Hawkes once called “the fetish of the standard of living,” replacing it with “a standard of values, in which beauty, comeliness, and the possibility of solitude have a high place among human needs.”

We must learn to be poor in the right way in order to become richer in the right way, says Indian social ecologist, R. Guha. In other words, to favor wiser ways of living off the land and the sea, we have to be more careful in differentiating between what we want and what we need. The pantry complex—taking more than we need—is deeply ingrained in our evolution. It is part of our opportunistic or, to be less polite, our scavenging nature. Separating needs from wants is poetic thinking, but it will mean nothing unless we can make it workable.

Barry Lopez, in his hard-hitting book
The Rediscovery of North
America
, does not mince his words when he deals with the subject of human greed. He calls it a crisis both of culture and character. “We have an obligation,” he says, well aware of the revolutionary significance of his words, “to develop a hard and focused anger at what continues to be done to the land, not so people can survive, but so that a relatively few can amass wealth.” We are obliged therefore to nurture an intelligence capable of making the shift from short-term survival thinking—me versus you—to one that consciously grasps the long-term significance of I and Thou. In essence, it requires that we be careful of our language and refuse to be seduced by jargon and slogans such as “ethical hunting,” “sustainable utilization,” “downsizing,” “ecofriendly,” “transparency,” “biodegradable,” “development,” and “growth.”

W
hile it carries such positive connotations when used in an intellectual or economic context, the word
growth
is also the name for a tumor. Cancer is a condition where host cells become autonomous and multiply. It spreads, it invades, it occupies, eventually killing the host. We fight it, we look for and claim all kinds of causes for it along a biopsychosociological spectrum and yet, unless it is caught early, there is often very little that we can do about its relentless course. Notwithstanding the genetic influence regarding the natural history of various illnesses, could it be that cancer is one of the diseases of our time, our niche, and our evolution? And if so, is there anything we can learn from it, for it is indeed a chilling metaphor for human behavior?

As with any life-threatening illness, perhaps it is this: as we face our death, it inevitably changes our lives. It opens us to many possible outcomes. It challenges us to live our dying and to say goodbye to those we have loved. It reminds us that death is not an enemy but an inevitable turning point in life, a shift in a molecular-chemical dance as old as the universe itself. Jung, more than half a century ago, had already come to the conclusion that the meaning of life lay in a complete adjustment to the laws of nature…with a gradual maturing toward death as a final goal. “Death must be regarded as the fulfillment of life’s meaning and its real aim,” he said in 1934. In a way that one might regard the life of a subatomic particle, he believed that the human psyche was deeply involved in a “time…and spaceless form of existence which might symbolically and inadequately be called eternal.” To me, the notion of dust to dust is poetry and science. It is at the heart of what it means to think molecular.

S
ome years ago, while working as a doctor in a small mining town along the west coast of South Africa, I was witness on the same night to what could be regarded as life’s two great mysteries—birth and death. One of my patients, a man in the terminal phases of a bronchial carcinoma, was breathing heavily as he slipped in and out of a coma. Seated at his bedside was his wife. She was holding his hand, fully aware of the warmth that was slipping away from her. Standing opposite her, I held his other hand, my fingers acutely aware of the pulse that was now racing toward its ultimate fate.

“She’s ready, doctor,” said the nurse who had opened the door just enough to show her face. It was a half-whisper, with enough urgency in it to show that she was serious. Down the corridor, a young mother in the final stages of labor was close to delivery. Excusing myself, I headed for the labor ward, rolling up my sleeves as I made my way through the doors of the delivery room toward the hand-washing basins.

Fifteen minutes later, a healthy, ten-fingered child was warmly wrapped and cradled in the arms of her exhausted mother. I headed back to the dying man and his wife, who greeted me with a silent, imploring look. He was still with us. About half an hour later he let out a long sigh. It was his final breath and it coincided with a sound I will never forget. It was the cry of a newly born infant echoing down the corridor. Later that night, I wrote this poem, “Deliverance.”

Tonight is my night she said

I can feel it deep inside

And tonight is my night he said

I can feel there is nowhere to hide

The pain comes and goes she said

This life deep inside moves about

The pain comes and goes he said

This life deep inside wants out

My breathing is deep she said

With labor there’s so much pain

And my breathing is pain he said

I will not labor again

I am ripe to deliver she said

I can feel it all below

And I am ripe to deliver he said

There’s a need deep inside to let go

O what a song she said

It is life and the young child cried

O what a song he said

It is life and the old body died

I
s there any cheer in this speculative analysis of our fate and of what it means to be the human animal? I think there is. It is in that tiny fraction of the genome that makes our consciousness different from that of a chimpanzee. The human animal can make choices that no other creature, as far as I am aware, can make. We can choose to drift into oblivion, to turn our heads, pretending we did not see, or we can refuse to be victims, as Oedipus did. We can choose the hard path—the one that demands accountability: the one that demands that we give beauty and meaning, in our own way, to the Earth and to the countless living things that share it with us.

Finally, we can choose to turn our usual image of the human animal at the apex of creation upside down. Instead of seeing ourselves at the point, let’s imagine ourselves instead at the open edge of a rose, a spiral shell, or a cup into which we can look to see all things taking shape and where the stem and the edge are one. Let’s try to imagine ourselves as the living equivalents of an ark upon a great evolutionary sea. Let’s become conscious of the animals that we have on board with us and of what they mean to us—that we need them as much and probably more than they need us. If we are divine, then so is every other creature on this planet. We have no right to drive any of them into extinction. Instead, let’s learn to say thank you to these older brothers and sisters.

Does the image of the ziziphus speak to you? Do the poets and those ancient admonitions of Apollo—to know thyself, to do no thing in excess, and to honor the gods—make sense? Is an ecological intelligence possible? If so, then say
yes
, quickly. This could be the last watch, and there are things to do.