Peak Everything (20 page)

It is easy to dislike human beings in the aggregate. Hearing about the endemic torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the global destruction of species (about a quarter of mammals and birds are now threatened), or any of a thousand other outrages, one can catch oneself hoping that Earth will simply be rid of our kind soon.

But Bittner reminds us there is more to humans than this. He tries to remain an objective, detached observer of parrots in order to gain credibility, but eventually he has to admit to himself (and his readers) that the reason he spends time with the birds is that he loves them — and not merely in some abstract spiritual or aesthetic sense. It is love that keeps him interested in the daily lives of specific birds with which he forms life-long bonds. It is love that keeps the flock together, love that enables it to grow. Human society is similar: without affection, we couldn't overcome our competitiveness long enough to accomplish much of anything. Moreover, it is our ability to extend this bond of empathy, compassion, interest, and fellow-feeling across species barriers that may offer us one of our last opportunities for escape from our self-designed cage, and one of our last chances to veer away from our ecocidal path. This sounds pretty sappy, I know. We've all heard it a million times: it's love that gives us meaning and that makes life worthwhile. And people are capable of extraordinary displays of love in a myriad of forms. Maybe it takes a flock of parrots to drive the point home.

At the end of the book and film we are treated to a pleasant surprise: Mark finds a girlfriend. He has also become a successful author and the subject of a documentary film. He has achieved success — though by a long, circuitous, and initially unpromising route. He has stuck to his vision and his principles. He has (mostly) avoided the cage.

Both the book and the film tell us as much about ourselves as they do about parrots. We are a peculiar species of ape, evidently not closely related to birds (genetically, we're closer to voles than to parrots). Yet in the conures of Telegraph Hill we see reflections of ourselves — as we are, as we were, and as we may once again be. And we are reminded just how lonely it can be to confine our attention solely to the solipsistic human matrix, when so much more is going on around us.

U
RINETOWN is a funny, smart, Tony award-winning musical. Its action takes place in a city of the future where, as the result of severe and ongoing water shortages, private toilets have been banned. A giant corporation, the Urine Good Company (UGC for short), is in charge of all pay-per-pee services. The gradually escalating price is still affordable to a well-off few, but teeming masses of the poor have to scrape together piles of spare change every day in order to take care of their private business. This, announces policeman-narrator Officer Lockstock, is “the central conceit of the show.”

The cast includes a greedy villain (Caldwell B. Cladwell, the CEO of UGC), a courageous hero (Bobby Strong, a poor lad who works for UGC collecting fees at a down-scale public toilet), and a big-hearted heroine (Hope, Cladwell's daughter). Bobby and Hope fall in love; Bobby leads a rebellion against UGC; “terrorists” take Hope hostage. She sings the uplifting “Follow Your Heart,” assuring herself and everyone else that love will win the day, but every line is tongue-in-cheek. Though Bobby is soon killed by UGC minions, Hope manages to gain ultimate power, disposing of her father and telling her followers that the time of deprivation is over. In the last scene she sings the fervent anthem “I See a River,” envisioning a new era when all can pee as much as they like,
whenever they like, wherever they like. However, by the end of the scene the entire cast — excepting the narrator — has perished in an ecological catastrophe brought on by overpopulation. Officer Lockstock's epilogue tells the sorry tale:

The Chorus sings: “This is Urinetown! Always it's been Urinetown! This place it's called Urinetown!” And with their unison cry of “Hail Malthus!”, the curtain falls.

The entire play is a send-up of the musical comedy genre, and the audience goes home laughing at gags and humming memorable tunes. Many reviewers have emphasized the infectious zaniness of the play, seemingly missing its explicit message — idealism and good intentions are insufficient responses to problems of population pressure and resource depletion. Maybe that's just as well:
Urinetown
succeeds so well as comedy and theater that even people utterly immune to its insights still have a good time; thus more people are drawn to see it, including those who
do
“get it.”

Thomas Malthus 1766-1834.

What's the significance of the play's last line, “Hail Malthus!”?

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was a British political economist who theorized that unchecked population growth must eventually outstrip increases in food production. He is most famous for the
Essay on Population
(1798), in which he explained in simple terms the connection between population pressure and human misery. The following passage from “The History of Economic Thought” website summarizes his ideas succinctly:

No wonder the term
Malthusian
almost always has negative connotations. Indeed, Malthus became anathema to utopians of the left and right, who envision a world with no limits. He has been reviled as a “hard-hearted monster,” a “prophet of doom,” and an “enemy of the working class.”

The summary goes on:

Malthus believed that a general famine would occur in the near future unless his policies were implemented; in this he was clearly wrong. There have indeed been localized famines in the decades since his death (e.g., in Ireland, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Ethiopia), but these have provided only a minor brake on global population, which has surged by over 500 percent in the interim. This failure of prediction is the main cudgel wielded by generations of Malthus-bashers, who attribute the growth of world food production over the past century-and-a-half primarily to human ingenuity. As knowledge expands, so does our ability to sustain more people.

But increased knowledge and cleverness can account for only a portion of the added global human carrying capacity. The main factor has been the use of fossil fuels for clearing land, pumping irrigation water, fueling tractors and other farm equipment, fertilizing soils, killing pests, and transporting produce ever further distances to support people in remote urban centers who would be otherwise unable to sustain themselves. Malthus could hardly have foreseen the contributions of fossil fuels to economic expansion and population growth during the past two centuries. And so, taking into account the inevitable, now-commencing winding down of that brief, incomparably opulent fossil-fuel fiesta, it may be better to say that Malthus wasn't wrong, he was just ahead of his time.

But if the depletion of fossil fuels proves Malthus to have been ultimately correct in his forecast of human die-off, what would that say for the rest of his message — his calls to abolish the Poor Laws and thus, in Bill Clinton's famous locution, “end welfare as we know it,” and his implicit view that the “perfectibility of society will always be out of reach”?