Advice for Ancestors
3/26/26 - Seeing the present through the future
Hello everyone:
Please consider showing up at a No Kings rally near you this Saturday, the 28th. It’s vital that much of the U.S. (and elsewhere) get out in the streets to slow this descent into corrupt, white nationalist, anti-environmental, fossil-fueled autocracy. Showing up matters: It alerts others to the social movement and instills fear in those in power. Here’s Bill McKibben on why this matters.
Remember also that the first Earth Day in 1970 brought out 20 million people, 10% of the population and still the largest one-day protest in U.S. history. Many of our most enlightened environmental policies were made possible by that event. We need that kind of participation in these No Kings events.
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
The Scarcely-Remembered Ancestors
Virologist Jonas Salk was once as famous for choosing not to profit from the polio vaccine as he was for inventing it. Salk seemed particularly saint-like when, having saved untold millions of future children from a life of polio-twisted misery, he smiled at the idea of patenting the vaccine and asked (in an interview with Edward R. Murrow), “Could you patent the sun?”
Salk was insistent on what it meant to be good: “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” How we do that, he said, is straightforward: “If we want to be good ancestors, we should show future generations how we coped with an age of great change and great crises.”
In other words, doing the right thing isn’t merely about providing resources for our kids and grandkids. It’s about modeling for them and our grandchildren’s grandchildren how to do the right thing by providing a cultural memory of how we, the scarcely-remembered ancestors, did the right thing.
Salk’s advice is both relevant and poignant in this Anthropocene moment. A brief scan of the news reveals the corporate and political selfishness of the current spate of wars, the vaccine skepticism, and even a bizarre plan to profit off of the Sun. We would do well to remember Salk, keep him on his pedestal, and apply his wisdom to what lies ahead, which is already shaping up to be the greatest change, and most formidable crisis, in human history.
Pennies in the Can
The good ancestors in the polio story extend beyond Salk and his colleagues, and beyond the many volunteers who took the jab to test its efficacy and safety. We should also remember the eighty million Americans who donated to the cause, often with whatever coins they could spare for the March of Dimes. No matter how poor or how unlikely they were to be stricken with polio, many Americans were willing to sacrifice something for the common good by putting pennies in the can.
Noting that vast army of donors and the massive roll-out of vaccinations, one biographer of Salk likened the push for the polio vaccine to the invasion of Normandy. (This was the post-war era, when invasions could be a hopeful metaphor.) But the vaccine arrived in a time of much greater change, in what is now known as the Great Acceleration.
Beginning in the mid-20th-century, there was extraordinary growth in human population and its consequences, among them deforestation and overfishing, loss of wetlands and grasslands to agriculture, chemical and fertilizer production, dam-building and urban sprawl, energy use and atmospheric heating, and other forms of resource depletion and habitat destruction. (See the graphic above for some details.) The real world has been rapidly retreating from our built world ever since.
Our good ancestors (well, parents and grandparents) were good mostly in terms of quality-of-life improvements (like polio eradication) for people, usually related to medical advances and economic growth. Our civilizational model, however, ensured that moderate human advancement was built on radical environmental loss. While the polio virus might have seen the conquering army land on its shores, so did nearly every other species on Earth.
To be good ancestors, we must first be good neighbors to all of life. Anything less - any self-obsession in a zero-sum contest with the Earth - and it won’t matter how many pennies we put in the can. If our neighbors suffer and disappear, so will we.
Trends and Countercurrents
As biodiversity loss and atmospheric heating rapidly intensify, we should be asking who we are not only in this moment, but in the eyes of generations to come: Are we being good ancestors?
On one hand, nearly all harmful trends occurring on our watch – from ocean acidity to chemical pollution to habitat loss – seem to be moving irrevocably toward worst-case scenarios. Some of these will not be fixed on normal human timescales, likely haunting several generations to come. On the other hand, there are so many useful, beautiful countercurrents at work – from regulation to conservation to activism to art and scientific breakthroughs – by all sorts of people in all corners of the world.
And, it should be said, that the worst ancestors among us - those shaping this moment and the distant future with the leverage of wealth and power for their own dumb and selfish purposes - are a tiny minority, a minority whose actions are largely disliked by the rest of us trying to live ordinary lives. The question, then, is whether this makes us better ancestors because we’re powerless in the face of all that leverage, or worse because we refuse to use the immense collective power that we have to insist on a better world.
We don’t know yet how or when the tide may turn in the face of what seems like an array of impossible battles and irreversible tipping points. We can take some heart from the fact that so many social impossibilities – women’s right to vote or enter the military, gay or interracial marriage, legalized drugs – reached their tipping points and suddenly became everyday norms.
The Anthropocene Thought-Experiment
Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland (and many other superb books) and one of our best living writers on our relationship with the real world, has replied to the Are we being good ancestors? question in interviews. To the Guardian he said,
Mostly, I found the answer to be ‘no’. But I did find hope too. I found it in people – visionaries, altruists, scientists, activists – and in their refusal to settle for despair.
In a 2019 conversation with the great Barry Lopez about both Underland and Lopez’s book Horizon, Macfarlane referred to this new epoch as “the Anthropocene thought-experiment.” I have, ever since, found it very useful to think of our civilizational model as an experiment run by our ancestors, and now by us.
In my cartoon version, I picture Stone-Age humans sitting around one day in a Pleistocene conference room and some guy saying, “Hey, I got an idea. I’m just spitballing here, but what if we kill off all the world’s slow, tasty megafauna over the next several thousand years, then develop intensive agriculture, create division of labor and build cities, grow our population without regard for ecological limits, spread like wildfire across the planet, abuse the land and out-fish the oceans, then spew out CO2 like a supervolcano until we make the Earth unrecognizable? Just to see what happens?”
This of course is not what Macfarlane said… but he is reminding us that what we do, how we live, and the price we and the rest of life are paying, are all rooted in ideas, ideas which are just as susceptible to failure as they are to replacement.
And now that failure is obvious, replacement is necessary. This is the task that good ancestors must face up to.
Stories to be Rewritten
The ideas that got us here include human supremacy (only humans matter, and all life on Earth exists to serve our purposes), a refusal to consider ecological limits (despite those limits being rooted in physical laws), and a weird impulse to treat the abstractions of capital and corporation as more valuable than people or nature. It’s worth noting that there are plenty of corporations today who – note the implied personhood – would be happy to patent the polio vaccine, not to mention the sun. And yet we still put them on pedestals.
There’s a library of books to explore or explain all of this, so I’ll just say that every culture, and every path, whether they take us toward failure or success or something in between, is a story. The stories that created the Anthropocene, and that are creating a deeply disrupted and impoverished world for our descendants, need to be rewritten. We need lives whose meaning embraces the more-than-human.
Once we understand that we belong to the Earth (rather than it belonging to us), we see that life has inherent meaning, in which beauty and purpose are indistinguishable. It’s culture that can collapse into meaninglessness and take our sense of self down with it. (As a young man, when I began to understand the schism between culture and nature, I stopped worrying about “the meaning of life” and focused instead on our disruption of it.) To be good ancestors, we need a culture which exists in service to the living world. Otherwise, what’s the point?
“Sustainable” is not a cliché about canvas grocery bags; it’s an existential query about the purpose of our lives on a planet with ecological limits. Our claim to supremacy becomes even more absurd when we realize that our cultural norms are so clearly self-destructive.
Of course, since long before the Great Acceleration, many good souls have been trying to rewrite or at least resist these unsustainable stories. We know that people in power lose perspective, that human supremacy and corporate personhood are ridiculous, money is a seductive fiction, and one of the few truths about the universe we can confirm with our senses is that the living world is greater, wiser, and more resilient than we are. The majority of us who want to live ordinary lives want a different culture and a different path, one that helps us become better ancestors.
A Better Confederacy
America is as much a land of missed opportunities as a land of opportunity. This goes back to the beginning. In my friend Jennifer Lunden’s book, American Breakdown, she notes how much of our nation’s founding documents originated in the Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (usually referred to as the Iroquois Confederacy). Nearly a thousand years ago, five of the Confederacy’s nations - the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca – joined together under the strictures of the Great Law to bring peace to the region. (The sixth, the Tuscarora, joined in the early 18th century.) There’s ample evidence that its principles of a representative, three-branched government with checks and balances influenced the founders and the authors of the Constitution.
But in the founding of America there were two missing elements of the Great Law: matriarchy and sustainability. Regarding the first, the chiefs of the nations were men, but they were chosen by clan mothers, who also formed a council (a Supreme Court, in a sense) to settle disputes between chiefs. The women could impeach poor leaders and veto any vote that would lead to war.
As for the second, what America’s founders left out, Lunden writes,
was the directive to the chiefs of the Confederacy to make their decisions based on likely impacts seven generations into the future. In other words, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy incorporated a plan for sustainability into their constitution, and the Americans did not. Perhaps it’s time to campaign for another amendment.
Some of you will remember that I’ve written about state-level campaigns for Green Amendments, which add to the bill of rights in state constitutions the right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. The motivation for these amendments is explicitly multigenerational.
For an everyday translation of what all this might mean for a culture seeking to create good ancestors, here’s some advice from the Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons:
What Indians are about, I think, first of all is community. They’re about mutual support, they’re about sharing, they’re about understanding what’s common land, common air, common water, common and for all. They’re about freedom.
Invisible Triumphs
One of the hard things about the struggle to protect the environment is that defeat is an ugly tragedy while success is the status quo. If we win, whatever bit of the natural world is at stake simply keeps existing. Until recently, at least, we haven’t had to rebuild or create vibrant healthy ecosystems; we only had to protect them. As Rebecca Solnit says in her book Hope in the Dark,
Most environmental victories look like nothing happened; the land wasn’t annexed by the army, the mine didn’t open, the road didn’t cut through, the factory didn’t spew effluents that didn’t give asthma to the children who didn’t wheeze and panic and stay indoors on beautiful days. They are triumphs invisible except through storytelling.
Invisible triumphs, indeed. And what triumphs are greater and less visible than those viewed a century from now, or five centuries from now?
What triumphs, invisible or otherwise, can we expect in the Anthropocene? Even the optimists among us should admit that we have reached a point where many victories can only be measured by their reduction in future harm. Thresholds have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed, and species and ecosystems will disappear that are unlikely to reappear despite the best of human intentions.
That said, absolutely vital triumphs are possible. Keeping planetary heating to the tragedy of 2°C instead of ramping up to the horrors of 4°C or 7°C would be an astonishing success that would preserve a large proportion of life on Earth. Preserving in perpetuity entire ecosystems, particularly those that nurture high concentrations of biodiversity – rainforests, cloud forests, coral reefs, mangrove forests, vernal pools and other wetlands, for example – improves the odds that recognizable realms of life will be sustained through the coming heat and storm for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.
Continuing the History of Dignity
Barry Lopez is unsurpassed as a writer working at the meeting ground of nature and culture. His prose is as exquisite as his understanding of how far we have gone astray. Barry died of cancer in 2020, having lived just long enough to see a climate-driven forest fire rage through the Oregon forest and home he had loved for decades. (I’ve written about this here.) Today, the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art and Culture works with artists to chart the changing Earth and our relationship with it. “It has become necessary,” they write, “to imagine a very different future than the one we had hoped for.” They include this somber paragraph on their What We Do page:
Climate change is already transforming the planet, and by the end of the current century the landscape as we know it will be unrecognizable. Familiar cadences—from the arrival of migrating songbirds and the blossom of spring flowers to the chill of the first frost—will become unpredictable. Glaciers and rivers will disappear, summer skies will darken with smoke, and the land will fall silent. What will it mean when the places that have shaped and sustained us are gone? How will our understanding of the world change when there is no longer ice in the Arctic or wildlife in the forest? What are our obligations to the planet, and to each other?
Lopez, in that conversation with Robert Macfarlane I cited earlier, responded to the younger writer’s somber assessment of the fate of nature (and humans) in the Anthropocene with an affirmation. Everything Macfarlane speaks of will come to pass, he said, despite “the great webs of denial” in our society.
But Lopez went on to say, echoing Jonas Salk’s idea of the good ancestor, that we must now look for examples in history of people who lived under impossible burdens yet showed incredible courage and poise, despite having every reason to give up. “You may think they simply died with dignity,” Lopez says, “but no, they continued the history of dignity.” In doing so, they served as examples for their descendants (that’s us) who live in equally impossible times.
Now it’s our turn.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
If you read nothing else, read this: From Rhett Ayers Butler and Nature Briefs, “A Profession Built on Hope, Strained by Loss,” an extraordinary short essay on why so many people working in conservation struggle to do the work in the face of so much difficulty and despair, and how some of that stress might be relieved:
If you are trying to protect life on Earth, you are working in an era defined by loss. Wildlife populations have declined sharply in recent decades. Fisheries are strained. The climate is changing fast enough that field realities often outrun the planning documents. For many conservationists, this is not an abstract set of trends. It is the ground beneath their boots, the water they dive into, the fading chorus of sounds on night surveys, and the animals they recognize as individuals.
There is grief in that, and also something sharper: the feeling that suffering is not accidental. Much of it is caused by choices people make and systems people defend. When you work close to the damage, the losses do not always feel like “nature.” They feel like consequences.
That can produce what some people describe as moral injury: the distress that can come from witnessing harm, caring deeply, and still feeling unable to stop it. Even when you are doing everything you can, the scale of what you cannot change can crush you. Day after day, you may find yourself asking a question you do not want to ask: Is any of this enough?
From the Times, a sperm whale birth in the wild was filmed, revealing that the mother and baby had assistance from several other whales, only some of whom were related. It’s a beautiful bit of documentary footage, and further proof that other species have communal involvement in a birth.
From Vox, some modest good news about monarch butterfly populations. The long-term decline has stopped, and their numbers have stabilized, but they’re still too low. The hope is that the good work being done to safeguard their migration routes will begin to rebuild the species.
From Common Dreams, Forests, Not Data Centers: A Better Plan for Rural Prosperity, a wise plea to think through the enormous and unnecessary waste of the data center expansion to the much smarter, longer-term investment in the forests those centers often threaten:
Nature is our lifeline. Technology cannot replace it.
That truth is the heart of a growing conflict in rural America. As data centers and AI infrastructure are sold to communities as “innovation,” “jobs,” and “the future,” we’re being asked to trade away the natural systems that have always sustained us: forests, clean water, a stable climate, and the human need for connection with each other and the natural world.
From the Guardian, a new report, State of the Global Climate from the World Meteorological Organization, highlights the extraordinary energy imbalance of the rapidly heating Earth, describing the planet being “pushed beyond its limits:”
More than 90% of that excess is absorbed by the oceans, which experienced the highest heat content in history last year. The rate of ocean warming has more than doubled over the past two decades, compared with the average over the previous 45 years.
The authors of the latest annual State of the Global Climate report say this highlights the increasing vulnerability of a planet that is moving ever further out of balance as a result of human activity. The burning of oil, gas, coal and forests releases heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, which are all at their highest level in at least 800,000 years.
From Undark, a long-form dive into the extraordinary difficulties (botanical and bureaucratic) in combating Arundo donax, an invasive plant that has accompanied humans on our spread across the globe. The article focuses mainly on Texas and California, but our relationship with the plant goes back to Mesopotamia.
For thousands of years, Arundo donax has spread across the globe, wreaking havoc on the riparian ecosystems it invades. The plant’s kaleidoscopic utility — it has been used by humans for everything from construction materials to musical instruments — ensured its rapid territorial expansion as it followed human migrations, and infestations can now be found on every continent in the world except Antarctica. Likely arriving in North America alongside Spanish colonizers in the 17th and 18th centuries, Arundo now bedevils waterways in at least 25 states, vigorously spreading through a form of asexual reproduction that results in vast thickets of genetic clones. In the areas it overtakes, Arundo often outcompetes nearly every native species, forming robust monocultures that destroy habitat, consume huge amounts of water, and pose increased risk of fires and floods. In California, where the plant was first rigorously studied in the 1990s, one scientist labeled it the “greatest threat” to that state’s riverside ecosystems. And in Texas, along the Rio Grande, the plant now covers tens of thousands of acres.
From Inside Climate News, freshwater migratory fish are in steep decline all around the world:
Declining faster than many terrestrial populations, 325 migratory freshwater fish species have been identified as candidates for urgent conservation efforts by the United Nations’ Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). These populations—critical for river health and economic output—have already declined by over 80 percent since 1970.
Two more from the Guardian: First, the first two weeks of the Iran war have been a disaster for the climate, releasing among the dark toxic clouds the equivalent CO2 of Iceland’s annual emissions.
And in an op-ed, George Monbiot brilliantly identifies the problem of fossil fuels as the source problem for much of what ails civilization, and points to the extraordinary value in ridding ourselves of their toxic, power-hungry talons:
Oil did not cause capitalism, but it has massively extended and empowered it. Reduce our dependency on oil, and we disrupt some of the world’s most violent and exploitative relations. We defuel dictators and war machines, coups and assassinations, invasions and nuclear threats. It’s not everything of course: there will still be water wars, land wars and mineral wars to be fought: after all, the military machine can’t just sit there rusting. But it’s a lot.
From Grist, $4/gallon gasoline is the tipping point when EVs make better financial sense than gas- or diesel-burning cars.
Links:
Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393242140
o New York Times review of Underland: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/books/review-underland-robert-macfarlane.html
Brief bio of Jonas Salk from the Salk Institute website: https://www.salk.edu/about/history-of-salk/jonas-salk/
Video clip of Salk’s interview with Murrow:
Guardian interview with Robert Macfarlane: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/22/robert-macfarlane-are-we-being-good-ancestors-mostly-no
Video of Robert Macfarlane and Barry Lopez in conversation:
About Jennifer Lunden’s American Breakdown: https://jenniferlunden.com/about-american-breakdown/
Haudenosaunee Confederacy: https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/confederacys-creation/
Green Amendment: https://forthegenerations.org/
Excellent “Brain Pickings” essay on Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/16/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-2/
Barry Lopez Foundation for Art and Culture: https://barrylopezfoundation.org/what-we-do/
This post would be an excellent framework to begin a teaching curriculum: “The Good Ancestor” ancestry and stewardship—how our past shapes the future, how to create a legacy for our planet. Kindergarten on up. I imagine if Jonas Salk was working on the polio vaccine in this timeline, his research would most likely have been defunded.
I made a quick visit to the website of that---definitely very bizarre---plan you mentioned to profit off of solar energy. If I'm understanding this correctly, they plan to use mirrors on satellites to catch solar energy that would otherwise bypass Earth. They seem quite confident that they can direct it to very precise locations, but it's hard to believe that none of it would reach the surface of the Earth and be re-radiated back into the atmosphere as heat, furthering global heating. Not to mention that this is the kind of technology that the global billionaire class would salivate over: securing an ongoing supply of energy for themselves in their bunkers, while the world outside collapses.