Are We Being Good Ancestors?

7/15/21

Jul 16, 2021

(Note to readers: Not many of you are clicking on links to sources, so I’ve embedded them into the text (rather than only having them at the end) in case that’s what you prefer. I encourage you also to look into the other Anthropocene news at the end of these posts. This week’s highlights include a surprising amount of child-free adults in Michigan, the massive die-off of marine life in the Pacific NW heatwave, the latest climate news from Bill McKibben at the New Yorker, and a disturbingly accurate prediction in a 1972 MIT study about the likely collapse of society in the mid-21st century…)

Now to this week’s essay:

Are we being good ancestors?

This week I thought I’d dip into this question, which lies at the heart of Robert Macfarlane’s new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. (I haven’t finished Underland, so this isn’t a review, but I can tell you already that it’s an astonishingly beautiful, lyrical, and intelligent book.) Macfarlane borrows the question from Jonas Salk, who for decades was as famous for not profiting from the polio vaccine as he was for inventing it. Salk was nearly sainted when, having saved millions of future children from a life of polio-induced misery, he smiled at the idea of patenting the vaccine (in an interview with Edward R. Murrow) and asked, “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 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.” So it isn’t just about doing the right thing; it’s about showing 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.

And here we are in the Anthropocene, the greatest of changes and most formidable of crises.

Notably, one biographer of Salk likened the push for the polio vaccine to the invasion of Normandy. Eighty million Americans donated to the cause, often with whatever coins they could afford to give (the collection of coins became known the March of Dimes). The message here is that much of the country, no matter how poor or unlikely to be directly affected by polio, were willing to sacrifice for the common good. It wasn’t just Salk and his colleagues in science; it was the poor folks too, dropping some pennies into the can, who were being good ancestors.

Well, since this was the early 1950s, the heart of the Great Acceleration that saw extraordinary growth in population, resource depletion, wetland destruction, agricultural takeovers of vibrant habitat, and much more, these good ancestors were good mostly in terms of polio eradication and other species-specific altruism. While the polio virus might have seen the conquering army land on its shores, so did nearly every other species on Earth.

Now, as the twinned crises in biodiversity loss and climate heating rapidly worsen, are we doing enough, and how will we be seen and understood by generations to come? The answer to the first question is both simple and incredibly complex. Simple, in that nearly all relevant harmful trends – from ocean acidity to extinctions to habitat loss – are descending quickly toward worst-case scenarios. Complex, in that there are so many useful, beautiful countercurrents at work – from regulation to conservation to activism to scientific breakthroughs – by all sorts of people in all corners of the world. We don’t know yet how the tide may turn in the face of what seems like an array of impossible battles. 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 this-is-normal realities.

Macfarlane has answered the good ancestor 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 conversation with Barry Lopez about both Underland and Lopez’s book Horizon, Macfarlane referred to this new epoch as “the Anthropocene thought-experiment.” I find this useful, to think of our civilizational model as an experiment. In the cartoon version, I picture 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, overuse the land and overfish the oceans, then spew out CO2 like a supervolcano? Just to see what happens?” This of course is not what Macfarlane said… but he is reminding us that what we are doing, how we are living, the price we and the rest of life are paying, is 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.

The ideas that got us here include human supremacy (i.e. all life and matter on Earth exist to serve our purposes), a refusal to recognize ecological limits, and a willingness to let the abstractions of capital and corporation hold more power than people or government. (I’m sure there are plenty of corporations today who – note the implied personhood – would be happy to patent the polio vaccine, not to mention the sun.) There’s a library of books to explore or explain all of this, so I’ll just say here that every path, whether it’s toward failure or success or something in between, is a story. Every path is a story. The story that led to the Anthropocene, and that is leading our descendants toward a deeply disturbed and impoverished world, needs to be rewritten.

On the subject of writing a new model for society: I’ve been reading my friend Jennifer Lunden’s manuscript for her excellent upcoming book, American Breakdown: Notes from an Industrialized Body, due out early next year. American Breakdown is a narrative, historical, down-to-earth, and intelligent critique of industrialized American society and a brilliantly contextualized memoir of illness. Toward the end, in a chapter that examines the original promise of America, she notes how much in our nation’s founding documents seems to have originated in the Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, what is 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 of this nation and the authors of the Constitution. But there were differences, most notably the decision not to include two key elements of the Great Law: matriarchy and sustainability. 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) which settled disputes between chiefs.

“The second element of the Haudenosaunee constitution that the 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 the 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, a much-needed push to reshape government so it helps us all to become better ancestors.

The hard thing about environmental struggles is that defeat is always an ugly tragedy while success is generally just the status quo. If we win, whatever bit of the natural world is at stake simply keeps doing what it always has. Generally we don’t rebuild or create vibrant healthy ecosystems; we 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 won today which are still won a century from now, or five hundred years from now?

What triumphs, invisible or otherwise, can we expect in the face of the Anthropocene? We have reached a point where we can only measure victories by the reduction in harm. Thresholds have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed, and species and ecosystems will disappear that are very unlikely to reappear under the best of human intentions. That said, 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. Preserving in perpetuity entire ecosystems, particularly those that nurture high concentrations of life – rainforests, cloud forests, coral reefs, mangrove forests, vernal pools and other wetlands, just to note a few examples – improves the odds that recognizable pockets of life will be sustained through the coming heat and storm.

Part of Barry Lopez’s legacy is the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art and Culture in New Mexico, which works with artists to chart the changing Earth and our relation to 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 mentioned earlier, responds 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 says, despite “the great webs of denial” in our society. But he goes 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.

Field Guide to the Anthropocene

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