"One of the defining characteristics of the Anthropocene is how, in the community of life, we now create the conditions that increasingly define who lives and who dies." This sentence is mind jarring in its moral implications. Who lives (for now)? White people in the North, Black and Brown people in the South? As you note, it was only a few hundred years ago that we created the conditions that are destroying the teeming, beautiful ecosystems that gave us the Anthropocene in the first place. What do we have to blame? The technology: steam engines and factories and cars? The enlightenment? Christianity's blessings on colonialism and saving pagans (otherwise known as stealing their land)?
I was amazed at the optimism of the news media on the topic of reaching 8 billion this week. And horrified that people still seem to believe that growth--any kind of growth!-- is good. Your writing helps with those talking points, but it is still depressing to think about how far people are from understanding these realities, much less acting on them. Thank you, once again, for being a voice in the wilderness.
Thank you, Jenny. It is fascinating, isn't it? I still have some patience for folks who assume growth is good and population worries will get ironed out, because that thinking is in the air we've been breathing our whole lives. What irks me are the pro-natalist talking heads who know the debate and insist we need more people, not less. It's crazy talk rooted in either the bizarre idea that more babies will breed more solutions - more hands to row the overcrowded lifeboat - or in the delusion that we need warm bodies to occupy other planets.
An Antarctic friend who used to run the field center in McMurdo had to deal all the time with scientists and academics who insisted they should get all sorts of unnecessary gear and special treatment. She was really, really good at nodding and smiling and saying No in a way that convinced them to walk away with what they needed rather than what they wanted. I think that's the approach that the family planning NGOs and U.N. are taking, in a way, by talking mildly about population trends but doing the really hard work of getting funding to provide services in underserved nations to slow the growth curve. Let the media in the U.S. talk cheerfully about population milestones, as long as the work to prevent the next one is being done.
8 billion. I feel like wearing a black armband in mourning the loss of biodiversity, the increase in carbon, the ever shrinking ratio of cropland to people, the baked in warming that now we have to live with. The anthropocene, the pyrocene, the notion that we must run ever faster to keep up. The age of the Red Queen.
Jason, for me it is that oldest of maladies, the grief of the elderly for the vanished brilliant lucid world of their youth, the finitude of memory, the loss of usefulness and relevance. But now, adding to that burden, it is a loss not just of our own but of the whole world's. The vanishing of a world we all perceived as of utter value. The purity of the white snowfields and the pine forests we loved. The species we knew and those we will now never know. All to vanish along with us.
Our young generations are justified in feeling anger at this and we elderly feel both grief and guilt. But it is unclear whether the young can undo what we older generations stood by and let happen.
It seems to me that we are forced to confront no matter how we turn, the dreadful mirror of what we have done. The vanishing world that despite its manifest imperfections remains of utter value, the one bright pearl.
A dreadful mirror, indeed, and all around us. You write beautifully of difficult things, Ilo. I'm an optimistic pessimist on my good days, and so I will add only this: Nearly all of what we hope to love and protect still remains. The mirror shows the present and past but can only imagine the future. The more we work to slow the losses, the fewer losses there will be. Like you I worry that the next generations will have lost so much - an ecological amnesia deeper than the one we suffer from - that they're not aware of the extraordinary beauty and complexity we've been gifted with. There's a bottleneck coming, certainly, but we still have the power to shape it.
Beautifully written. This matter of the Anthropocene is epical and it has the capability of stirring our deepest feelings and bringing out our greatest homeric eloquence. You are absolutely right in everything you said. I admire.your efforts to change the shape of the our shared future The greatest danger in my feeling, is to feel powerless, as it falsely absolves us of acting. Mathematics and physics verify that even the existence of a newsletter can cause a chain of cascading actions that make a major transformation in the future. The butterfly wing hypothesis I think it's termed. So more power to you.
Way too many. It is like a slow motion train wreck, a Greek tragedy, a spreading flood, a calamity, an inevitability, a stupidity. Three billion was too many. I'm not hesitant to say that the world would be far better off without us.
Thank you for chiming in, Ilo. It's slow motion for us, an eyeblink for our fellow travelers in field and stream. I spent some years convinced, as you seem to be, that the world without us could only be a good thing, and given current trends am still sympathetic to the thinking. But I finally remembered that for nearly all of human history we've been a perfectly fine neighbor to life on Earth. Evidence is everywhere that in recent millennia (pre-industrial) humans were modifying the landscape in a way that benefited us but also maintained or encouraged biodiversity. For all of our faults, we're not a plague by nature. We've just been on a blind bender for the last few centuries.
As for how many is too many, much depends on how we rewrite the rules of civilization. I wrote about carrying capacity in a piece titled Fewer Feet, Smaller Footprint.
And re: your Greek tragedy metaphor, I have another piece that might interest you called The Greek Chorus and Brandolini's Law.
But humans being essentially a large herd of mammals, deserve exactly the same compassion we would extend to other animals. We cannot wish for a plague, a war, an asteroid strike to reduce their numbers. Most humane is to reduce their replacement numbers so they get to live full lives, but every generation reduces in numbers to perhaps around a billion. We are late to the game, we should have started 70 years ago. But better late than never. Better voluntary than imposed on us.
Compassion, yes absolutely. It's the highest form of intelligence. Fully funding/advertising/explaining family planning efforts everywhere will go a long way to flatten the curve and then encourage degrowth. The losses in the natural world between here and there, though, will be truly terrible, as will be the likely suffering in human communities as warming torques planetary systems.
As for timing, 70 years ago would have been ideal. I'm often reminded in this context of this little bit of wisdom: “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.” Resources in this case having a couple meanings...
"One of the defining characteristics of the Anthropocene is how, in the community of life, we now create the conditions that increasingly define who lives and who dies." This sentence is mind jarring in its moral implications. Who lives (for now)? White people in the North, Black and Brown people in the South? As you note, it was only a few hundred years ago that we created the conditions that are destroying the teeming, beautiful ecosystems that gave us the Anthropocene in the first place. What do we have to blame? The technology: steam engines and factories and cars? The enlightenment? Christianity's blessings on colonialism and saving pagans (otherwise known as stealing their land)?
I was amazed at the optimism of the news media on the topic of reaching 8 billion this week. And horrified that people still seem to believe that growth--any kind of growth!-- is good. Your writing helps with those talking points, but it is still depressing to think about how far people are from understanding these realities, much less acting on them. Thank you, once again, for being a voice in the wilderness.
Thank you, Jenny. It is fascinating, isn't it? I still have some patience for folks who assume growth is good and population worries will get ironed out, because that thinking is in the air we've been breathing our whole lives. What irks me are the pro-natalist talking heads who know the debate and insist we need more people, not less. It's crazy talk rooted in either the bizarre idea that more babies will breed more solutions - more hands to row the overcrowded lifeboat - or in the delusion that we need warm bodies to occupy other planets.
An Antarctic friend who used to run the field center in McMurdo had to deal all the time with scientists and academics who insisted they should get all sorts of unnecessary gear and special treatment. She was really, really good at nodding and smiling and saying No in a way that convinced them to walk away with what they needed rather than what they wanted. I think that's the approach that the family planning NGOs and U.N. are taking, in a way, by talking mildly about population trends but doing the really hard work of getting funding to provide services in underserved nations to slow the growth curve. Let the media in the U.S. talk cheerfully about population milestones, as long as the work to prevent the next one is being done.
8 billion. I feel like wearing a black armband in mourning the loss of biodiversity, the increase in carbon, the ever shrinking ratio of cropland to people, the baked in warming that now we have to live with. The anthropocene, the pyrocene, the notion that we must run ever faster to keep up. The age of the Red Queen.
There's poetry in your grief, Ilo. Thank you for that.
Jason, for me it is that oldest of maladies, the grief of the elderly for the vanished brilliant lucid world of their youth, the finitude of memory, the loss of usefulness and relevance. But now, adding to that burden, it is a loss not just of our own but of the whole world's. The vanishing of a world we all perceived as of utter value. The purity of the white snowfields and the pine forests we loved. The species we knew and those we will now never know. All to vanish along with us.
Our young generations are justified in feeling anger at this and we elderly feel both grief and guilt. But it is unclear whether the young can undo what we older generations stood by and let happen.
It seems to me that we are forced to confront no matter how we turn, the dreadful mirror of what we have done. The vanishing world that despite its manifest imperfections remains of utter value, the one bright pearl.
A dreadful mirror, indeed, and all around us. You write beautifully of difficult things, Ilo. I'm an optimistic pessimist on my good days, and so I will add only this: Nearly all of what we hope to love and protect still remains. The mirror shows the present and past but can only imagine the future. The more we work to slow the losses, the fewer losses there will be. Like you I worry that the next generations will have lost so much - an ecological amnesia deeper than the one we suffer from - that they're not aware of the extraordinary beauty and complexity we've been gifted with. There's a bottleneck coming, certainly, but we still have the power to shape it.
Beautifully written. This matter of the Anthropocene is epical and it has the capability of stirring our deepest feelings and bringing out our greatest homeric eloquence. You are absolutely right in everything you said. I admire.your efforts to change the shape of the our shared future The greatest danger in my feeling, is to feel powerless, as it falsely absolves us of acting. Mathematics and physics verify that even the existence of a newsletter can cause a chain of cascading actions that make a major transformation in the future. The butterfly wing hypothesis I think it's termed. So more power to you.
Way too many. It is like a slow motion train wreck, a Greek tragedy, a spreading flood, a calamity, an inevitability, a stupidity. Three billion was too many. I'm not hesitant to say that the world would be far better off without us.
Thank you for chiming in, Ilo. It's slow motion for us, an eyeblink for our fellow travelers in field and stream. I spent some years convinced, as you seem to be, that the world without us could only be a good thing, and given current trends am still sympathetic to the thinking. But I finally remembered that for nearly all of human history we've been a perfectly fine neighbor to life on Earth. Evidence is everywhere that in recent millennia (pre-industrial) humans were modifying the landscape in a way that benefited us but also maintained or encouraged biodiversity. For all of our faults, we're not a plague by nature. We've just been on a blind bender for the last few centuries.
As for how many is too many, much depends on how we rewrite the rules of civilization. I wrote about carrying capacity in a piece titled Fewer Feet, Smaller Footprint.
And re: your Greek tragedy metaphor, I have another piece that might interest you called The Greek Chorus and Brandolini's Law.
But humans being essentially a large herd of mammals, deserve exactly the same compassion we would extend to other animals. We cannot wish for a plague, a war, an asteroid strike to reduce their numbers. Most humane is to reduce their replacement numbers so they get to live full lives, but every generation reduces in numbers to perhaps around a billion. We are late to the game, we should have started 70 years ago. But better late than never. Better voluntary than imposed on us.
As it will surely be.
Compassion, yes absolutely. It's the highest form of intelligence. Fully funding/advertising/explaining family planning efforts everywhere will go a long way to flatten the curve and then encourage degrowth. The losses in the natural world between here and there, though, will be truly terrible, as will be the likely suffering in human communities as warming torques planetary systems.
As for timing, 70 years ago would have been ideal. I'm often reminded in this context of this little bit of wisdom: “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.” Resources in this case having a couple meanings...
I should have mentioned education alongside family planning. Universal access to education for girls is essential for slowing the curve.