Like a lot of other people, I have believed for my whole life that human beings can not expand their numbers and their rate of consumption indefinitely. While innovation might well change the dynamic slightly, I have always felt that some sort of catastrophe was likely. I am not one who thought it would come in a flash of Armageddon because, in the natural world, things usually move too slowly for an individual to actually bear witness to the change. Change is something that we usually have to take on faith or deduce from facts. I always figured that the catastrophe in the world’s future would come too slowly to get the attention of most people; that species and landscapes would disappear over generations or morph into ecosystems that we were genetically unprepared to thrive within. I thought the destruction of the habitat that humans need to thrive would occur so slowly that we would hardly notice until we had consumed our way far beyond the tipping point. I thought we might well act just like most of the other species that have gone extinct before us: take a few other species with us but pass into oblivion without leaving much more than a ripple in the ocean of geologic time. I really didn’t believe that humans would be in a position to even contemplate another destiny. But perhaps I was wrong.
When you look at the events in recent human history that we consider truly positive and of our own making (civil rights, democracy, the renaissance, perhaps true Christianity) it only takes a glance to see that these events, important as they were, were microscopic compared to the proposed collective decision to modify human growth and consumption, and in so doing extend our tenure on this planet.
I just returned from a new-decade tour of America’s Midwest. Jill, Jilian and I drove through portions of the Great Lakes states of Michigan and Ohio – spent much of our time in and around the cities of Toledo and Detroit. It is an amazing place, overflowing with the historical remnants of the post WWII industrialization that is emblematic of the cultural and environmental changes of my lifetime. Miles and miles of shelled-out factories and boarded up houses. Jilian stared in awe as we moved through the Motown she thought she knew as automobiles and music. She asked what had happened here, as if we were driving through Dresden. For her, there was not much good to see. But with absolute clarity I saw those buildings, neighborhoods, small towns, and farms as they were in the fifties and sixties, when they still had a shine to them. It was all ghostly familiar to me because I was born and raised there.
I escaped in 1966, fleeing the coming rust as best a kid can flee anything. I didn’t understand about jobs and business and industry. But I knew that embattled countryside better than most and I wanted out and away, to a place were the simple creatures – the toads and fish and birds – had a chance. Already by that time the countryside was closing in. A lot of the birds were gone, the water was turning to sludge and skull and crossbones signs were popping up where we used to swim. The connection to the land was already fraying badly and I believed it was the beginning of the end. But in the intervening years there were retrenchments and a few victories. Lake Erie was cleaned up and the perch fishery came back, a law against littering was enacted, government agencies and wealthy land owners discovered the obvious – like humans, all things need a clean and safe place to live – and they began to replant essential habitat. Some of the richer developments staged comebacks and from time to time over the last fifty years I have wondered if I was too hasty with my gloomy predictions. But most of that hope was an illusion and my recent trip “home” convinced me that the land mass available for other species beside humans continues to shrink. It goes without saying that those species are essential to our survival but in hundreds of miles of driving we saw only humans, a few pigeons, a lone seagull, and one dead deer. I looked hard but I saw no young boy, wearing baggy blue jeans and a hand-me-down wool coat, haunting the woodlots, watching the lives of birds and rodents and worms and reptiles and amphibians. Lots of fancy cars passed us. We heard load music blaring and saw people moving on asphalt. But we saw no one venturing outside of their man-made maze. No one probed the frontiers between the species. No one seemed to realize that those frontiers are man-made too.
I did see signs proclaiming this corporation’s belief in green technology and that corporation’s dedication to clean energy. I saw waste collection areas for plastic bottles and cardboard. I saw a few hybrid vehicles and some dirty, public busses. Perhaps these should be viewed as positive signs. But mostly what I saw was waste and needless, advertisement-driven consumption. Driving through the belly of the beast, gauging the enormity of the problem and what it will likely become, the response and the outcry seemed puny indeed. The land was diminished by greed, arrogance, and ignorance to an extent even greater than the diminution perceived before any of the other forward leaps of mankind. So where was the indignation? Where was the outrage?
I believe the state of our physical world really can be compared to civil rights in the Jim Crow era, or human rights in the age of tyrannical monarchs, or the crushing of human creativity by the forces of the Dark Ages, or indeed the advent of love as a firewall against human suffering. The major difference is that these other human challenges are limited in there reach where the challenge of human habitat change is universal and total. Yet even with the ultimate stakes that are involved, we still insist on fooling ourselves and others. As with the struggles for civil rights, democracy, freedom of thought, and the belief in things greater than individual men, the struggle for a livable human habitat for our children will only succeed if we are willing to invest serious thought, serious sacrifice, and probably the blood of martyrs. Like the other great challengers we have surmounted, there is and will be an increasing need to speak out against entities much more powerful than any individual. To do so will be condemned as blasphemy and madness. Those entities will use their power to discredit, intimidate, humiliate, and destroy the truth-sayers. It will take true courage and there will be loses.
I hope that Jilian took some lessons away from her new-decade tour of the middle of our country. It would be nice if the lessons could have been gentler and more hopeful. But it is important that she is ready, and there is no sense denying it: the decade that is just beginning, and the decades to follow, will not be a time for the faint hearted.
Like a lot of other people, I have believed for my whole life that human beings can not expand their numbers and their rate of consumption indefinitely. While innovation might well change the dynamic slightly, I have always felt that some sort of catastrophe was likely. I am not one who thought it would come in a flash of Armageddon because, in the natural world, things usually move too slowly for an individual to actually bear witness to the change. Change is something that we usually have to take on faith or deduce from facts. I always figured that the catastrophe in the world’s future would come too slowly to get the attention of most people; that species and landscapes would disappear over generations or morph into ecosystems that we were genetically unprepared to thrive within. I thought the destruction of the habitat that humans need to thrive would occur so slowly that we would hardly notice until we had consumed our way far beyond the tipping point. I thought we might well act just like most of the other species that have gone extinct before us: take a few other species with us but pass into oblivion without leaving much more than a ripple in the ocean of geologic time. I really didn’t believe that humans would be in a position to even contemplate another destiny. But perhaps I was wrong.
When you look at the events in recent human history that we consider truly positive and of our own making (civil rights, democracy, the renaissance, perhaps true Christianity) it only takes a glance to see that these events, important as they were, were microscopic compared to the proposed collective decision to modify human growth and consumption, and in so doing extend our tenure on this planet.
I just returned from a new-decade tour of America’s Midwest. Jill, Jilian and I drove through portions of the Great Lakes states of Michigan and Ohio – spent much of our time in and around the cities of Toledo and Detroit. It is an amazing place, overflowing with the historical remnants of the post WWII industrialization that is emblematic of the cultural and environmental changes of my lifetime. Miles and miles of shelled-out factories and boarded up houses. Jilian stared in awe as we moved through the Motown she thought she knew as automobiles and music. She asked what had happened here, as if we were driving through Dresden. For her, there was not much good to see. But with absolute clarity I saw those buildings, neighborhoods, small towns, and farms as they were in the fifties and sixties, when they still had a shine to them. It was all ghostly familiar to me because I was born and raised there.
I escaped in 1966, fleeing the coming rust as best a kid can flee anything. I didn’t understand about jobs and business and industry. But I knew that embattled countryside better than most and I wanted out and away, to a place were the simple creatures – the toads and fish and birds – had a chance. Already by that time the countryside was closing in. A lot of the birds were gone, the water was turning to sludge and skull and crossbones signs were popping up where we used to swim. The connection to the land was already fraying badly and I believed it was the beginning of the end. But in the intervening years there were retrenchments and a few victories. Lake Erie was cleaned up and the perch fishery came back, a law against littering was enacted, government agencies and wealthy land owners discovered the obvious – like humans, all things need a clean and safe place to live – and they began to replant essential habitat. Some of the richer developments staged comebacks and from time to time over the last fifty years I have wondered if I was too hasty with my gloomy predictions. But most of that hope was an illusion and my recent trip “home” convinced me that the land mass available for other species beside humans continues to shrink. It goes without saying that those species are essential to our survival but in hundreds of miles of driving we saw only humans, a few pigeons, a lone seagull, and one dead deer. I looked hard but I saw no young boy, wearing baggy blue jeans and a hand-me-down wool coat, haunting the woodlots, watching the lives of birds and rodents and worms and reptiles and amphibians. Lots of fancy cars passed us. We heard load music blaring and saw people moving on asphalt. But we saw no one venturing outside of their man-made maze. No one probed the frontiers between the species. No one seemed to realize that those frontiers are man-made too.
I did see signs proclaiming this corporation’s belief in green technology and that corporation’s dedication to clean energy. I saw waste collection areas for plastic bottles and cardboard. I saw a few hybrid vehicles and some dirty, public busses. Perhaps these should be viewed as positive signs. But mostly what I saw was waste and needless, advertisement-driven consumption. Driving through the belly of the beast, gauging the enormity of the problem and what it will likely become, the response and the outcry seemed puny indeed. The land was diminished by greed, arrogance, and ignorance to an extent even greater than the diminution perceived before the any of the other forward leaps of mankind. So where was the indignation? Where was the outrage?
I believe the state of our physical world really can be compared to civil rights in the Jim Crow era, or human rights in the age of tyrannical monarchs, or the crushing of human creativity by the forces of the Dark Ages, or indeed the advent of love as a firewall against human suffering. The major difference is that these other human challenges are limited in there reach where the challenge of human habitat change is universal and total. Yet even with the ultimate stakes that are involved, we still insist on fooling ourselves and others. As with the struggles for civil rights, democracy, freedom of thought, and the belief in things greater than individual men, the struggle for a livable human habitat for our children will only succeed if we are willing to invest serious thought, serious sacrifice, and probably the blood of martyrs. Like the other great challengers we have surmounted, there is and will be an increasing need to speak out against entities much more powerful than any individual. To do so will be condemned as blasphemy and madness. Those entities will use their power to discredit, intimidate, humiliate, and destroy the truth-sayers. It will take true courage and there will be loses.
I hope that Jilian took some lessons away from her new-decade tour of the middle of our country. It would be nice if the lessons could have been gentler and more hopeful. But it is important that she is ready, and there is no sense denying it: the decade that is just beginning, and the decades to follow, will not be a time for the faint hearted.
Comments 4
Well put. As long as corporations are obligated to maximize profits for their stockholders and protected from slander as if they were citizens, we will never see an altruistic change for the better without force…economic or otherwise.
At least you have land to live off.
Keep fighting.
Dan, you might find the Time Magazine Detroit Blog/project interesting. The magazine has bought a house in Detroit and is doing a year-long reporting job there about the city. It’s alternately heart-wrenching (like your piece) and ever-so-incrementally hopeful. I grew up in the area myself and if I were younger, I think I’d move back and dive in…there are glimmers of opportunity for the stout and young of heart.
Very thought-provoking, Dan. Jillian is very fortunate to have you and Jill raising her. And I suspect that she is teaching you a few things as well. I wish you all strength in the coming struggle.
I’m writing this as I fly over what once was the edge of the Great Plains and what is now miles and miles of farmfields and roads as far as my eyes can see. (I’m coincidentally on my way to Detroit, but only passing through.)
Dan, what you wrote about natural habitat – that land mass available for other species continues to shrink – is especially apparent to me now from above. What is not farmland is residential or urban, mostly built by humans and for humans first and foremost. Over-population and over-consumption are crowding others out, and in a world where there is a full-blown shopping mall in the airport and an article in the New York Times about designer pants that cost $550 just because they can, when will it stop? When will enough people realize the challenge we face and cut back to give the rest of Earth’s inhabitants and ecosystems a fighting chance at continued survival (for their sake and ours)? I don’t know, but I also hope it’s sooner rather than later.
I don’t consider myself a big material consumer, but what I do consume quite a bit of is food. Trying to live more sustainably, I was a vegetarian for much of the last two years, but in the last few months I have been eating meat on occasion. Jill’s talk on Wednesday cemented in my mind that it’s not enough to not eat meat, because then you’re just leaving the system as it is. Instead, we have a duty to demand grass-fed, happy animals that are raised and harvested in a ecologically responsible way. I can’t think of a better way to keep and restore the Great Plains than by raising buffalo on them. We are benefited, the buffalo are benefited, and the Great Plains are benefited also. Keep up the great work!