Lessons in Extinction 7
Contents Updated: Monday, September 13, 1999
Our Hubris?
James Lovelock and Michael Allaby, experts on the biosphere of the earth, sound like public relations executives for the polluters. They insist they do not wish to ridicule legitimate concern about the state of the terrestrial environment, but simply to place in perspective the puny attempts of industrialists and farmers in polluting the environment. They compare them with what nature has done in the past through glaciations, volcanic eruptions and meteoric collisions. Despite all of these natural disasters, whose scale dwarfs the attempts of man, life continues. There is no need to worry about human pollution—the earth has been able to cope with far worse. All species modify their environment just by being alive. Mankind is no different and cannot degrade his surroundings to the point of extinction. They conclude, Our power to destroy the world, or even ourselves, is quite imaginary, a product of our hubris.
Yet elsewhere Lovelock argues that the control systems of the earth would break down if the human population were to reach ten billion. Mankind would then desperately have to artificially maintain what formerly were self regulatory feedback systems. We would no longer have a natural environment that sustained life but a spaceship earth with life support systems provided by the occupants. Unless, that is, we succumb to gigadeath, in which case mankind will have done—simply through procreating—what these same experts claimed was quite imaginary, a product of our hubris.
And why chose ten billion as the danger level? What if he has overlooked some factor and the figure is five billion? Then the threshold has already been crossed and we are passengers of spaceship earth without realizing it. Experts have unquestioning faith in their own pronouncements no matter how arbitrary they may be. Yet we accept them.
Lovelock seems genuinely full of concern when he writes:
Each time we significantly alter part of some natural process of regulation or introduce some new source of energy or information, we are increasing the probability that one of these changes will weaken the stability of the entire system, by cutting down the variety of response.
Bravo! Surely urgent action is merited to make sure we do not increase the probability that some danger point is exceeded.
What does he recommend? No need to panic—there is
ample time and every inclination on the part of scientists to investigate and prove or disprove allegations, and then leave it to the law-makers to decide rationally what should be done.
Aaaargh! He wants to involve a cabal of experts. Not only are the scientific experts to mull and ponder over the diagnosis but the political experts are then to debate it in the legislature and legal experts are to test it in courtrooms. Too bad if the patient is in terminal decline.
Others are less sanguine. Dr Hans Martin says we do not have time
to develop our skills. We are presented with a curriculum which includes primary and secondary school, university courses and graduate studies simultaneously.
In the imagery of Dr Stephen Schneider of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research: we are staring into a murky crystal ball and cannot clearly foresee the future; if we waited five years hoping the ball would clear, the vision awaiting us would be all the more horrific. Their message is evident. We have no time to study, no time to understand the cybernetics of our environment. There is no time to decide what we can safely do. Deterioration continues daily. We must call a halt to the damage now. But we may already be too late!
None of this hubris worries Allaby and Lovelock but something else does:
The credible threats must come from outside the earth and the impact of a large planetismal is the most immediate of them... We have a moral obligation to take such modest, inexpensive steps as we can to avert them...
An asteroid impact that occurs perhaps once every 26 million years, if their interpretation of the fossil record is correct (and the next is not due for some 13 million years), is far more worrying than the destruction being wreaked every second by mankind!
Can’t you picture the Professors Expertosaur, 65 million years ago saying exactly the same thing? And worse, convincing their compatriots that they should examine the skies and muse on the best ways of saving life on earth by deflecting planetismals while everything died about them. The meteor never came but the anthroposaurs fooled observers 65 million years later into believing it had, by simulating all its symptoms.
We are all, let alone the experts, indifferent to the fate of the earth—evidently the anthroposaurs were too. Like the anthroposaurs, we do not seem to have grasped that we are also on the list of endangered species, and as more go, so we get nearer to the top.
Wilford said of the dinosaurs that they were limited; they were incapable of foreseeing or preventing their own extinction. We are no different! Is any one of us able to use our intelligence for the broader good when selfish motives intervene? Why do we accept what the experts tell us? Why are we optimistic about the future but apathetic about destroying the planet? Have we inherited fatal flaws from our predecessors, the dinosaurs?
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