"No matter what we do at this point, global temperatures will continue to rise in the coming decades, owing to the gigatons of extra CO2 already circulating in the atmosphere. With more than six billion people on the planet, the risks of this are obvious. A disruption in monsoon patterns, a shift in ocean currents, a major drought - any one of these could easily produce streams of refugees numbering in the millions. As the effects of global warming become more and more apparent, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."-
The Climate of Man - III
Elizabeth Kolbert/New Yorker 02.05.05
Setting aside the reactions of those whose religious conviction - that the end of the world is a good thing, a confirming sign, and should be passively accepted as part of God's plan - lets them observe Kolbert's forecast with calm assurance, most everyone else reading that "With more than six billion people on the planet, the risks of this are obvious" is going to imagine a world with substantially less than six billion people on it, so that they can imagine themselves continuing to burn fuel by the luxurious ton and enjoying the power and security of indiscriminate technology unimpeded by the ruinous weight of its effects.
This is an anthem in the world of construction and manly values, and it's a subtle creed in the bureaucratic halls of commerce and finance as well. It is an undercurrent in lots of homes. And there hasn't been a whisper of it publicly in decades.
Good. I'm fine with that. More than fine, I'm against the idea of encouraging a reduction of the population, against it with everything I have. Dead set against it. To hell with that idea. Because the problem isn't how many of us there are, it's how we live.
But it is a popular idea, the perspicacious selecting out of those who deserve a place in the improved world - even though you can't read anyone espousing it anywhere. It's an "us against them" or "us above them" paradigm. I wouldn't have to feel guilty about burning 20 gallons of gas a week (I don't, that's rhetorical. I don't drive at all now.) if there weren't 20 million other cars on the road in California.
A reduction in the numbers is what pops up in most minds when they read Kolbert's "more than six billion people on the planet". And anyone whose self-image is of themselves as a decent hard-working citizen wants to get rid of the no-goods, the socially inferior, the criminals and incompetents, when it comes time to reduce the numbers. The assumption being that things are basically running in the right direction, there's just too many of us. So get out the scales of judgment and weigh the living accordingly.
The problem I have with that is the rigged scale, the butcher's thumb invisibly pressing the pan as the numbers climb.
The core issue is a return to Darwinian selection, or what's called that. The culling hand of natural forces sweeping through the race. But things have shifted around since the long ago when we lived in submission to those forces and won every scrap of survival with hard work and fortitude and fortune; marginal creatures then are now central to what's human. Lapdogs live in luxury while wolves are hunted from helicopters. Scammy creeps have massive armamentaria, and the system's rigged in their favor, so if we turn toward some kind of natural selection they'll come out on top. Natural selection, now, is unnatural.
There is no human solution to the numbers. That's my position. Sickness taking the weak, winter taking the weak, it's how our strong immune systems developed, and our social cohesion, our cultures and languages all come from that pressure of natural adversity - but we're not there anymore. Our heritage has been relinquished, the lines of descent have been polluted, and the top of the human food chain is now rife with corruption and inhuman intelligence. That's why we're facing this catastrophe. Selfishness unchecked led us right to this.
The confusion about eugenics is there. It's not people being removed from the gene pool that's wrong, it's human-centered values doing the removing, taking over from the greater wisdom of natural force; it's people doing the selecting according to their own limited flawed ideas of who should stay and who should go. This is easily spun into its being a suggestion that we all lay down in a forest somewhere and let bears eat us. I try not to let that kind of idiocy have more influence than it deserves.
Our struggle to survive has been so successful we're eating our home. That struggle was always against death, but it was never about conquest, never about some final triumph, it was only about holding our own.
This has been perverted to an anti-life stance where death is the enemy, always to be overcome. But death is how we got here. Death is why we have sex. Death is how improvements are made in species as they go along through time.
This is now heresy. It seems evil. An embrace of the darkness. And the scorn for the natural world that's so integral to the dominant voice comes right out of that. Because the natural world is opposed to what this is, what we've become, how we live - because how we live is unbalanced, horribly unbalanced.
The real conflict is between those who put themselves above that natural world, who've created this steadily more artificial increasingly poisonous controlled environment and all its ramifications - the virtual slavery of its economies, the coercive traps that make complicity with it the only choice for survival; and those who want health, healing, balance - to live as part of something healthy and real.
It isn't about how many of us there are, it's about how we live. It was always about that. And as long as we're here, as long as we're human, it always will be.
