Posted on 01/12/2005 10:50:54 AM PST by mikeharris65
Scientists think that our species, Homo sapiens, emerged about 100,000 years ago somewhere in Africa. Imagine that back at the time, scientists in another galaxy had been searching the cosmos for life and discovered our solar system and Earth. So they park their spaceship above the Rift Valley in Africa and gaze at the vast expanse of lush forests, plains teeming with wildebeest, zebras, elephants and gazelles and rivers filled with hippos, crocs and flamingoes.
Those extragalactic scientists would no doubt notice small family groups of a two-legged, upright, furless ape but I doubt that anyone would point to them and say, "Watch that one. That's the creature of destiny!" After all, we weren't that impressive in size, speed, sensory acuity, strength or beauty.
But if they watched our behaviour, they would realize that our advantage wasn't visible from the outside. We seemed to be acting deliberately - preparing shelter, seeking food, avoiding predators. We made up for our physical deficits with the two-kilogram organ locked in our skulls.
The human brain was the key to our survival. It endowed us with curiosity, inventiveness and a massive memory. The French Nobel laureate, Francois Jacob, says the human brain has an inbuilt need for order. We find chaos frightening and there is an innate tendency to try to organize our observations and speculations so it all makes sense. We recognized patterns, cycles and rhythms in nature - day and night, seasons, tides, lunar cycles, movement of stars, animal migration, plant succession - and that knowledge gave us some predictive capacity that was useful.
The human brain invented an amazing concept - a future. Because we had a notion of future, we (I believe uniquely among all animals) recognized that we could deliberately choose a path into the future. We understood causal relations ("If I do this, this will happen, if I don't do that, something else might occur.") and deliberately chose, from a number of options, the kind of future we were heading for. And it worked. It got us to where we are.
All people since the earliest times integrated their observations, speculations, insights, superstitions into worldviews, the sum total of their culture, in which nothing existed in isolation or apart - everything was connected to everything else. In such a world, everything we do has repercussions and therefore, every act carries responsibilities lest order be disrupted.
Even today, traditional and aboriginal people constantly remind us who they are and where they belong on this earth. They tell their stories, sing their songs and offer their prayers to thank their Creator for nature's generosity and abundance, acknowledge they are part of nature and therefore have responsibilities, and promise to act properly to keep everything in order. That's just the way it has always been.
Until now. Today, most of us live in a shattered world. A world of disconnected bits and pieces, so it is no longer easy to recognize our place. And when we can't see the connections, we fail to recognize causal relationships and therefore feel no responsibility.
When we shop at GAP, NIKE or ROOTS, we don't usually ask where the cotton, wool, rubber or leather came from, the working conditions and pay of the workers who harvested the raw materials and whether pesticides and other pollutants were used. We just want a garment to wear.
Similarly, upon purchase of an IBM computer, SONY television or GM car, we don't wonder about the dozens of different metals in the components or the consequences of mining, manufacturing, transporting and using the product. We just want to watch TV or get around.
In the middle of winter, we seldom wonder as we buy fresh papayas, lettuce or bananas where they were grown or how they got here. Yet every purchase and every use of a purchase has consequences that reverberate around the world. We just aren't seeing them. And that's the problem.
Time to reinvent our future (Part II)
Last time, I suggested that human beings have almost always lived within a worldview in which everything is interconnected and where we knew we had responsibilities to act in certain ways to ensure nature's generosity and abundance would continue. But suddenly in the past century we've become blind to those interconnections and therefore have lost our sense of responsibility - and now it's putting our future at risk.
So how have we come to this state? I believe it has been the sudden confluence of a number of factors that have had the collective effect of shattering the world we perceive.
The most obvious factor is population. Human numbers have exploded in the past century, rising from a billion and a half people in 1900 to more than six billion by 2000. When populations grow so rapidly, it means the average age declines. Most people on Earth today were born after 1950. They have lived their entire lives in an absolutely unprecedented and totally unsustainable period of growth and change. But because that is all they've ever known, it seems the norm and must be maintained.
Likewise, most scientists who have ever lived are alive and practicing today. Scientists focus on a part of nature, separate that part, control everything impinging on it and measure everything within it, thereby acquiring insights into that part of nature. But in the process of focusing, we lose sight of the context - the rhythms, patterns and cycles - within which that fragment exists and functions. So we fragment the whole into isolated bits and pieces.
Ideas from science are applied as technology, which can be extremely powerful, but furthers the disconnect between us and our world and fosters the illusion that it is technology and not nature that provides us with what we need to survive. As an unexpected side-effect, rather than freeing us from work and responsibility to give more leisure, it has sped up time, allowing us to jam more and more things to do into a shorter period and rewarding us with a river of new toys and stuff, instead of free time to enjoy life.
In my experience in television, the rapid growth in available channels has resulted in shorter, more sensational reports that contain less and less information or context and more and more factoids or visual images. When a radio or TV announcer says, "And now for an in-depth report," it may be two minutes long. So information, as typified by the news, is increasingly chopped into short soundbites that fail to include the context, history, or suggestions as to what can be done, thereby again shattering the world we are seeing.
The twentieth century also brought about a stunning shift in the way humans live. In 1900, most people lived in rural villages - we were an agrarian species. Only a hundred years later, most of us live in large cities as urbanites. This transformation has severed our connection with nature, leading us to assume that the "economy" is the source of everything, as if it exists independent of the world around us.
Urban children today don't recognize that wieners and hamburgers are the muscles of an animal. They don't know where water and electricity comes from or where the toilet flushes to or garbage ends up. Too often, urban children are warned not to touch something because "it might bite" or "it's dirty" or simply "Yuk. That's disgusting." We teach our children to fear nature and fail to make connections with the natural world.
We in developed countries are lucky because most of us don't have to worry about day-to-day survival. With 80 per cent of us in cities, our world is largely of concrete and steel, and all the amenities we could ever want are at our disposal 24 hours a day. The goods we need come in on trucks and our wastes go out on trucks or through pipes. We don't have to think about these things.
Or do we? We are now paying the price for our disconnect from the natural world. Global warming, species extinction and a gradual erosion of our quality of life are all symptoms of the problem. But there is a way out. We can reinvent our future and choose a new path to sustainability.
Read this over Christmas, thought it was interesting. David Suzuki kicks a$$
I shall now sit back and watch evolution take it's course.
Kumbaya.
Troll. I'll bet my coveted FR membership on it.
Nice knowing you Mike. Goodbye til next sign-up.
David Suzuki is a leftist who produces programs for the left wing Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Relax, dude. I've been here and well behaved so far.
I was just thinking how boring things were today.
Thanks for spicing things up...
Oh, my. You're about to get it, and how. I forsee lightning strikes, angry cats and kittens, and more in your future. See what seeing the future can do?
That's a grand sweeping statement if I ever heard one. Got any proof?
I've often felt the same way--we are "evolving" ourselves into oblivion. We hardly need to think anymore--why figure out how something works, or how to build something when we can turn on the TV or log onto the Internets? We have gotten dumber, I guess you could say. Think of Cro-Magnon man, having to make everything himself in order to function; figuring out that bark strapped to the bottom of his feet gave them protection, figuring out that two stones smashed together could produce a spark which would make fire, etc etc. We don't have to worry about any of that--and it's only getting more advanced...
Well, apparently, you've been here since...let's see...today. You post some liberal apology for our consumption. Sorry, but it isn't going to wash.
Or, perhaps, you've been here under another name, now sent to oblivion. That seems more likely.
THANK you. Finally SOMEone has an engaging comment other than "he's a blahh blah... liberal... blahh blah... leftist..."
I'm going to think about that one while I go and graba slice of pizza. Thanks, jcb8199 for not politiking this thing to death.
I'm relaxed.
You have been here since today. And you are admitting that you will NOT be well behaved in the future with the "so far" qualifier.
Ta Ta
LOL, no... I have this heterosexual fixation on him though, I guess you could say.
He was much hated, but I thought he was pretty good.
"So far" does not imply that I "will be" in the future.
Hope you weren't planning on logging back in when you get back. Enjoy the pizza - how many teats were painfully squeezed for that cheese?
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