“We are not living in normal times, and every American knows it.” —Daniel Sherrell writing in The Guardian
Paul and Anne Ehrlich wrote a fascinating new article; both were curious about what normality is after the arrival of COVID-19. As we all know, the lockdowns and closures of bars, restaurants, economic activity, and social gatherings led to a crisis that we still reel from.
The authors argue that it is a failure of the educational system that has not linked homo sapiens' history with our current situation that has ushered in the climate crisis (that includes pandemics) we have unleashed on ourselves and all other species on earth.
Ehrlich notes our bemoaning of the rapidity of disruption to our lives and the real possibility that we might not survive the collapse that is happening with losses to agriculture, freshwater, and energy. They write that our view of normality is "possible because everyday thinking about human history largely ignores its first 300,000 years and does not recognize how extremely abnormal the last few centuries have been, roughly just one-thousandth of the history of physically modern Homo sapiens."
It is the result of “genetics and cultural evolution" over the millennia which explains our predicament and our difficulty in dealing with the repercussions of our collective decisions that have brought us to the situation that none of us ever had wanted to face.
Before modern humans arrived, we did not have agriculture; we were hunter-gatherers for 300,000 years. If we include our ancestors who first stood on two feet to peer over the grasslands for the first time, history can be measured in millions of years.
The world we have lived in over the past ten thousand years was never ordinary, only a tiny window of time where the ancestors could invent agriculture and bring about the swelling populations that built massive human settlements and devoured nature's balance. It was only when the climate stabilized and was not a threat that civilization, as we know it today, was able to begin.
Mismatches and culture gaps are foundational to civilization's grave present situation. Even the most casual consideration of human history brings to light dramatic mismatches (Ehrlich and Blumstein 2018) that could not have occurred in prehistoric normal times. For instance, all organisms have evolved ways of detecting changes in their environments and, if possible, reacting when required in defensive ways to remain in conditions conducive to their survival and reproduction. For most mammals, the important environmental changes they need to detect tend to be immediate or sudden. Survival and reproduction may depend on perceiving the appearance of a predator nearby or a sudden change in the physical environment such as a rockslide or a flash flood. Most mammals have evolved nervous systems that can detect a leopard's rush, the approach of a possible mate or a falling branch, do extremely rapid calculations of the likely consequences, and send signals to the appropriate organs to take life-saving actions. Our primate ancestors, being mammals, also evolved to be very good at sensing sudden danger and ducking or running.
Your nervous system evolved proprioceptors that detect the head motions and tell your brain how your eyes are moving—and your brain automatically compensates and keeps its image of the background steady, as it does all the time as you go through your normal activities. Bottom line: We're good at seeing things change in front of a constant background, and we've actually evolved to hold the background constant to improve the accuracy of our own movements and our ability to detect other movements. Add in habituation (as to warnings about climate disruption) and your perceptual system in the modern world is mismatched with the new need to detect and respond to gradually increasing existential threats in our environmental background.
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There were plenty of reasons for australopithecines to evolve the ability to spot stalking predators but no reason at all to focus on gradual changes in the climate (as opposed to reacting to changing weather). Our distant ancestors weren't causing climate disruption; if they had been, they couldn't have done anything to correct it. Indeed, for much of our history, they didn't have the language with syntax to even discuss it. The same can be said for the vast sweep of our normal evolutionary history. The utility of detecting changes in the environmental background (as opposed to immediate environments) came along primarily with the agricultural and industrial revolutions, which produced both the technological means for creating massive environmental changes, as well as detecting any gradual ones among them, communicating widely about them, and taking steps to deal with them. In the new abnormal, humanity started to cause extreme but initially scattered and gradual deleterious changes in the ecological theatre in which the human drama was being performed. Homo sapiens has yet to take significant steps to save the structure.
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Even when confronted by the lethal coronavirus epidemic, massive wildfires, extreme and erratic weather, disappearances of wildlife, environmental refugee flows, and other signs of ecological collapse, few people today recognize the likely shallow temporal depth of the new abnormal. Faith in a future of more seems still unshaken. The widespread assumption remains that everything from automobile numbers and passenger flights to corporate earnings, consumer demand, automation, and access to boundless energy (shifting to mostly “renewable”) will go on expanding indefinitely. And almost everyone assumes that there will always be technological solutions for escalating environmental risks, material constraints, and a wide range of diseases, thanks perhaps to artificial intelligence, whose possible contributions and attendant risks remain difficult to sort out (Haenlein and Kaplan 2019).
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The recent great acceleration of change in the human situation and scale of activities took place in a historic three-century period, starting around 1750 with industrialization (Steffen and Saez 2015). In that blink of an eye in geological time, our ancestors have essentially completed the postagricultural replacement of the 300-millennia-old normal human situation of living in small, mobile groups. Along with creating mismatches and culture gaps, the global population expanded some dozen-fold in numbers in those three centuries. It has benefited from a one-time bonanza of natural resources (Ehrlich 1989, Price 1995), especially the stored solar energy equivalent of some 10,000 hours of human labor that can be extracted from each barrel of oil (Love 2008, Mouhot 2011). People have used that energy to drastically modify every major ecosystem from the oceans to the forests to the ice caps, disrupt the climate of the planet, and create novel poisons, spreading them from pole to pole. Industrializing people changed their own patterns of activity, including vital sleep times (Walker 2017) using gas and then electric lights, and greatly altered their eating habits and, therefore, jaw structures (Kahn et al. 2020). Modern civilization has also fouled the air so that it often becomes lethal to breathe (Smith 2000), wiped out most other large animals and replaced them with more people and gigantic populations of a few domesticated species, and depleted much of the planet's soils, underground freshwater stores, and high-grade mineral resources. Humanity has even developed and used weapons with the potential to exterminate everyone and managed to kill in a single war more than five times the estimated number of people that existed ten millennia ago when our species began switching from normal hunting and gathering to abnormal agriculture and launched an acceleration of population growth.
We might trace that transformation's beginning to the Mesolithic, about 12,000 years ago, when various technological and trade arrangements (Graeber and Wengrow 2021) and increasing sedentism and sociopolitical complexity evolved (Newell and Constandse-Westermann 1984, Reiter 2012, Pearl 2021). Humanity has more recently so disrupted normality that geologists describe its results as a new era in Earth history, the Anthropocene. A leading economist chimed in: “The Anthropocene can be read as being the era when the demand humanity makes on the biosphere's goods and services—humanity's ‘ecological footprint’—vastly exceeds its ability to supply it on a sustainable basis” (Dasgupta et al. 2021). Today, since the acceleration, it's quite ordinary for the United States to spend nearly $800 billion annually to have a military that can try to dominate other nuclear powers, ignoring most existential threats, and making one, a world-ending nuclear war, more likely (Kristensen et al. 2017, Baum et al. 2018, Redfern et al. 2021), something that would have been impossible in a normal human society. Humanity created the Anthropocene through cultural evolution; absent extreme and obvious selection pressures, a dozen or so—or even a hundred—generations is insufficient time to adapt genetically to the dramatically new human-made environments. Homo sapiens has therefore brought Stone Age genomes into a Facebook world, creating the great genome–environment mismatches that plague civilization.
There is so much more at the link provided in the link above and this one from Stanford University.
You can’t be called a doomer, terrorist, or alarmist if the news is terrorizing and alarming.
