“We are undoubtedly in the middle of a mass extinction. The specifics are heartbreaking. In my lifetime the last wild elephants have disappeared from the savannahs and forests. No more elephants! How will we ever be able to justify that to our grandchildren? In my lifetime, we have already lost a quarter of all the species extant in the year 2000. If we keep going at the current rate, we will destroy some two-thirds of the species extant in 1900 by the end of this century. The event’s severity already puts it up there with the previous big five of Earth’s battered history.
“Meanwhile human-induced climate change has already turned out to be much more severe than any but a few scientists predicted. Africa’s major coastal cities, from Cairo to Lagos, have been partially or completely flooded, displacing tens of millions of people. Bangladesh is almost totally inundated. If it wasn’t for billion-dollar flood defenses, even Florida would be an archipelago. And so on.
“The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the Earth.
“But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here.
“Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interactions of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness.
“I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this.
“So my question is — consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?”
She ground to a halt, impassioned, uncertain, standing on her coffee table.
Some people were nodding. Others were looking bored.
Alison Scott was the first to stand up, long legs unfolding languidly. Joan held her breath.
“You aren’t telling us anything new, Joan. The slow death of the biosphere is — ah — banal. A cliché. And I have to point out that what we have done is in fact inevitable. We are animals, we continue to behave like animals, and we always will.” There was a grumble of dissent. Scott plowed on, “Other animals have been known to eat themselves to extinction. In the twentieth century reindeer were introduced to a small island in the Bering Sea. An initial population of twenty-nine ballooned to six thousand in twenty years. But their food was slow-growing lichens, which had no time to recover from their intensive grazing.”
“But,” somebody shouted out, “reindeer don’t know anything about ecology.”
Scott said smoothly, “We’ve done this throughout history. The example of the Polynesian islands is well known. The Mideast city of Petra—”
As Joan had hoped, the group broke up into arguing clusters.
“…those people of the past who failed to manage their resources were guilty simply of failing to solve a difficult ecological problem…”
“We are already handling energy and mass flows on a scale that rivals natural processes. Now we have to use those powers consciously…”
“But the risks of tinkering with the fundamentals of an overcrowded planet…”
“All these technological measures would themselves cost energy, and so would actually add to the planetary burden of waste heat…”
“Our civilization has no common agenda. How would you propose to resolve the political, legal, ethical, cultural, and financial issues implicit in your proposals?…”
“I’ve been listening to this kind of technocratic horseshit all my adult life! What is this, a NASA funding pitch?”
“I say fuck the ecosystem. Who needs horny-backed toads anyhow? Let’s go for a drastic simplification. All you’ve got to do is soak up cee oh two, pump out oxygen, and regulate the heat. How hard can it be?”
“So, madam, you really want to live in Blade Runner world?”
Joan had to intervene again to pull the group back together. “We need a unity of will, a mobilization we haven’t seen before. But maybe we haven’t yet hit on the solution we should be reaching for.”
“Precisely,” said Alison Scott, and she stood up again. She rested her hands on the shining hair, blue and green, of her two daughters. “Big engineering is a defunct dream of the twentieth century. The solution is not out there; it will be found in us.”
More hostility greeted these pronouncements. “She means engineering babies, like her own two little freaks.”
“I’m talking about evolution,” Scott snapped. “That’s what happens to a species when the environment changes. Throughout our history we have proved to be a remarkably adaptable species.”
A woman stood up, sixtyish, black. Joan knew her. Evelyn Smith was one of the premier evolutionary biologists of her time. Smith said coldly, “Natural selection has not been operating on human populations for some tens of millennia. Claims that it has show a lack of understanding of the basic mechanism. We fend off the winnowing processes that drive selection: Our weapons have eliminated predators, agricultural development has beaten back starvation, and so on. But this will change if the imminent collapse occurs. In that case, selection will return. This is the subject of my paper in Session Three, incidentally.”
There were some protests.
“…what ‘imminent collapse’?”
“…for all its surface brilliance, our society shows symptoms of decline: growing inequality, declining returns from economic expansion, collapsing educational standards and intellectual achievement.”
“…yes, and spiritual death. Even we Americans pay only lip service to totems — the flag, the Constitution, democracy — while we surrender power over our lives to the corporations and comfort ourselves with mysticism and muddle. It’s happened before. The parallels with Rome especially are very clear…”
“…except that now we’re all joined up, all over the world. If we do collapse, there might be nothing much left to un-collapse out of.”
“…absurdly pessimistic. We’re resilient — we achieved great things before…”
“We dug out all the easy ores and burnt all the easy oil and coal; if we did fall, we’d have nothing to build from…”
“My point,” said Smith doggedly, “is that we may not have much time.”
These words, softly spoken, briefly silenced everybody, and Joan saw her opportunity.
She said dryly, “So I guess that if we don’t want to go back to the bad old days of being just another animal in the ecology, we need to get a hold of this mess. But I think there’s a way we can do that.” Absently stroking her belly, she smiled. “A new way. But a way we’ve known about all along. A primate way.”
And she began to outline her vision.
Human culture, Joan said, had been an adaptation to help people live through the wild climate swings of the Pleistocene. Now, in a savage millennial irony, that culture was feeding back to cause still more drastic environmental damage. Culture, which had once been so profoundly adaptive, had become maladaptive, and would have to change.