“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.
“Life isn’t just about competition,” she said. “It’s also about cooperation. Interdependence. It always has been. The first cells depended on the cooperation of simpler bacteria. So did the first ecologies, the stromatolites. Now, our lives are so interdependent that they must, in the future, develop with a common purpose.”
“You’re just talking about globalization. What corporation is sponsoring you?”
“We’re back to Gaia and other Earth goddesses, aren’t we?”
Joan said, “Our global society is becoming so highly structured that it is becoming something akin to a holon: a single, composite entity. We have to learn to think of ourselves in that way. We have to build on the other half of our primate natures — the part that isn’t about competition and xenophobia. Primates cooperate a lot more than they compete. Chimps do; lemurs do; pithecines and erectus and Neandertals must have; we do. Human interdependence comes from our deepest history. Now, without anybody planning it, we have engulfed the biosphere, and we have to learn to manage it together.”
Alison Scott stood again. “What exactly is it you want, Joan?”
“A manifesto. A statement. A cosigned letter to the UN, from all of us. We have to give a lead, start something new. We have to start showing the path to a sustainable future. Who else but us?”
“Hoorah, we can save the world…”
“She’s right. Gaia will be not our mother, but our daughter.”
“What makes you think anybody with power will listen to a bunch of scientists? They never have before. This is pie in the sky…”
Evelyn Smith said, “They’ll listen if they are desperate enough.”
Alyce Sigurdardottir stood up. “Confucius said, ‘Those who say it cannot be done need to get out of the way of the people who are doing it.’ ” She raised her thin fist in a power salute. “We’re still primates — only more so. Right?”
Despite a few catcalls, Joan thought she saw a warmer response in the faces ranked before her. It’s going to work, she thought. It’s just a start, but it’s going to work. We can fix this. She stroked her belly.
In fact she was right; it might have worked.
The political and economic pressures might indeed have induced a receptivity in the global power brokers that hadn’t existed before. Joan Useb’s ideas could indeed have shown how to ally the interconnections offered by technology with older primate instincts of cooperation. And it might have gone beyond mere ecological management. After all no species before had had the potential to be linked globally, not in four billion years of life on Earth. Given time, Joan’s approach might have inspired a cognitive breakthrough as significant as the integration of Mother’s generation.
Humans had become smart enough to damage their planet. Now, just given a little more time, they might have become smart enough to save it.
Just a little more time.
But now the lights went out. There were explosions, like great footfalls. People screamed and ran.