Some of these massive cities will be in the so‐called developed countries. They will be well planned, with shopping malls, information booths, and property taxes. But the real growth isn’t happening in those parts of the world. It’s happening in the so‐called developing world—parts of Asia, South America, the Middle East, and Africa. Many of these sprawling cities will be mainly shantytowns, self‐built with poor sanitation, little infrastructure, and barely any social support services. This massive growth in the size and density of human populations across Earth presents enormous challenges. It demands that we tackle the crisis in natural resources with urgency. But it demands too that we tackle the crisis in human resources and that we think differently about the relationships between these two. All of this points to a powerful need for new ways of thinking—and new metaphors about human communities and how they flourish or decay.
For more than three hundred years Western thought has been dominated by the images of industrialism and the scientific method. It’s time to change metaphors. We have to move beyond linear, mechanistic metaphors to more organic metaphors of human growth and development.
A living organism, like a plant, is complex and dynamic. Each of its internal processes affects and depends on the others in sustaining the vitality of the whole organism. This is also true of the habitats in which we live. Most living things can only flourish in certain types of environment, and the relationships between them are often highly specialized. Healthy, successful plants take the nutrients they need from their environment. At the same time, though, their presence helps to sustain the environment on which they depend. There are exceptions, like the Leyland cypresses that just seem to take over everything in their path, but you get the idea. The same is true of all creatures and animals, including us.
Farmers base their livelihoods on raising crops. But farmers do not make plants grow. They don’t attach the roots, glue on the petals, or color the fruit. The plant grows itself. Farmers and gardeners provide the conditions for growth. Good farmers know what those conditions are, and bad ones don’t. Understanding the dynamic elements of human growth is as essential to sustaining human cultures into the future as the need to understand the ecosystems of the natural world on which we ultimately depend.
Aiming High
A few hundred miles away from my home in Los Angeles is Death Valley, one of the hottest, driest places on earth. Not much grows in Death Valley, hence the name. The reason is that it doesn’t rain very much there—about two inches a year on average. However, in the winter of 2004–5, something remarkable happened. More than seven inches of rain fell on Death Valley, something that had not happened for generations. Then in the spring of 2005, something even more remarkable happened. Spring flowers covered the entire floor of Death Valley. Photographers, botanists, and just plain tourists traveled across America to see this remarkable sight, something they might never see again in their lifetimes. Death Valley was alive with fresh, vibrant growth. At the end of the spring, the flowers died away and slipped again beneath the hot desert sand, waiting for the next rains, whenever they would come.
What this proved, of course, was that Death Valley wasn’t dead at all. It was asleep. It was simply waiting for the conditions of growth. When the conditions came, life returned to the heart of Death Valley.
Human beings and human communities are the same. We need the right conditions for growth, in our schools, businesses, and communities, and in our individual lives. If the conditions are right, people grow in synergy with the people around them and the environments they create. If the conditions are poor, people protect themselves and their anxieties from neighbors and the world. Some of the elements of our own growth are inside us. They include the need to develop our unique natural aptitudes and personal passions. Finding and nurturing them is the surest way to ensure our growth and fulfillment as individuals.
If we discover the Element in ourselves and encourage others to find theirs, the opportunities for growth are infinite. If we fail to do that, we may get by, but our lives will be duller as a result. This is not just a West Coast, California argument, even though I do live there now. I believed this in the damp, cold days of December in England, when these thoughts can be harder to come by. This is not a new view. It’s an ancient view of the need for balance and fulfillment in our lives and for synergies with the lives and aspirations other people. It’s an idea that is easily lost in our current forms of existence.
The crises in the worlds of nature and of human resources are connected. Jonas Salk was the pioneering scientist who developed the Salk polio vaccine. As somebody who contracted polio in the 1950s, I feel some affinity with his life’s passion. Later in his life, Salk made a provocative observation, one that addresses the two forms of climate crisis. “It’s interesting to reflect,” he said, “that if all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all other forms of life would end.” He understood, as Rachel Carson did, that the insects we spend so much effort trying to eradicate are essential threads in the intricate web of life on Earth. “But,” Salk went on, “if all human beings were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all other forms of life would flourish.”
What he meant is that we have now become the problem. Our extraordinary capacity for imagination has given rise to the most far‐reaching examples of human achievement and has taken us from caves to cities and from marshes to the moon. But there is a danger now that our imaginations may be failing us. We have seen far, but not far enough. We still think too narrowly and too closely about ourselves as individuals and as a species and too little about the consequences of our actions. To make the best of our time together on this small and crowded planet, we have to develop—consciously and rigorously—our powers of imagination and creativity within a different framework of human purpose. Michelangelo once said, “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” For all our futures, we need to aim high and be determined to succeed.
To do that each of us individually and all of us together need to discover the Element.
Notes
Chapter One: The Element
GILLIAN LYNNE: All material in this segment came from an original interview for this book.
MATT GROENING: All material in this segment came from an original interview for this book.
PAUL SAMUELSON: Paul Samuelson, “How I Became an Economist,” http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/articles/samuelson-2/index.html.