I woke up the other morning with a conversation going on in my head. This happens often and seems to be both a part of my creative process and my life of prayer. I never know who these conversations are with. Usually I am the one talking. The other mostly listens. But every now and then that voice will say something, invariably no more than a single sentence, and that is what I remember when I wake. That morning it was this: “Fifty years from now, when people look back on the literature of the past century, they will judge it primarily on the basis of one question: Did it prepare us for this?”
By now, a growing number of people have begun to realize what “this” refers to. In my case it was the predictions made in a small book of environmental writing I’d finished reading just the night before.
The End of the Wild was the last book by MIT professor Stephen M. Meyer. Published in 2006, the book takes as its premise the conviction that there is little we can do now to forestall the extinction of one half of our planet’s biodiversity by century’s end. Half of all plant and animal species will either disappear or be reduced to the status of “relic” or “ghost”—species populations too small or too scattered to renew themselves, and will therefore eventually go extinct.
Meyer points out that even the solutions we propose to stem that loss (conservation movements, preserves and sanctuaries, endangered species legislation) are themselves so profoundly out of sync with natural selection that they often only make matters worse. The problem is “human” selection and always has been.
Since the invention of the first stone tool, humanity has pounded the wild into a shape that fits its needs. Forests are transformed to fields. Swamps are drained. Arid landscapes are irrigated. Mountains are flattened and valleys filled. The bounty of nature is converted into commodities: timber, food, luxuries. Coexisting with nature has always meant taming it; consuming it. As the human population jumped into the billions, the rise of human selection as the dominant evolutionary force was inevitable, and so was the end of the wild.
It is a problem of such long standing, and is so deeply ingrained in every aspect of human endeavor, that to suppose we can counteract it reactively in a matter of mere decades is simply naive. There are just too many of us on the planet now... doing what we do.
For all that, The End of the Wild is not the usual doom and gloom we hear from environmental millennialists. The book is sobering, but, strangely, it does not invite despair. Rather, it seems to say, “This is the world you have made, a world in which everything is suited to your purpose. How do you like it?”
Honestly, the answer for many of us (especially those living in developed nations) is that we like it a great deal. But that confidence is starting to wobble and will soon begin to fall. In the final pages of The End of the Wild, Meyer asks a single question, the answer to which (if we choose to attempt one) is as devastating as they come: “What is the essence of our own morality if it fails to encompass most of life on Earth?”
This is, of course, a variation on the question I woke up with the other morning. Being a writer, my still small voice-of-conscience framed it in a somewhat more specific way: If what you are writing does not prepare us to deal with “this,” should you be writing it? But, then, that sort of question also applies to pretty much everything else in life: If what you are buying or consuming does not prepare us for “this,” should you be buying or consuming it? If what you are saying or thinking does not prepare us, should you be saying or thinking it? If your religion does not prepare us, should you believe it? The list goes on and on.
It’s only a matter of time before this truth sets in; fifty years at most. By then it will have become apparent that human selection is an endgame scenario: that one species having its way with the whole ecosystem reduces the world to a park. The only problem with that is, a park has no meaning in itself.
What purpose could there be in diversion when the rest of the world is gone?
Tags: earth, ecology, extinction, morality, religion, wilderness
Meyer blends factual evidence with expressive prowess in such a way that his ideas cannot fail to make an impression. He offers enlightening illustrations and presents his argument with extraordinary clarity.
The End of the Wild is a wake-up call. Marshaling evidence from the last ten years of research on the environment, Stephen Meyer argues that nothing—not national or international laws, global bioreserves, local sustainability schemes, or "wildlands"—will change the course that has been set. Like it or not, we can no longer talk about conserving nature, only managing what is left. The race to save biodiversity is over. So I think, this might worth my cash advance.
Perhaps we in America could start to do our part by switching from a religion that puts faith and hope in end times destruction of the world and suffering for everyone else to one that has a love for this world and seeks to preserve it.
Agreed, Jim. I tend to read the end times teachings of Christianity as a commentary on the limitations of anthropocentric thinking. When read this way, the so-called "fall of man" is the beginning of sacred (historical/anthropocentric) time, and Revelation predicts the end of that limited frame of reference.
If you check out WholeEarthGod.com, you'll find a lot of writing along these lines. My basic theory is that Revelation fortells the re-encounter of human beings with "Deep Time" (i.e., ecological, evolutionary time) during an era of radical climate change. This has happened to Homo sapiens many times already in the remote past, but we now have only a kind of mythic memory of it, preserved in such legends as the biblical story of the flood. If that makes sense...
It sounds intellectual, deep time and mythinc memory. It might make sense and might be valuable information, but we have more pressing needs. At the extreme of modern day America we have Zionism and people insisting on the importance of more war in the middle east, especially against Iran. Most of those not in the extreme at least put up with this because they are all on the same side, believing in the name of Jesus Christ and American concepts like rapture. I don't think we started our war in Iraq because of Hagee. We start the war for oil, but Hagee was important for guiding the extreme and helping bring others along. Now the most deeply Christian segment of the American population is the segment most supportive of torture.
We should first end religion that believes in destruction of the world and suffering for everyone else hopefully in our lifetime. After that, maybe we can think about what Revelation fortells. If we can't get Christians to open their eyes and see what they are causing, perhaps we can at least spread the word to some of their children.
Hi Clark,
I liked the possible future scenario that Redfield(?) dreams up in Celestine Prophesy with futuristic cities with little sprawl always built near grandiose old growth forests where people can walk right out of the city into the wild for soul nourishment. I experience that more out here in the west than I did out east. Maybe because there are more initiatives to reclaim wild lands in and around the populace areas. In a very short distance, one can exit the street or sidewalk and suddenly come face to face with silence in nature and quickly forget the city on the other side of the trees.
Thanks for the topic,
Matt
I read Redfield's book some years ago and remember being struck by the same idea. Sadly, I think his wish will be fulfilled on that score. It's already happened just outside of Tokyo. Not that the idea of a near-metropolis old growth forest is a bad idea. It's helpful (even essential) for just the reason you mentioned. It's just that it doesn't preserve the levels of biodiverity that allow such old growth trees to survive in the first place. Meyer, who died of cancer just after he finished writing The End of the Wild, offers a brilliant analysis of this problem if you ever have a chance to read the book. I got my copy used on Amazon for almost nothing.
Hi Clark,
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we will not get a chance to witness the slow extinction as chronicled in the "End of the Wild". The pot is already brewing on mankind's self-destruction. The race is already in full gear between the nations of the world to start MINING OPERATIONS on the many Near Earth Asteroids (or NEO's) which have been circling the earth for millions of years. These operations will be removing millions of metric tons of material from these NEO's and shuttling the extracted precious minerals back to earth.
From the point of celestial mechanics NEO mining poses an unimaginable horrific risk of total destruction for every form of life on this planet, caused by a collision between a man-modified NEO and the earth.
Mining any NEO changes its mass. Changing the NEO's mass changes its gravitational balance in its orbital field. This in turn chages its orbital direction and trajectory resulting in subtle but dramatic changes in the relationships in the orbital path alignments between members of the orbital field around the earth. All of this raises the potential NEO/Earth collision from some statistical probability to a dead on certainity.
Two questions....
(1) What, not who, do you think will survive if a Rhode Island size NEO hits the Earth?
(2) What are the chances that the average earth man will be able stop these greedy giants of industry from continuing their current headlong rush into industrializing outer space?
I wans't aware that the mining of NEOs (near earth objects) was a viable (i.e., profitable) option in the near future. I think a far more likely scenario for planetary degradation is the one offered by Meyer in his book, which is already well-advanced and requires no additional technological development to reach fruition. Moreover, it is a very common human impulse to turn away from a closer disaster to a more distant one. It's a way of trumping our own anxiety about a threat we know to be all too real.
For my part, I prefer the honest broken-heartedness of looking at the extinction of 1/2 of all plant and animal species on Earth by century's end (if not sooner) and realizing that I am contributing to it just by virtue of being one in 6.8 billion of a species that has now outgrown its box. Although I'll admit that the greedy giants of industry scenario (which lets me off the hook) has some appeal.
Spam!
What Mr. Strand exposes is the grave limitations to the existing intellectual/moral conception that has been derived from the religious ideas of tradition, whether theistic or non, and which are unable to provide humanity with the sustainable values necessary for the survival of the species. The only question is how to transcend those limitations? The means may already be circulating on the web and it's revolutionary stuff for those who can handle it: http://www.energon.org.uk
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