the albatross around our necks

The tone of global climate change denial which we encounter so often these days is inevitably characterized by an intense desperation which gives it away. The strident insistence that we continue pursuing the predatory capitalism and environmental cannibalism which have led us into a deadly confrontation with the natural world flies in the face of the most painfully obvious and easily observable facts. However, it probably doesn't matter much in the long run, since in some ways climate change is the least of our problems.

Like the protagonist of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the human race today has an albatross around its neck. Our short-sighted and prodigal exploitation of the resources which make up the earth's "carrying capacity" has now combined with massive overpopulation (world population is now just a couple ticks short of seven billion) to overwhelm the natural world on which we all depend. Long-term prospects for the survival of the human race now look bleak; short-term prospects aren't that much better.

I was first alerted to this situation about seven years ago when I read the introduction to Noam Chomsky's 2003 book, "Hegemony or Survival." In it he quotes the renowned biologist Ernst Mayr, who now believes "that higher intelligence may not be favored by selection. The history of life on Earth, (Mayr) concluded, refutes the claim that 'it is better to be smart than to be stupid,' at least judging by biological success: beetles and bacteria, for example, are far more successful than primates in these terms, and that is generally true of creatures that fill a specific niche or can undergo rapid genetic change. He also made the rather somber observation that 'the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years.'"

Chomsky adds, "We are entering a period of human life that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid -- whether there is intelligent life on earth, in some sense of 'intelligence' that might be admired by a sensible extraterrestrial observer, could one exist. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of 'biological error,' using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else. The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and our hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might conclude that they have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well."

Looking at Christ Jordan's photographs of dead baby albatrosses, taken this year on Midway Atoll in the North Pacific, serves as an analog of the impact of human activity on the natural world in modern times. The parents of these chicks mistook bright fragments of plastic they saw floating in the water for food, with disastrous results. These are unintended consequences, of course, as are the warming of the oceans, the melting of the polar ice caps, the degradation of the breathable atmosphere with pesticides and defoliants, the fouling of the water table with industrial contaminants...the list goes on and on. The fact that they're unintended doesn't make them any less real or lethal, however.

These circumstances were never described better or more bluntly than by the great Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, who bears little sympathy for the self-inflicted environmental predicament in which modern humans now find themselves. "Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature," Jung wrote in 1950, "and has populated it with monstrous machines. The latter are so indubitably useful and so much needed that we cannot see even a possibility of getting rid of them or of our odious subservience to them. Man is bound to follow the exploits of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, he cannot help admitting that his genius shows an uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide."*

I've never regretted my decision to father a child, but I'm glad she's decided not to have children. One day soon we'll be gone, but the earth will survive, as a planet of weeds.

*"Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams," Ch. 7, p. 140.