In the middle of Maps of Time

I have an eerie feeling as I read this. I'm two thirds through now, and I have the creepy feeling that he is headed in a direction to which my own thoughts generally run. In a way, I hope I am wrong.

I was at a party recently and a thirty-something was talking to his dad, a seventy-something. We were talking about the severity of the problems we have here on earth and whether they can be solved: global warming, population pressures, water shortages: all the usual suspects.

The father bemoaned, "It's the fault of my generation. We did nothing but make it worse."

I tried, out of fairness, to get him partially off the hook. I told him I thought our present crisis was ten thousand years in the making, not 50, not just the 250 since the beginnings of the industrial revolution. But that it began with that first time population pressure demanded a new solution, when all the easy niches for foraging/ hunter-gathering were taken up at the beginning of the Holocene. When humans had spread out widely throughout all the habitable continents of the planet, and there was no longer anywhere easy to move on to when resources began to be depleted.

A decisive choice was made (no doubt not seeming so at the time) over the next millenia. Settling down, sedentism, domestication of plants and animals, increasing the productivity of the earth by new means; altering the face of the planet by cutting massive forests and making the face of the planet, familiar as it is to us now, unrecognizable as it was before; losing the skills of the forager, and no way back without mass starvation and conflict as burgeoning populations could never be supported on the hunter-gatherer's productivity.

And in my mind, the new strategy of extracting more out of the earth, reshaping the planet to support more food and more humans led inexorably to the crisis we now face. 10,000 years in the making, but finally the end game. Finally we near the end of the strategy. We change the habitat of the earth in a way that may mortally threaten the way of living and producing we have pursued. We approach the depletion of the oil and other materials we have come to depend on. We heat the planet, unleashing unpredictable forces. We extract the available water from the renewable aquifers in many places, and drain the ancient nonrenewable ones. We fill the Pacific with inedible plastic detritus consumed by marine life, leading researchers to conclude, "Degraded plastic pieces outweigh surface zooplankton in the central North Pacific by a factor of 6-1. That means six pounds of plastic for every single pound of zooplankton." No need to belabor the point.

Could some imaginative genius in the early neolithic have used his powers to envision the ultimate destination of the strategy, 10,000 years hence? What wisdom would have been required to avoid this? Do humans have that capability, the ability for centuries-long planning rather than how to get through today and take care of the stomach and the children?

So here we are, with what options? Abject catastrophe with billions dead of flooded homes, malnutrition, degraded soil, lack of clean water and infectious disease? A spiritual transformation, in which humans tap into their Buddha-natures and behave wisely? A massive die-back, allowing a rump of humanity to survive? A technological solution, including renewable unlimited energy and a comprehensive plan to address the strong destructive forces unleashed? Manhattan Project-style effort to develop space colonies and possible terraform Mars and other satellites for human colonization, giving us a fresh start elsewhere, sadder but wiser, while we try to save the earth?

Perhaps I've got it completely wrong as to where Christian is headed. I hope he has a more sanguine view of the situation. But even so, it was worth getting this out there. I fear we are just smart enough to get ourselves into this mess. But it remains to be seen whether we are smart enough to get ourselves out of it. The problem is one I suspect we would have come to eventually, sooner or later, when we began the strategy of extracting more and more to feed more and more. And it is time to pay the piper.

Well ... I must say I was kind of down and you cheered me up!

But seriously folks ... a wonderful yet grim exposition, Stellar. But of course it doesn't have to be that way. Without giving away the conclusion of Maps of Time (no, the butler did not do it!) I can share that Christian posits that we can easily predict the distant future (supernovae, etc.) and perhaps somewhat reliably predict the near future, but it is impossible to realistically predict the period between these extremes. So anything goes.

It doesn't have to be post-apocalyptic, although it certainly could be. There is still hope. Growing up I thought a nuclear war that ended civilization was inevitable. Perhaps it still is, but who could have predicted that the Soviet Union would suddenly go out of business like K-Mart? So my near term perception of that worst case scenerio was irrevocably altered. So it's anyone's game.

I agree with you, my friend. A soft landing is still possible. But the stakes are as high as could be: the fate of humankind.

I just borrowed The World Without Us by Alan Weisman from the library. The first few chapters that I've read are certainly thought-provoking.

He doesn't go into why humans disappear, but he looks into what could happen after we were gone. I had never really thought about how much daily and even hourly upkeep is involved is maintaining a city.

He discusses what things may have been like before humans became dominant, and what sort of changes we have caused. It is interesting to see which of our actions he thinks will cause irreversible change to the earth, and which will just fade or crumble away.

Yeah I enjoyed his book, Sylvia. Apparently so did the History Channel too, since they've had for a while now this series based on it (I think it's a take on that title, something like "A World Without People" or something).

I love all the little things too that you just don't think about. For instance the idea that New York would just cave in on itself relatively quickly since every day someone has to turn on the pumps to make sure the subways don't fill with water; failing this they'd fill up and after a while the iron beams holding up the city would just rust through and snap... haha

The online multimedia offering on The World Without Us:

http://www.worldwithoutus.com/multimedia.html

stellar, you are right about the longevity of the problem. Sing Chew has written a two volume book called World Ecological Degradation. In it he tabulates a whole pile of research data from all kinds of unrelated studies - lake bed saamples, palaeobotany, ice cores, water sediment analysis etc - to illustrate a startling argument that ever since 3000 BC, periods of generalised 'civilisational' crisis - what he calls Dark Ages - have been associated with human caused climate and environmental change. Technological revolutions - eg Bronze Age, Iron Age, Feudal High Farming, Industrial Revolution, were he suggests technological fixes to get out of human caused collapses. It pains a rather frightening image of exactly how fragile the environment is when say neolithic forest clearances by maybe a few undred thousand people in lower mesopotamia can leave palaeoclimatic traces in Scandanavia.

Thank you cedric -- that is indeed a frightening last thought. I would much prefer to be entirely wrong.

simple- too many people, and of that huge number are large minority are living too high on the hog. i think i read once that more people have been born since 1900 than were born in the previous 15000 years. i dont think the pope read that tho.
do we have less people or live like primitives? or will our ingenuity save us?

There is an illuminating set of pie charts in Maps of Time (Figure 8.1) on this, taken from Livi-bacci, A Concise History of World Population

It shows that 68% of all humans who have ever lived did so between 10,000 B.P. and 250 BP. 20% have lived in the last 250 years. 12% lived before the agrarian era.

That is mind boggling.

I thought so too. I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

There is another chart along with it that is also interesting in its own right.

It shows the number of years lived for each era, the Paleolithic, the Agrarian, and the Modern/industrial, ie the last 250 years.

The results:
Paleolithic 9%
Agrarian 62%
Modern 29%

The differences from the first set of numbers stem from the increase in life expectancies in the modern era.

Yeah these charts in Maps if Time are extremely provocative. The first time I ebcountered these specific charts I remember just staring at them for quite a few minutes, letting it sink in.

When I finish the Teach Co. course, I may re-read the book, but I know if nothing else I'll look at the charts again.

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I just finished reading a nineteen-century post-apocalyptic novel called "The Purple Cloud." It was entertaining enough, but plainly was written by a guy who had no clue about how food was produced, preserved, and prepared. The last-man-on-earth protagonist had the same amount of leisure time as would an upper-class English gentleman, and food just seemed to materialize on his table. For twenty years.

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