{"id":128,"date":"2021-03-03T14:35:55","date_gmt":"2021-03-03T14:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dummy.xtemos.com\/woodmart-elementor\/?p=128"},"modified":"2022-09-09T18:40:52","modified_gmt":"2022-09-09T08:40:52","slug":"rethinking-the-human","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2021\/03\/03\/rethinking-the-human\/","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking the human: On being accountable in the Anthropocene"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a quiet corner of my library is a book\u00a0called\u00a0Man and the Ecosphere<\/i>. It’s a set of essays from Scientific American<\/i>, edited by Paul R. Ehrlich, John P.\u00a0Holdren\u00a0and Richard W. Holm.\u00a0I purchased\u00a0it\u00a0in January 1976, a year after leaving secondary school and six months after abandoning law school to rethink who I was as a human being and what I really believed.\u00a0I have kept it as the decades passed, because the questions it raised have not lost their relevance. Indeed, they have become sharper and more important\u00a0in the present century.<\/p>\n

Some of you\u00a0will see the name Paul Ehrlich and instantly react\u00a0for or against, such was the controversy\u00a0he\u00a0and\u00a0his partner Anne\u00a0stirred up in 1968\u00a0when they co-authored\u00a0The Population Bomb<\/i>, which included\u00a0dire predictions\u00a0of imminent and\u00a0apocalyptic ecological catastrophe.\u00a0Huge famines would claim the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the 1980s\u00a0they declared; and\u00a0industrial civilization would unravel\u00a0as key natural resources, including oil,\u00a0were exhausted.<\/p>\n

There are those who insist the\u00a0Ehrlichs\u00a0were\u00a0right\u00a0\u2013\u00a0just half a century or so out in\u00a0their\u00a0timing. Others insist that\u00a0they\u00a0were\u00a0fundamentally mistaken and that scientific and technological civilization is triumphing in ways\u00a0they\u00a0entirely failed to anticipate.\u00a0Pro or con, this is the debate of our era.<\/p>\n

It’s not my intention to dwell on the Ehrlichs here. Even in the mid-1070s I read, along with Man and the Ecosphere<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0The Population Bomb<\/i>, Herman Kahn’s The Next 200 Years<\/i>, published in 1976 and acquired by yours truly in July 1978. Kahn \u2013 one of the models for the dark character Doctor Strangelove, in Stanley Kubrick’s classic early 1960s film about nuclear apocalypse \u2013 argued that humankind had made a \u2018Faustian bargain\u2019 in seeking to dominate the biosphere rather than be subject to it in ignorance and poverty. Keep going, he urged: the future can be dazzling beyond the imagining of the pessimists.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0I picked up\u00a0Man and the Ecosphere<\/i>\u00a0again recently and found myself reflecting on the ethical question: how accountable am I for the ecological footprint I personally make\u00a0and what is the state of the debate?\u00a0Ethicist Peter Singer\u00a0likes to urge us to ponder such questions. Like Ehrlich, of course,\u00a0Singer is roundly assailed by various\u00a0critics. But let that pass. It is surely a perfectly good ethical question\u00a0to ask.<\/p>\n

It keeps bugging me because, even though \u2013 by the current standards of our ‘consumer society’ \u2013 I live rather modestly and responsibly it troubles me that every week I accumulate a ‘recycle’ bin full of plastic bottles, cardboard, paper bags, cardboard, tin or aluminium containers, discarded newspapers and magazines and other detritus, as well as a large black plastic bag of wet garbage and waste.<\/p>\n

This troubles me, because I don’t have any clarity about the effectiveness of hard waste recycling; I don’t have a garden in which I can recycle food waste compost; and I am aware that there are billions of other human beings generating waste at least as fast and relentlessly as I do. Given that the word ‘guilt’ etymologically stems from words for ‘debt’, I would say I suffer from a certain guilt complex on account of the ‘debt’ I run up every day; week in, week out, to the material environment and to future generations.<\/p>\n

I would say I suffer from a certain guilt complex on account of the ‘debt’ I run up every day; week in, week out, to the material environment and to future generations.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How so? I use things that consume raw materials that cannot be replaced. I do so prodigally, by any pre-consumerist standard and the net cost accounting is not something I can reasonably undertake. Are you with me? All I can do is live as sensibly as possible within the confines of a social and economic system that is churning through raw materials like there is no tomorrow. I am disquieted by that realisation.<\/p>\n

Man and the Ecosphere<\/i> has four sections: The Ecosphere and Pre-Industrial Man; Limits Rarely Perceived; The Dimensions of Intervention; and On Managezment and Buying Time. Distributed across those sections are 27 specialist essays. I won’t list them. But the one most immediately relevant to my point about debt is an essay by Harrison Brown called ‘Human Materials Production as a Process in the Biosphere\u2019. It had originally been published in Scientific American<\/i>\u00a0in September 1970. I underscored many, many\u00a0lines, reading it\u00a0in 1976. I refer to it here, in passing, because of its topical relevance to my immediate, everyday concern.<\/p>\n

Brown began by making the straightforward point that,\u00a0for millions of years,\u00a0our\u00a0hominin\u00a0ancestors lived sustainably, using organic materials that were biodegradable and plentiful; as well as inorganic ones, most notably stone, which were plentiful and non-polluting. Their populations, throughout that time,\u00a0were\u00a0thin on the ground. Neither in per capita nor in aggregate did they have cause to feel the kind of guilt I confess to suffering.<\/p>\n

From the Neolithic onwards,\u00a0though,\u00a0we became\u00a0more and more inventive,\u00a0our numbers grew and our impact on the environment\u00a0grew\u00a0with it.\u00a0Although there were various cases of crisis or collapse due to human errors in environmental stewardship, the world for millennia seemed vast and resources inexhaustible. Then came the Industrial Revolution.<\/p>\n

Brown referred chiefly to the huge increase in\u00a0the human consumption of\u00a0metals\u00a0and\u00a0fossil fuels\u00a0\u00a0(as well as\u00a0the use of plastics and paper products\u00a0in the modern world): both the depletions caused by such use and\u00a0the pollutants generated by our extraction, refinement and use of\u00a0ores,\u00a0hydrocarbons\u00a0and wood. His tone was not, like that of Ehrlich, quite apocalyptic. It was cautionary.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

He concluded on a sober note:\u00a0 “Man has it in his power technologically to maintain a high level of industrial civilization, to eliminate deprivation and hunger and to control his environment for many millenniums. His main danger is that he will not learn enough quickly enough and that he will not take\u00a0adequate measures in time to forestall situations that will be very unpleasant indeed.”
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given that he was writing in 1970, he broadly anticipated,\u00a0but did not predict the impressive gains we have made since then.<\/p>\n

We have lived through half a century of unprecedented economic growth and increased general prosperity, while achieving notable efficiency gains in how we use energy and raw materials \u2013 as well as in how we accumulate, sort and share information. This is consistent with his general premise that we have the basic ability to handle the challenges facing us. Brown himself died in 1986, so he didn’t live to see the most impressive of these many gains.<\/p>\n

Would he have felt reassured or gravely troubled by where we are now? I’m not sure, but I wonder whether I exhibit sufficient responsibility and restraint in my personal use of energy and materials. There is no doubt that as I have grown older I have consumed more, not less, in material terms. The range and affordability of material goods available to me has expanded in astonishing ways all my life. The world around me has ‘boomed’.<\/p>\n

The range and affordability of material goods available to me has expanded in astonishing ways all my life. The world around me has ‘boomed’.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Western societies\u00a0are overloaded with affluence.\u00a0Predictions that there would be\u00a015\u00a0billion people on Earth\u00a0by 2050 have been scaled back, but there are\u00a0twice as many\u00a0of us\u00a0as when\u00a0the\u00a0Ehrlichs\u00a0predicted\u00a0imminent catastrophe\u00a050\u00a0years ago. Moreover, per capita consumption, around the world,\u00a0has been going ahead by leaps and bounds in\u00a0that time.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s economic ‘miracle’ since 1980 is only the most egregious instance of the explosion of per capita materials consumption. With almost 1.5 billion people, it has seen its economy grow at supercharged rates for 30 or 40 years. It now has more people living at the \u2018American\u2019 standard of income and consumption than does the United States itself. It has another billion aspiring to such standards. They hanker after cars, white goods, electricity, more meat, wine, vegetables, plastic containers, laptops and mobile phones. All of Asia is hot on their tail.<\/p>\n

Even attempting to keep one\u2019s sense of proportion or balance in the midst\u00a0of this is a serious challenge:\u00a0not\u00a0only\u00a0ethically, but\u00a0even\u00a0intellectually. The sheer quantity of data needed to weigh things up, the amount of reading and the skills in thinking demanded by the task are formidable. What would even constitute a \u2018responsible\u2019 effort in this regard? I don\u2019t have an answer to that question and that\u00a0is what\u00a0troubles me\u00a0most persistently.<\/p>\n

Equally, it troubles me that social media allow all manner of irresponsible rhetoric on the subject to go viral and to cloud the picture rather than clear the air.\u00a0There are\u00a0relentless doomsayers and\u00a0arrogant techno-optimists. There are those who\u00a0claim\u00a0that the End Times are due soon and we should, therefore,\u00a0us<\/i>e<\/i>\u00a0up<\/i> the rest of the world’s resources rather than ‘waste’ them. They won’t be required after the ‘rapture’, after all!<\/p>\n

Then there are science fiction-based notions that we can trash the planet because \u2018we\u2019 will then just migrate out among the stars \u2013 presumably to plunder other worlds. In short, the world is rife with grossly ill-informed, irresponsible and downright dangerous lines of thinking. It shouldn’t be so.<\/p>\n

In this context,\u00a0Toby\u00a0Ord, a philosopher at Oxford University,\u00a0has\u00a0written\u00a0The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>(Bloomsbury, 2020). His dedication shows\u00a0him\u00a0poised between\u00a0the\u00a0Ehrlichs\u00a0and Brown:<\/p>\n