Too Big Not To Fail

In his last book and final apocalyptic vision in which he forecasts the end of the human species, H.G. Wells includes a one-page chapter titled "Race Suicide By Gigantism," in which he asserts that a species that predominates for awhile often ends by growing larger and larger before going extinct.  "In the record of the rocks it is always the gigantic individual who appear at the end of each chapter."

Wells does not elaborate on why this applies to human beings (a problem as well with the rest of this short book, Mind At the End of Its Tether.)  It would be curious if he meant it applied to human bodies physically--not when Wells wrote this book at the end of World War II, especially not in England and Europe, where food shortages and warfare had the opposite effect.

But it occurred to me reading this recently that it may well apply to human bodies now. In 2002 a CDC study found that the average American adult was slightly taller than in 1960, but a lot heavier--by 25 pounds.  The trend towards heavier continued in a 2015-16 study.  Weight increased particularly among whites and Hispanics; for all populations and both genders, the average weight gain was around 30 pounds from 1960.

And it's not just Americans.  Another study found that globally, the average adult was 1.3% taller and 14% heavier in 2014 than in 1974.  Perhaps this is why the portrayal of future humans in the popular 2008 animated feature WALL-E caused such a shock of recognition as well as controversy.

This increased weight comes at a cost, not only in individual health but in resources used and needed.  That 2014 study also found that energy consumption increased by over 6% as a result.  But there is also the need for more food and the result of more refuse.  WALL-E posited a future in which garbage has taken over the planet, which doesn't even have plant life left.  Meanwhile a spaceship full of fat humans are splayed inert in mobile chairs, slurping Big Gulps and downing Big Macs, circulating through a huge shopping mall amusement park, manipulated by an A.I. mall manager.

That future factors in another postwar trend: the human population explosion, from 2.3 billion people in 1940 to 7.7 billion now.  The US population has itself more than doubled from when Wells was writing and I was born, from 141 million to 327 million now.  That's 186 million more people (which is more than the total population in 1960) in the same space (though the addition to the Union of Hawaii and still lightly populated Alaska makes some difference.)

These are not just numbers.  Numbers can be deceptive--they may not show why they seem to show.  But the change is there to see, if you've lived long enough to see it.  To me the difference is striking, even from the 1970s and 80s when I spent a lot of time trolling through shopping malls.  People are just way bigger, and there are a lot more of them.

This all contributes to the other kinds of gigantism that Wells saw building in his own time.  The immense resources needed to make the planes and tanks, ships and bombs that were used in World War II suggested the scale of human exploitation of the planet.  The scale of that continuing and growing exploitation, and the future resources destroyed in the process, is the first cause of the mortal threat to humanity and life as we know it on Earth.

It is appropriate to consider this on this Fourth of July weekend, which like Christmas and most other official holidays, is more an increasingly manic and desperate celebration of ever-swollen excess than anything else. Particularly this year in Washington.

Once you start looking for it, gigantism is everywhere. Americans are not only bigger, but these days they are back to demanding bigger vehicles--no longer the cabin cruisers on wheels of the late 50s and early 60s, but ever new and larger trucks and vans and their various crossbreeds.  Considering what it takes to keep up with this physical inflation, it's no wonder there is rapidly decreasing room for anything else.

Cities are becoming larger, even in proportion to population growth.  New forms of mining for oil and gas as well as minerals destroy and pollute vast areas of land and water.  Those Big Macs require the destruction of huge tracts of rainforest for cattle. The unimaginably large oceans are incredibly overwhelmed by garbage and pollution.

Outsized political rhetoric not only overwhelms realistic subtleties, but by its very gigantism it becomes necessarily--and often transparently--phony and false.  What used to be called The Big Lie is small potatoes in the newsfeed, allowing such outrages as American concentration camps on the southern border.

Even our entertainment gets bigger and more costly all the time.  I used to enjoy popular movies such as superhero films, but now that their budgets literally would pay for actual spacecraft, as well as addressing crises identified in increasingly wasteful mailings from worthy organizations, I can't watch them.

Increased human weight is not all due to Big Macs and Big Gulps.  A 2015 study found that people of the same age who ate the same number of calories and exercised as much as did people in the 1980s are heavier anyway.  Factors that may account for the difference include chemicals and other pollutants, certain prescription drugs and reduction in microbiomes, the population of genes from microbes contained in the human body.  All of these, in turn, can be see as results of societal gigantism.

The dinosaurs failed when confronted with the results of a gigantic catastrophe--the impact of a huge asteroid.  Smaller creatures survived.  But physical size may not be the only or most important factor for humans.  The size, power and interdependent complexity of global society makes it stronger in some ways, but a lot more vulnerable in others.  A huge earthquake in the wrong place could fracture the global economy enough to affect billions.  And with nuclear weapons around, there's no telling where spiraling consequences end up.  This applies as well to the slower motion challenges of the climate crisis.  This summer has already seen killer heatwaves in India, record high temperatures across Europe, and in Alaska and the Arctic.

"The planet spins, climate changes, so that the old overgrown Lord of Creation is no longer in harmony with his surroundings," Wells wrote in 1946.  And there were still 31 years to go before the invention of the Big Mac.

Trinidad Head 2019

My annual birthday trek up Trinidad Head on an overcast late afternoon.  Again this year they've made it steeper and longer, don't know how they do it.

From my favorite bench, my power spot not quite at the top of the Head, the sea is still at low tide.  Silent except for birds and the low persistent moan of a distant fog horn. Some white clouds under the darker, blue peeking through here and there. Gray sea except near Clam Beach where it is very blue, mirroring perhaps the last sunlight at the opposite horizon.

From the top, looking back over Trinidad Harbor towards Clam Beach to the south, there is above the beach a dark layer of trees where cloud shadow falls, with a brighter green layer at the top of the range.  Beyond and above that, another forested range, green in misty sunlight.  Beyond and above that, a segment of another range, blue in the distance.  Above that, a snugly fitting cap of white clouds on the distant blue hills, and a scattered white layer above that, before it meets a solid darker mass of clouds that covers the sky from there to over my head and out to sea.

Going down, it occurs to me I haven't seen a rabbit on the trail in a couple of years.  Rabbits are the largest animals I've ever seen on the Head.  As it is now evening, when they come out, I hope I see one today.  After the next turn of the trail, I do.  A small rabbit, probably young, hears me and freezes at the edge of the narrow trail, crowded with leaves from both sides.  I stop as well, to look.  I am pretty far away but I know that as soon as I move, the rabbit will scamper into the underbrush, but neither of us can stay there all night.

(Don't strain your eyes.  The rabbit isn't in the picture.)

At 73: Further Thoughts on Hope and the Future

There is no possibility of true culture without altruism."
Susan Sontag

"The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of duty...to live through it as bravely and as generously as possible."
Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard

“It is important to work for future generations, for our descendants. We must be proud to do something, even though people do not usually know its value.”
Shunryu Suzuki
founder of San Francisco Zen Center

We live in many kinds of time. We experience time differently, especially according to our age,  and the contexts of our experience are shaped by cycles we know, and that we don't know.  So any speculation on the future is bound to be vague, provisional and a bit of hit and miss.  But this is what I feel about the relatively near future, beyond my time.

As outlined in my previous post, the context of coming decades is likely to be dominated by the effects of the climate crisis, named or not.  Those persistent effects and the new contexts they create will change what people do and how they live.

When that happens in a widespread way (for it is already happening in relatively ignored parts of the world) depends on the climate.  What happens, and how it happens, depends to a great extent on future generations--probably beginning with those who are now young, who are now children.

Right now the impetus for efforts to address the climate crisis--such as the proposed Green New Deal in the US--is coming largely from the young.  Their leading edge is represented in government, and presumably in other influential institutions.  If their awareness becomes the standard for future generations, then responses can become more conscious and deliberate.

 But one way or another, the climate crisis will change just about everything, perhaps in the next few decades, probably by mid century, almost certainly by the end of the century.

There are two major aspects to the climate crisis: there are the causes, and there are the effects.  Societies may choose whether or not to address the causes of future global heating, such as greenhouse gases.  There will be less choice in whether or not to deal with the effects: the sea level rise, heat waves, droughts, floods, shortages, disease outbreaks, and the likely secondary effects of relocations, mass migrations and armed conflicts will demand attention--first local, and then as resources stretch and more people are involved, beyond that. Yet how societies and especially individuals choose to deal with the effects will make all the difference in how people live their lives.

There are those who imagine possible futures, mostly as stories.  While these stories may be visions that include new technologies and/or old forms of human society, or they may be mostly "what if?" explorations, cautionary tales or metaphors of the present, they offer a range of possibilities that cannot be dismissed.  I offer here only a few elements of a future I can imagine and foresee.

There are aspects of that future that can begin right now.  The young can prepare for the meaningful work of that future.  Many of the concerns of today will evaporate.  The consumer economy cannot be the focus of so many lives.  The emphasis will be on meeting needs, rather than in inciting and manipulating wants.

There will be increasing interest in finding technical means for addressing both causes and effects of the climate crisis.  The young can prepare themselves to participate in such research and development.  If I were advising adolescents today, I would suggest examining areas of study and possible occupations by asking the question, what will a climate crisis society need?

At this point, a stubborn refusal to surrender to some sense of the inevitable is healthy for the young. But denial is not.  They can dedicate themselves to possible means of addressing the causes as well as effects of the climate crisis.  But developing means to address future effects is also worthy and important.  In this way--the only meaningful way--they enact hope.  Hope is no longer principally a feeling.  It is a commitment, a set of activities, a life.

In terms of anticipating and dealing with effects, my guess is that the future will need managers of teams and resources responding to individual problems, and to develop strategies to address problems before they occur.

The future will need a greater proportion of dedicated individuals with skills for actions that today are often grouped under the name of first responders.  The future will need engineers and others in specific areas not yet prioritized by society's reward system.

The future will also need dreamers and storytellers, visionaries and critical minds, but using means and applying themselves in incalculable ways.  More broadly, when many occupations that today seem important eventually fall away as useless and wasteful, the need for currently undervalued skills will come forward.

Other needs will become the focus of more jobs, and even with increasing difficulties, those jobs can be more meaningful to communities and the individuals who do them. The perils and pains of this future may be great.  But individuals may find new purpose. Life may be harder, but less absurd.

This future, when so much that seems unavoidably important today fades into the sodden inventory of this failing period of history,  offers new opportunities for individuals to make basic commitments.  Some of these will be instinctive, but many personal commitments and choices will need to be made consciously, because they will be hard to make.  It will even be hard to know they can and must be made.

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives."
Howard Zinn

“Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as responsible beings among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need to found our hopes upon.”
Ursula LeGuin

"…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

There seem to me to be two essential mysteries about humanity and its history.  One is whether humanity as a whole would develop in time to meet challenges of the changing present, particularly those very large ones that humanity itself has set in motion.  So far, when applied to the climate crisis, the answer seems to be no.

The other in some ways underlies the first.  It is the nature of human nature.  Is human nature based on selfishness, greed, lust, fear, envy, anger, the will to dominate and the passion to destroy and to kill?  Or is it based on understanding, a moral sense and sense of justice, compassion, empathy, courage and generosity?  Or is it an uncertain mix of both?

That last view is expressed in a fable, attributed to several Native American peoples, and may be familiar to some from the under-rated film Tomorrowland.  A version of it goes like this:

A grandfather talks to his grandchild. "A fight is going on inside me," he said. "It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." 

"The other is good," he continued. "He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith."

 "The same fight is going on inside you," grandfather said, "and inside every other person, too."

The grandchild thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

 "The one you feed." 

Under greater pressure and in starker terms than perhaps we can imagine, people of the near future will face this choice.  Their choice may not alter the ultimate future that comes after them--perhaps centuries later-- but it will help characterize their present.  Human civilization is some ways has been a struggle to inculcate a fair degree of personal freedom and justice for individuals while meeting the needs of community.  Freedom is based on choice, and community is based on a sense of common humanity, fairness, decency and shared fate.

 How the needs of the individual and society are both met is an ongoing test of humanity as a social species.  Individuals need the support of community, as community needs the commitment of individuals.  Apart from institutional constraints, the balance is achieved by a sense of responsibility, empathy, compassion, generosity and kindness.  The ethic of "you'd do the same for me" is perhaps the most basic human statement.

Even in his bleakest scenario for the future, HG Wells kept reminding readers than nothing will prevent at least individual human beings from exhibiting qualities of courage and love.  In adverse times, the need becomes even greater for "mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindness."

Redemption is a curious concept in this context, but there is something to it.  If humanity can't quite redeem its past by fixing its future, it can at least to some extent redeem itself.  Wells expressed his preference that, if the end is truly coming, he "would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack."

Humanity can go down fighting, and it can go down loving, both.  Perhaps it will even endure.  But its time of testing need not be one of unremitting pain and degradation. It can be a time that includes creativity, challenge, commitment and character, in which life is lived to the fullness of the moment.  For we live in many kinds of time.