The World as Home

The beast looming now on our national horizon is a creature few in Washington seem able to measure. In the blustering metaphors of war and gamesmanship, the specter is merely another enemy for America to defeat. And of course we know how to defeat an enemy. We design and deploy smart weapons, fine-tune economies, and eradicate small-pox. We dismantled communism in eastern Europe. We will find a cure for AIDS.

In the long view, from Australopithecus africanus, an early human ancestor scavenging hyena kills in southern Africa, to Homo sapiens, taking a six iron to a golf ball on the walled plain of the Moon's Fra Mauro, such claims sound vain-glorious. To put it tactlessly, the bravado is coach-talk, delivered to a team of young basketball players down by ten at the half at state championships. In its place such talk is both appropriate and useful, but it is not equal to the breadth of this subject, the fate of humanity. "The fate of humanity" seems to many an overblown characterization, but this seems so only because we automatically assume we can control our destiny in a crisis, that even biological problems—population growth, our essential need for fresh water and protection against solar radiation—are simply challenges, barriers through which we will engineer a breach.

It is sobering to consider, in this context, the quick extinction, like the pull of a light cord, of ten or so Miocene primates about 11 million years ago in eastern Europe. The popular Victorian idea of "improvement" in the human line of descent does not apply here. These apes ceased to exist because the climate changed and they were not adaptable. Other, related creatures, including our own Miocene ancestors,were.

In setting ourselves apart from all other animals, we have put such emphasis on the development of consciousness, we've all but lost sight of the fact that we cannot, no more than Neanderthals could, think our way out of every tight situation. We must face the limiations of our biology, especially the measure of its resilience in a rapidly changing environment. It makes no difference whether we ourselves change our environment (by, say, altering greenhouse gas chemistry) or, as was the case in the Miocene, tectonic activity causes climatic change. Either way the organism must prove adaptable if it is to survive.

What is unique for us is that to a degree unknown in any animal before us our culture will affect our potential for survival. Our behavior, which has helped create the environment we are now at such pains to adapt to, can also limit our ability to adapt. Consciousness, in other words, forty thousand years after its dazzling emergence in Cro-Magnon Europe, might ultimately prove maladaptive.

Many therapists have compared the rationale behind any strong defense of American consumerism to the strategies of denial employed by addicts. Their indictment is pointed at the rhetoric of government apologists and growth promoters who routinely offer, the argument goes, self-delusional explanations for why we can't survive without increased consumer activity, additional oil-based technologies, faster data processing, and lunar mining ventures. Faced with critical habitat issues—inadequate arable land, deforestation, and management of human and industrial waste—humanity needs these no more than an addict needs the next dose of heroin. Most everyone in government, however, is afraid to say this unequivocally; and many business people fear the economic consequences of the change that is implied.

All of us, of course, share that fear.

We are essentially addicted to petroleum. If prudence dictates we try to break that addiction before the last reserves are drained, then we have to draw a line in the dirt. It doesn't really matter where, whether it's with the high-profile reserve said to lie beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or at an obscure reserve known only to a few petroleum geologists probing the South China Sea. It matters no more than which site Gandhi chose for his initial Satyagraha, his first nonviolent act of civil disobedience.

When you draw the line, you proclaim simultaneously not one but two courses of action: reduced consumption and an alternative economics that will allow solar power and other alternatives to flourish. This story—where and when do prudent people draw the line—has become, of course, a threadbare scenario. The essayed intent of the Bush government to prospect for petroleum in ANWR, however, creates the circumstances for an illumination. Even while reservoirs of that other, far more precious liquid, water, are draining away the world over, the biological alert does not register: human time is on the verge of radical rearrangement, if not eclipse. The ANWR debate is a time to clarify. If self-awareness is actually going to prove biologically adaptive, we need an alternative to "engineering" our way out of this predicament.

Is there ground between "lock it up" and "drain it" that we haven't explored? I believe there is.

In many traditional societies, historically, people argued when seemingly intractable problems arose. In those societies today, it usually works like this. People (mostly, it turns out, people who have cared well for children) present their views and then wait, as attentively and patiently as they can, while others present alternative views. After everyone has had a chance to speak, a second group, recognized by everyone present as "senior" people or elders, does something undemocratic. It makes the decision. All sides defer, however, because, in essence, elders are not distracted by the present. They speak from an overriding past, the tested wisdom that has gotten everyone in the room to this juncture. The difference is between weather-based thinking, with its fears and options anchored in the present, and climate-based thinking. (The elders listen, first, because their decision is not predetermined. Climate reflects the measure of every weather system that moves through.)

Our deep predicament with ANWR stems from the collapse and obliteration of a coterie of senior people among us. The experts we call upon for testimony—biologists, economists, bureaucrats of various sorts—almost invariably speak from the perspective of present circumstances. Testimony from a transcending perspective, if it comes, is often dismissed as impractical. With such a (deadly) arrangement, opinion, well informed or not, overrides philosophy. Senior people are put on a footing with computer modelers.

We might argue, with respect to ANWR, that elders from among the traditional occupants of the land speak for all of us. But this will not work. What is at stake is multicultural. No culture has ever been in precisely this situation. We need a "wisdom of the elders" that we must in fact make up as we go along. (Given our blistering pace, many believe, of course, we will be overtaken by disaster before we are able to implement any such supposed wisdom.)

The decision at ANWR, it seems to me, is not whether or not to prospect for oil. It's whether someone in nominal authority—a federal president, a state governor, a secretary of the interior—will have the courage to choose to draw the line. Beyond the declaration, we require people who can think in the great stretches of time that are the natural habitat of the elders. We require a council of such men and women to restore the sense of composure that distinguishes valued human life.

In transition from late Home erectus to early Homo sapiens, it is striking to find that new tools do not turn up. The same stone implements carry right through. But with the transition from archaic to fully modern Homo sapiens (perhaps 50,000 years ago), the most dramatic shift in the evolutionary line of Homo takes place. Whatever that subtle biological change was, it brought with it the potential for Hammurabi's codex, the architecture of Chartres, the poetry of Blake, and the technologies of electronic processing and linkage. It is such a change in awareness as this, I believe, not a new tool, that calls to us now.

Wilderness outfitters have long known of a remarkable phenomenon. A confirmed government bureaucrat of big-business executive is introduced to a landscape undistributed by human schemes. The response is frequently one of increasing discomfort, even bewilderment, that such places continue to go on the chopping block. It is as though they had found a lost perspective, rather than discovered a new one. Back in their offices, however, the recovered awareness diminishes, and it is finally extinguished before the modern insistence on expediency and conformity. What began as a profound repossession of human meaning becomes, once again, a vision for humanity narrowly defined by profit men and polls, programmers and paperbenders.

An awakening to transcendent views followed by confusion about how to apply the wisdom, of course, is characteristic of adolescence. Typically, adolescents also believe adults have misconstrued the same wisdom, and that their decisions need to be questioned. Questioning the stance of the elders has worked well historically to keep human societies resilient, but only when elders have actually been present. In a culture like ours, where adolescent motivation and reasoning are necessary for the continued growth of our consumer-based economy, and where many middle-aged people resist focusing on the essential tasks of parenting and providing (beyond financial support), the trait is a disaster. More than long-term stability, what an adolescent mentality wants is to win the state championship and to win big. It perceives ethics as a necessary inconvenience, self-denial as weakness, and wisdom as an impediment to innovation. It wants biological fitness to be only a problem in engineering.

We can't afford this anymore.

What should come out of ANWR is not a debate about drilling, but adults strong enough to take an adolescent culture firmly in their grasp.

"Adolescence" by Barry Lopez, excerpted from Arctic Refuge: A Circle of Testimony