kelpiewilson

Chimpanzees and Culture Change

Chimpanzees and Culture Change
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 24 August 2006

These remarks were presented at SolFest 2006, a sustainable living and environmental education festival at the Solar Living Institute in Hopland, California, August 19-20.

Many people have asked me how I got the idea for my eco-thriller novel, Primal Tears, and what motivated me to write it. Primal Tears is the story of Sage, a young female human-bonobo chimpanzee hybrid.

It all started back about ten years ago when I was reading reports of our genetic closeness to the chimpanzees and learning that we share 98-99% of the same genetic material. Jared Diamond and others say we are so close to the chimps that taxonomically we should be put in the same genus - humans are actually the third chimpanzee. The common chimp is called Pan troglodytes, the bonobo chimp is called Pan paniscus, and so the human chimp would be called Pan sapiens. Or we could induct our chimp cousins into the Homo genus, in which case the names would be Homo troglodytes, Homo paniscus and Homo sapiens.

I was motivated to write this book because in my work to save ancient forests I constantly ran into the human chauvinist attitude that we are superior to - not just different from but superior to - all other species on this planet earth. This attitude is embodied in the Great Chain of Being, where humans occupy a special level below the angels but above the beasts.

The Great Chain of Being was a medieval construct that seems to be based on the Bible, on the Genesis story of the Creation, in which God gives Adam and Eve "dominion" over the beasts and "every living thing that moves on the earth." The idea is deeply ingrained in our culture.

But what if we could prove that humans are not a separate rung on the ladder? Here's where the idea for Primal Tears came from. Reading those figures for genetic closeness, I realized that the gap between humans and chimps was no greater than the gap between a horse and a donkey, or a lion and a tiger, and yet those species have interbred and produced offspring. Doing a little further research, I found that Carl Sagan had also speculated about this. "For all we know," Sagan said in Dragons of Eden, "occasional viable crosses between humans and chimpanzees are possible ..."

So there I was, working as the director of a grassroots forest protection group in Oregon, entrenched in a daily battle of ideology: do we humans have the right and even the duty to cut down 500-year-old trees to make more and more houses for an ever increasing human population, or do those trees have the right to exist for their own sake and for the sake of the entire ecosystem of plants and animals that depend on them?

I was continually searching for ways to communicate a value system that recognizes that we humans are a part of this planet. We are not separate. We cannot survive without functioning ecosystems. But this Great Chain of Being concept has given an awful lot of people the idea that we are somehow exempt from environmental concerns. Economists are a big part of this too. We can hear them now saying: "Peak oil can't be happening because we are humans, damn it, this can't happen to us. The magic of the market will save us."

And so I latched on to this idea of a human-chimpanzee cross. If such a creature were produced, it would be convincing proof that humans are animals, just another species in the genus Homo, subject to the same natural laws. At one point, I even fantasized about doing the experiment on myself! I could put a personal ad in the paper:

Female, age 40, seeks wild, swinger male for procreation purposes, no commitments. Bonobo preferred but regular chimpanzee acceptable.

I was out of luck, of course, because chimps don't read. But people do, so I came to my senses and realized that instead of trying it myself, I could write a book about this idea.

Primal Tears takes place in the Ecotopian landscape of Northern California and Southern Oregon. The story opens when Sage's mother, Sarah, is fired by her principal for teaching evolution to her 8th grade class. She goes home and a friend tells her about a great ape research program that is looking for women to act as surrogate mothers for endangered bonobo embryos. They want to increase the captive breeding pool of these highly endangered bonobo chimpanzees.

Sarah volunteers for the program, but something goes wrong and it turns out that a bonobo sperm has impregnated one of her own eggs, and her daughter, Sage, the human-bonobo hybrid, is born.

The rest of the novel follows Sage's adventures as, like all teenagers, she copes with feeling different and worries about her appearance. She launches a crusade to save her bonobo relatives that takes her to the Congo, and as she grows older, she has to cope with her high level of sexual desire.

One of the most interesting things about the bonobo chimpanzees is the way in which they handle conflict. Common chimps are like us. When there is conflict over a scarce resource, like food, they beat each other up. But bonobos have a different approach. They are the "make love not war" chimps. When tension arises in the group, they drop everything and start having sex. Everybody. All at once. Later, after everyone has calmed down, they share.

We humans also have the ability to share. We do it all the time. Only now, as the world grows increasingly crowded, we are challenged to share like never before. We must do everything in our power to keep from descending into violence and war over scarce resources.

Another interesting thing about bonobos is that, even though they have all that sex, they don't have too many babies. They don't overpopulate their habitat. They don't lose a lot of their population to predators, so they are regulating their births somehow. How do they do that? Answering that question is a major theme in Primal Tears.

Finally, coming back to Genesis, I want to acknowledge that there is more than one way to interpret the language found there.

In Genesis 1:28, God urges Adam and Eve to "be fruitful and multiply" and "fill the earth." But what happens when the earth is full? Nothing in the Bible says we are supposed to be fruitful and multiply without end!

The concept of "dominion" is also open to interpretation. A modern translation by Leslie Thatcher renders the words of Genesis 1:28 this way:

And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Develop as human beings and become great; complete the earth and look after the fish of the sea and the birds of the skies ..."

I think it is also worth noting that in the Genesis story of the Great Flood, when God sets a rainbow in the sky, he says it is the token of the covenant that He makes directly with "every living creature of all flesh." The covenant is with all species, not just humans.

As we humans take seriously now the task of living sustainably on the earth, we need to create and honor covenants with all flesh.

So, I recommend that you go and read Genesis again with these different interpretations in mind. And you also might enjoy reading my novel, Primal Tears.

Diane Wilson - An American Hero

An Interview with Diane Wilson
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Tuesday 28 March 2006

Diane Wilson is the author of An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas (Chelsea Green, 2005). It is a remarkable book, telling the story of Wilson's life as female shrimp boat captain and an environmental activist fighting devastating toxic pollution from chemical and plastics manufacturers on the Texas Gulf Coast.

But I have to confess, when the book was first recommended to me, I hesitated to read it. As an environmental activist, I have my own personal history of endless hours of research, boring meetings, scary confrontations, nasty intimidation and the infighting that goes along with these struggles, and I wasn't sure that I wanted to hear all the gritty details of someone else's pains and triumphs. Lois Gibbs, the courageous activist mother of Love Canal, said the same thing in her review of An Unreasonable Woman in Orion Magazine. But like Gibbs, I was hooked after the first page. For one thing, the Texas Gulf Coast seems to be unlike any other place on the planet.

Molly Ivins and others have called An Unreasonable Woman a masterpiece of American literature, and I agree. First, there is the poetry of Wilson's language. I can only compare her to fiction writers like Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. She wraps her tender descriptions of her beloved Lavaca Bay around poignant inner reflections, while rendering the home-grown dialogue and emotionally tense social ecology of her community with complete authenticity.

Then there is the excitement and exhilaration of working-class feminism that permeates Wilson's life. The first-person feminist voices we usually hear are those of academic or professional women speaking of their battles in the bedroom, the boardroom and the halls of power. We don't hear much about a lone woman, the first woman in her community to run a shrimp boat, relying on herself for both aid and comfort, fixing a broken engine with bailing wire and tape, satisfied with her own company through the long night, trawling for shrimp under the stars.

Finally, the best thing for me about Diane's book was getting to share her spiritual journey to a deeper humanity. So many things can tear you apart as an activist and it's a delicate balance you must maintain between your own passion and your compassion for your opponents, your victories and your failures. Diane has used the living sea itself as her spiritual role model:

"Risking one's life can be strangely liberating. That's what the sea counsels me. She still talks even though she's got a mercury Superfund on her left breast and vinyl chloride and phthalates on her right breast. She's a forgiving grandmother. Not unduly angry about the mix-ups and mess ups and the confounding fact of healing taking so long. She knows it is complicated. My intent will keep her, she says."

Diane was recently released from jail in Texas after serving time for an act of civil disobedience. She is back home in Seadrift now, living in a tiny trailer she says she "paid no more than $500 for." She agreed to answer a few questions for TruthOut readers.

Kelpie Wilson: Diane, you just got out of jail. What were you in there for?

Diane Wilson: I was in several jails. I was arrested December 5th in Houston for disrupting Vice President Dick Cheney's speech at the DeLay fundraiser. I was charged with possessing a fake document and spent five days in the Harris County Jail waiting on a trial that never materialized.

I was then transferred to the Victoria County Jail for an outstanding warrant. Back in 2002 I had climbed a 70-foot chemical tower at Dow Chemical in Seadrift, Texas, and chained myself to the top after dropping a twenty foot banner that read: "Dow - Responsible for Bhopal."

In October 2005, while on a book tour in the Northeast, I was told to go to jail for my 120 days, and I told the sheriff's department and DA that I wouldn't go to jail until Warren Anderson, former CEO of Union Carbide, went to jail for his outstanding warrant in India for the crime against Bhopal.When I was arrested on December 5th in Houston, I spent the five days in Harris County Jail, then was transferred to Victoria County Jail, where I spent three months.

KW: I heard that the DA called you a "dangerous woman." Is that true? Who would you be dangerous to?

Diane Wilson: The District Attorney in Calhoun County, Dan Heard, called me a "dangerous woman" during my trial and was speaking to the jury. I believe he said that because he thought my ideas were dangerous and that I had no fear of retaliation. He asked me once what they (the courts, the justice system) could do to make me stop fighting, and I told him there wasn't a thing they could do to stop me.

KW: Has anyone ever called you an eco-terrorist?

Diane Wilson: Yes, when I was fighting Formosa Plastics' illegal discharge and attempted to sink my shrimp boat on top of the illegal discharge, the Coast Guard, who apprehended me and confiscated my shrimp boat, said I was a terrorist on the high seas. Another time, when I was trying to get DuPont to recycle their waste stream into the bay and I was on a 30-day hunger strike in front of their Delaware office, they said I was an eco-terrorist.

KW: You live in a community where many of your friends and relatives have died or are dying of cancer. What happened when you started to go to public hearings and speak up about the role of pollution in that cancer?

Diane Wilson: At one meeting, a large delegation of politicians and industry leaders, the chamber of commerce, and the school system showed. They said I was a fanatic and a nut and making stuff up. Or else I was a spy hired by Louisiana officials to disrupt economic development in Texas. A woman from the school district said she'd never heard of pollution causing cancer. She said her husband, who worked at Alcoa and died of cancer, got it because he was a smoker. Also the head of the American Cancer Society came down and urged me to NOT do a study on cancer in my community. He said if I EVER contemplated doing a study I should call him first. He also showed me a copy of an Earth First! magazine and said I should bring down Earth Firsters and get them to protest (this was during the time that a bomb exploded in a car driven by Earth Firsters). He was trying to destroy my reputation in the community.

KW: I want to note that many times in your book you talk about the embryos and eggs of the shrimp and other sea life and how effluents from Formosa and Alcoa are killing them. Do you have any thoughts on the term "pro-life" that is so heavily used by Republicans and how that idea might apply to the situation where you are?

Diane Wilson: I believe if the male of the species had babies there would be universal pro-choice. I think this idea of pro-life has more to do with control over the bodies and minds of women and is so hotly defended by the religious right because they consider the bodies of women and the body of the earth inherently evil. I don't think it is a coincidence that the killings at abortion clinics have sometimes been by Assembly of God (Pentecostal) members. I was raised Pentecostal so I've been a fly on that wall.

KW: When you were in jail in Victoria County, you wrote a letter to the Sheriff about deplorable conditions. You had several examples of terrible abuse by the withholding of medical treatment. The worst was the story of Shandra Williams. Can you tell that story briefly and also tell us your thoughts on how such a thing can happen in a Republican, "pro-life" state like Texas?

Diane Wilson: I met Shandra on Christmas Eve after she had been picked up because she looked "suspicious." A year before, Shandra had been in the very same cell block after she had been picked up by the Victoria County cops for an outstanding warrant. Shandra was 6-7 months pregnant, and her file clearly stated that she was NOT to be picked up until after her delivery because she had a rare uterine condition and it was very problematic.
That mattered not a whit to the sheriff's department. The sheriff was running a re-election campaign and outstanding warrants don't look good on the campaign trail so in the cell she went. Due to the harsh conditions of cell life, Shandra's condition worsened and she started bleeding, but the guards and nurse said she was just trying to get out of jail and was a complainer and just wanted drugs, so she repeatedly had to "prove" her condition with a bloody pad. Eventually they stuck her in isolation, by herself, in a cold, cold room with nothing but a blue paper gown and a paper sheet. To keep her quiet they gave her Benedryl. Eventually she was placed back in the jail until her water broke, starting her labor. The nurse said she was hallucinating and trying to get drugs so they tried to place her back into isolation, which frightened Shandra. The guard said Shandra was going into isolation the "hard way or the easy way" and threatened to use the Taser on her. Fortunately, a startled guard gathered Shandra's belongings and got her into isolation before the guard tased her. Once in isolation again, Shandra went into labor. The baby was breeched and started coming feet first. With a baby dangling to her knees, Shandra crawled about 60 feet to a call button and pressed it three times and yelled that she was in labor. Finally the guards and nurse arrived and they rushed her to the ambulance, but Shandra said her baby died en route.

In a state like Texas, unfortunately, there is no incongruence between stopping abortions and lack of health care for inmates. It's part of their disdain for all things that are "soft on crime." During the state Republican convention, the Attorney General and US Senate candidate John Cornyn joked about the differences between Republicans and Democrats. "If you've used the phrase 'protecting prisoners' rights,'" Cornyn said, "you might be a Democrat." Another Texas Attorney General noted Texas had big bad jails because they had big bad prisoners.

KW: What has been the effect of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the Gulf environment and the shrimpers and other fishermen?

Diane Wilson: When Hurricane Katrina rolled in, the immediate impact was the Gulf of Mexico fisheries, and in fact the entire Gulf of Mexico was declared an official disaster. The Gulf of Mexico fisheries, especially the bays, were in dire straights before the hurricane, and now many are totally decimated. Another issue that will probably not be understood for a long time is the toll that pollution has taken on our gulf waters. Many, many chemical sites and waste sites were flooded. A man from my home town was working on a dredge boat that was doing salvage work near Beaumont and he dredged something up that triggered a heart attack. That's local knowledge but nothing the media knew about.

KW: Do you think the EPA is covering up the true extent of toxic contamination after the hurricanes?

Diane Wilson: I have been involved in environmental issues for 17 years and in my opinion, the EPA and the chemical industry have been co-conspirators in their attempt to keep the extent of the pollution unknown. I had two investigators from the Texas state environmental agency give me internal documents about contamination, asking me to do something with it because they couldn't do anything with it. There was a political bottleneck and nothing went higher up, they said.

KW: Turning back to your book, what made you think you wanted to write about it all?

Diane Wilson: I am a closet writer. Always have been. I had a lot of anguish over my fight with Formosa and writing the story was the way I released it. I wasn't really thinking about publishing until I finished.

KW: Everyone who reads your story is overwhelmed by your courage and boldness. For instance, it must not have been easy being the first woman to run a shrimp boat by yourself. Was it the feminist movement that gave you the idea that you could do that?

Diane Wilson: The feminist movement has not made it to the Gulf of Mexico. Never seen that movement. I became a boat captain because I loved the water and had been on a boat since I was eight. I captained the boat by myself because I liked being alone. Probably if I had a male deckhand on the boat he would have tried to gain control over the wheel. Running a boat isn't that hard. Just takes doing. Most or all women I ever knew were discouraged from running boats, but it was too late with me.

KW: Your father took you out shrimping as a youngster. Did he have a more liberated attitude? Did he encourage you to do a man's work?

Diane Wilson: My daddy thought women were basically stupid, but he didn't mean that in a mean way. I was on the boat because I was good and I was a big help and I could patch nets and I could steer the boat without crying. It was a practical decision on my daddy's part.

KW: So what is it that gives you your strength?

Diane Wilson: I am a mystic and am directed by an internal compass. I am not outer-directed.

KW: Tell me, what kind of dreams are you having these days?

Diane Wilson: I was dreaming about my dead daddy. He was alive, he said, and couldn't I tell? He was making COFFEE - stupid!!!

Note: this interview with Diane Wilson was re-published in Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, AK Press, 2008.

Climate Shock: We're on Thin Ice

Climate Shock: We're on Thin Ice
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Review
Friday 30 December 2005

Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains
By Mark Bowen
Henry Holt, 2005

"In Sanskrit, Himalaya means 'abode of snow,' but as crops and people die from lack of water while watching the highest mountains on Earth turn from white to black, that name may soon seem grotesquely inappropriate."
-- Mark Bowen, Thin Ice

Climate shock comes from the realization that climate change is not only real, but huge; it is not only huge, but it is now; and it will affect your life very shortly. Not your grandchildren's lives. Not your children's lives. Your life. Soon - if it hasn't already.

If you have not experienced climate shock yet, you will when you read Thin Ice by Mark Bowen. Thin Ice is the story of the scientific team from Ohio State University, led by researcher Lonnie Thompson, that has spent the last two decades drilling ice cores in tropical mountain glaciers. Their aim is to retrieve information about climate history from the ice, but there has been a race against time as these glaciers melt, making new history.

Thin Ice is an exciting adventure story. The logistics of transporting the scientists and their drilling equipment into the most inaccessible places on Earth bring hair-raising tales. The team members struggle with altitude sickness, windstorms destroy the solar panels that power their drill, crampons get stuck in ladders deployed over widening crevasses, and the crew tries to float ice core samples off the mountain with a hot-air balloon.

The scientists are awed by their surroundings as they camp for weeks at a time on the top of the world, absorbing "the brown earth and the blue sky and the white ice..." until it seeps into their skins and they bond emotionally with the mountains. Bowen quotes researcher Mary Davis saying that she has a "soft spot" for the Dunde Ice Cap in China's Qilian Shan mountain range. Drilling engineer and ice physicist Bruce Koci confesses to Bowen that it is not just a job for him, it is about "being out there," and he would do it even if he didn't get paid.

The scientific detective work is just as thrilling. Thompson's team has made a number of surprising additions to climate theory and shaken some deeply held establishment views. One surprise was the discovery that a few of the mountain ice cores went as far back in time as any yet recovered from the polar regions. Why? Because when ice gets thick enough, as it does at the poles, pressure and temperature build up, and the ice actually starts to melt from the bottom, destroying the sediment layers and air bubbles that yield all the historical information. But tropical mountains have only scant annual precipitation, so the ice layers are thin, making a longer time-horizon possible. Hence the book's title, Thin Ice.

Another surprising result is some convincing evidence that the Gulf Stream and African currents that help to warm northern Europe are a less powerful influence on climate than previously thought. The climate change horror flick, "The Day After Tomorrow," was based on this "thermohaline convection theory" that says melting ice could disrupt the flow of the warming current and actually cause Europe and New York City to freeze (though not nearly so fast as in the movie).

Thompson's work shows that tropical influences, particularly the El Niño and monsoon cycles (which are related), are the bigger drivers of climate change. This suggests that in the future, the Earth's climate may resemble what we see in El Niño years, but much more extreme. Depending on where you are, your climate shock could show up as either flood or drought or both in rapid succession - a permanent El Niño from Hell.

My own climate shock came in 2002 when the 500,000-acre Biscuit Fire raged through the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in southwest Oregon. I sat in my yard and watched a huge mushroom cloud of smoke boil up out of the wilderness. A freak wind was blowing from the east, full of dry, hot, desert air that pumped up the fire like a bellows. The Kalmiopsis was a place that I deeply loved and it will never be the same again - not just in my lifetime, but forever. Climate change is likely to favor new growth of chaparral and brush over the kind of deep fir and pine forests that got their start in a cooler age.

Gulf Coast residents got their climate shock this past hurricane season as warming oceans spawned the strongest storms on record. Alaska natives are getting their climate shock as retreating sea ice ruins their hunting, and melting permafrost topples their homes. Pacific Islanders are getting it too as their atolls flood and they flee to higher ground. And this is just the very beginning.

Trying to anticipate the climates of the future is impossible without understanding those of the past, yet as Bowen conveys in this book, the past is extremely complicated and hard for someone who is not a climate researcher to fully understand. Given the difficulties, Bowen does a remarkable job both of explaining it and keeping the story interesting and fast-paced. But for a little help getting a better grasp on Earth's history and the timescales involved, I turned to a 1991 book by scientist James Lovelock called Healing Gaia.

Lovelock believes that the best way to think about the Earth is to see it as an organism that goes through phases of sickness and health, or instability followed by equilibrium. Earth's medical history is a long story, for she is an older lady. Her life is now at least 3.5 billion years old.

Conditions change on Earth, and one is that the sun has grown hotter. For most of the age of mammals (the age that followed the dinosaurs and their asteroid demise) the Earth was warm and no ice formed at the poles. But as the sun grew ever hotter, by about 2 million years ago, polar ice caps formed and the Pleistocene began - the ice ages. This sounds odd, but Lovelock explains it: the Earth began to pull more CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in rocks and plants. Less CO2 in the atmosphere lessened the greenhouse effect and temperatures dropped. But because of cyclical changes in Earth's orbit over time, the ice ages have see-sawed back and forth between glacial and interglacial in a series of 100,000-year cycles. A system with this much dynamism is prone to getting knocked off balance, and there is little doubt that that is what is happening now: climate shock.

A funny thing happened 2 million years ago on the way to the ice ages. The ice caps sucked moisture from the African forests, which withered and withdrew from the plains. An arboreal ape came down from the trees and began to make tools and lose its hair. When its descendants multiplied and started to burn fossil fuels, they became a fever-inducing planetary infection. They (we) are the cause of climate shock.

Thin Ice is really the story of the "planetary physicians," as Lovelock calls them - the scientists like Lonnie Thompson who have devoted their careers to taking the planet's temperature. And now the world is getting so warm that anyone can hold a hand to the patient's forehead and get a sense of what is happening.

Besides being a physics PhD from MIT, Thin Ice author Mark Bowen is also an avid recreational climber. He was able to add to his story of scientific discovery the eyewitness accounts from climbers all over the world of rapid ice-melting over the last ten years. A glacier that was a stone's throw from Sir Edmund Hilary's first camp on Mt. Everest has retreated three miles since Hilary's 1953 historic ascent.

An international commission predicts that there is a high likelihood that all of the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035. The Himalaya will turn black, and the Ganges and other rivers that flow from it will dry to seasonal streams. The 500 million people in India who depend on water from these rivers will have no other source. As mountain glaciers and snow packs melt everywhere, China, the Andes and California will face the same climate shock - no water.

Meanwhile, the melting ice will raise the seas. Lonnie Thompson and other researchers are discovering that once glaciers start to melt, they can melt all the way to bedrock very rapidly. If all of the Earth's mountain glaciers were to melt, it would raise the sea level by a foot and a half and that would be the end of places like Bangladesh and Louisiana's bayou country. But the polar ice caps are showing the same tendency for rapid melting, and a mere two degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature could be enough to cause a complete disintegration. Sea levels could start rising by 3 feet every 20 years. We will have to act quickly and drastically to avert this inundation.

Reading Thin Ice and exposing yourself to climate shock could help prepare you for your new role in the greenhouse world. We will need more planetary physicians to diagnose and prescribe, and there will also be a need for planetary nurses, orderlies and volunteers to pitch in around the clock to keep the dear old lady alive. What does this mean? Probably it will mean changing everything about the way we live, starting by reducing our fossil fuel consumption now.

But how on Earth can we train ourselves to change everything, all at once?

Let's face it: We are more like monkeys than like gods, and we learn best by imitating whatever we think is admirable. For most of our evolutionary history we were a prey species - a scruffy primate just recently evolved from a rodent. And so, in our hominid phase we have fancied ourselves a glorious predator, in the same league with the lion and the eagle. In the future, if we want to survive, we will become symbionts - life forms that live in partnership with others. We may become like the rhinoceros bird that pecks parasitic ticks (and blood) from the rhino's back and warns it of approaching danger.

As successful symbionts we will adapt to the warmer Earth by living modestly and learning all the tricks and trades for storing carbon away in forests, fields, soils and rocks. We'll blow sweet breezes on the lady's brow, soothe her hot flashes, and cool the Earth again. In return, if luck and tides are with us, she will continue to sustain us until our time on Earth is done.

REVIEW: Y6B AND GOD’S LAST OFFER

REVIEW: Y6B AND GOD’S LAST OFFER
by Kelpie Wilson
Sentient Times, Oct - Nov 1999
www.sentienttimes.com

God’s Last Offer by Ed Ayres, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1999.

We’re all aware that Y2K is coming, whether or not we know what the actual impacts of the computer bug will be. We are much less aware of the fact that Y6B is already here. Y6B is the year that the world’s population grows to 6 billion people. The best demographic projections show that the world’s 6 billionth person will be born sometime in October 1999. Yet a listing of the 20th Century’s top 100 news stories compiled by noted journalists and scholars did not include the unprecedented quadrupling of the earth’s population and its impact on global ecosystems. The big news is that not only has population quadrupled this century and doubled in the last 30 years, but that if nothing is done, another one billion people will be added by 2012. Zero Population Growth is creating a campaign to promote awareness of Y6B because otherwise it will receive little notice in the world’s media. You can find out more about the Y6B campaign at www.zpg.org.

God’s Last Offer is a new book by Ed Ayres, the editor of World Watch magazine. Ayres confirms that population growth is a threat to our survival, and in the World Watch Institute's State of the World tradition has put together the big picture in a way that is both easy to understand and very, very compelling. This may be the first truly “millennial” book of the new age. What’s different about Ayres’ book is that not only does he give us up-to-date information on what he calls the four “spikes” that are endangering us (population growth, consumption, global warming and extinction), but he also exposes the problem of synergy. When these four horsemen of the apocalypse ride together, their planetary impact is compounded by synergy. In addition, black holes in the information available to us make it difficult if not impossible for the average person to see the big picture and know what needs to be done to survive.

Sentient Times: Eschew Eschatology

Eschew Eschatology
by Kelpie Wilson
Sentient Times, May 1999
www.sentienttimes.com

Recently I realized that I had just read three “end of the world” books in a row. No wonder I've been feeling depressed.

Greg Bear's The Forge of God explores the helplessly naïve reaction of humans to predatory aliens who threaten to destroy the planet. Bear’s grittily realistic characters share descriptive space with the rock and metal bones of the earth itself. You won’t believe what happens to Yosemite’s Half Dome.

Into the Forest by Jean Hegland is a more organic apocalypse, which follows the survival moves of a pair of homesteading, home-schooled teenage sisters living in the Mendocino redwoods. The sisters turn back to nature after a Y2K-like scenario cuts off all the gas and electricity. Ecotopian back-to-the-landers such as myself are easily carried away by this common fantasy of learning to eat acorns and drink fir tip tea.

Finally, the sublime Kalki by Gore Vidal, probably my favorite, is the story of a Vietnam vet turned international drug dealer turned Tibetan mystic named Kalki who predicts the end of the world and promises salvation to true believers. The action is seen through the eyes of a female test pilot who tied her tubes and wrote a book about it, a spiritual daughter to Amelia Earhart who’s become a talk show celebrity. Her commitment to non-breeding makes her attractive to Kalki who recruits her for what he thinks are his own ends.

These were all three well-crafted, worthwhile books and I’d recommend them to anyone, but I don’t recommend reading them all in a row. It’s too much, especially right now with Y2K hanging over our heads. I'll be glad when this millennium business is over and we can get on with life again--life that doesn’t climax in some ultimate fate but just keeps on as the world turns.

Unfortunately, our culture seems fixated on endings. Eschatology, which is any religion or doctrine concerned with endings, final judgements, etc, is entrenched not only in Judeo-Christian culture, but in others as well. Take the Hopi and Mayan prophecies for instance, or the elaborate cycles of world creation and obliteration presented in Hindu mythology. Prophecies and predictions are found throughout the world, but primarily in certain types of cultures. For some pretty clear reasons, eschatological cultures have their roots in the early agricultural civilizations.

First of all, agricultural civilizations did not tend to last. Either they were not sustainable and created ecological collapse (like the Mayans) or they were successful and became tempting targets for takeovers. Their cities were sacked and burned by conquerors (Jericho, Babylon, Troy--just about every city in the ancient Near East).

Second, some agricultural civilizations endured long enough to allow for very sophisticated astronomical observations to be made with the aid of stone monuments like circles and henges. These observations revealed a new view of time by discovering the precession of the equinoxes. Due to precession of the earth’s axis (the little wobble in its spin--like a top), the annual position of the constellations in the sky shifts over a 26,000 year cycle. For instance, 10,000 years from now, an entirely different star--not Polaris will be in the position of north star. By fixing the position of the sun and marking its relation to a particular constellation at sunrise on the spring equinox, the henges measured the progress of the heavens.

What these observations meant for human culture and religion was revolutionary. For 100,000 years or more before settled agriculture, life was governed by the cycles of the moon. The phases of the moon influenced animal behavior and determined hunting and fishing schedules. The moon also had the awesome property of synchronizing the menstrual cycles of women--a cosmic significance that inspired the goddess religions. But most importantly, the moon didn’t change over any deep time cycle and the hunting and gathering way of life didn’t change for hundreds of millennia and the most important thing was to keep returning, over and over to the same cyclic processes of life.

Ancient peoples had a horror of progress as documented by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return. The ever-returning cycle meant stability and security for people. To change the way one did things was risky business and could fail. But as agricultural civilizations became established for longer and longer periods, the new astronomical observations provided an ideology of progress. Whether or not the longer 26,000 year cycle was apparent to them, ancient astronomers saw changes in the sky (about 1 degree every 72 years), and no one really knew where it was all headed. It was easy to assume the worst, and religions prophesied the end of the world in conflagration or deluge.

The ideology of progress created a new psychological state that fostered the comparatively rapid technological changes of the bronze and iron ages. But such ideologies can also rationalize the destruction of the world. After all, if it’s written in the stars, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway, so we might as well keep accumulating stuff and having a good time--especially if we are profiting from the current situation.

Millennarism also has its attractions for those who are not doing well in the stratified societies that agricultural civilization (and industrial civilization) produces. Stephen J. Gould, in his book Millennium, describes the millennium fever that seized early Christians--an undertrodden class, who believed that the thousand-year reign of God was at hand. Originally predicted to occur shortly after Jesus’ death, the Christian millennium is now long overdue and actually has no scriptural connection to years ending in triple zeros.

And what of Y2K? It’s an eerie convergence of eschatological ideology and technological blunder. But ultimately it’s just another glitch in the machine of the human enterprise, which like all well functioning machines must move in cycles. What occurs to me is that tales of the end of the world are not helpful just now. We need to focus on restoring the cycles of the earth that our enterprise has disrupted. That is best done by applying the ecological knowledge that we have acquired but that is languishing in libraries and other data storehouses, unused because unlike grain and microchips it is unprofitable by current accounting.

It’s not too late to restore the ancient cycles. Life will go on, and if we start thinking seriously about the fate of our grandchildren and the grandchildren of frogs and trees and salmon, we will even have a reason to live.