The Dieback of the Human Species
Any system—whether it is a rock, a living cell, or the Milky Way—exists because it is well-attuned to its particular environmental circumstances. Circumstances change, however. The Milky Way, the solar system, the Earth—each system is complex and dynamic (evolves through time) and so creates continual challenges for its inhabitants. That is why living systems—from cells to societies—are problem-solving organizations. We are alive because, for billions of years, our predecessors were among the best at addressing their environmental challenges. We, the millions of living species, have evolved together. We are intimately part of this planet. We belong here. And change is hardwired into us. In this website, we speak of human extinction, only of change. True, all species eventually become extinct, so that we too will one day vanish. However, we will likely be here for a long time yet.
The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Three: Ji'nan to Mount Tai: Wang Hui, circa 1698
The average lifespan of a species is about four million years. The more complex the species, the sooner it comes to extinction.[i] The fossil record suggests that some bacteria have been around for three billion years. At the other end of the spectrum, mammal species average only a million years.[ii] By the reckoning of anthropologists, atomically similar Homo sapiens have walked the earth for at least two-hundred thousand years, and culturally modern Homo sapiens sapiens have been around some seventy-thousand years. So, at the very most, our species has been around about a fifth of the average mammal lifespan. We should have another 800,000 years coming to us. In our favor, there is another important factor that influences longevity. Called the Law of Evolutionary Potential, “the more specialized and adapted a form is in any given evolutionary stage, the smaller the potential for passing to the next stage.”[iii] Specialists are uniquely adapted to a specific niche and thus have little tolerance for environmental changes.[iv] Because generalists, like rats, cockroaches, and crows, are adapted to varied circumstances, they deal better with change. We are the epitome of generalists. We can crawl, walk, and run. We can swim, surf, climb a tree, ride a horse, and zip through space at supersonic speeds. We can eat just about anything, and have adapted to every earthly niche. Given our great virtues—from bipedalism to opposable thumbs; a cooling system composed of two million sweat glands; an omnivore’s digestive tract; highly sensitive, binocular, trichromatic vision; a complex brain composed of many trillions of connections and all its mental powers of memory, reasoning, language, social aptitude, culture, and so forth—we could be around for who knows how long, until the sun burns away the last life here. And by then we may be flying away in spaceships to other star systems.
Roots: Frida Kahlo, 1943
So, no, we are not considering extinction, only a pruning back of our numbers, of a human dieback. From eight, nine, ten, eleven or whatever billion, to some far smaller number. We, the living generations, are witnessing the peak population of humans on this planet. Never again will there be so many of us living at any one time on Earth. The bigger our numbers and the longer we postpone the dieback, the greater will be the suffering of our kind as well as the rest of the creatures our growing numbers replace in the interim. We will either voluntarily make the necessary adjustments, or nature will do it for us. As Alfred Crosby put it, “Mother nature always comes to the rescue of a society stricken with the problems of overpopulation, and her ministrations are never gentle.”[v]
What I Saw in the Water: Frida Kahlo, 1938
Droughts will force us to abandon the deserts to the cacti and solar panels, and dry aquifers will force us to stop irrigating arid fields. Hurricanes will force us to move our cities off of the deltas and leave barrier islands to the vagaries of the seas. A heating atmosphere will scorch and wither our more delicate crops. We will compete with each other for the fertile lands and the remaining resources. There will be winners and losers, and the latter will die off. Energy prices will force the winners to grow their food regionally and to consume intelligently.[vi] Cities will grow their own vegetables, and buffalos and cattle will be herded across the grasslands, turning the plains from breadbaskets into bio diverse cornucopias. Because we are such clever animals and because we have the potential of living up to our name Homo sapiens, the wise human, Civilization likely will one day live in harmony with Nature. Nature informs us of where we are most welcome. We will listen more carefully. We will participate in a dance with Nature, rather than raping Nature and then calling it our birthright. We will likely live a long time on this Earth, and we will face many more challenges, both from Nature’s vicissitudes (like super-volcanic eruptions and climatic fluctuations) and from self-inflicted causes (war and resource drawdown, for example).
Evening at Argenteuil: Claude Monet, 1876
In the meantime, we have to pass through the difficult transition or perhaps several transitions, from where we are now to that sustainable civilization. From nine destructive billion to the few sustainable billions. From a petroleum-based civilization to a solar-based one. We are just beginning. We have just become aware of our plight. Many still deny the problems of population, overconsumption, climate, and food security. Most are too busy trying to eke out a living by the rules of civilization to give it much thought and too poor to change their behaviors even if they knew how. Few people regard our predicament to be so dire as to actually warrant significant adjustment on our parts. A little tweaking of the ways of government and business will surely suffice, according to the predominant view. In these pages, however, we are suggesting something quite different. Our numbers have already overshot the Earth’s limits, and our methods of production and consumption are reckless and suicidal. Given our level of ignorance about the matter, our circumstances will deteriorate further before we commit ourselves to change. It will likely take a lot of pain and suffering before we can change something so big as civilization and its prevailing paradigm. It will likely require our dieback.
Canyon with Crows: Georgia O’Keeffe, 1917
Dieback is not uncommon in nature. By pruning back unsustainable numbers, dieback acts as a last check on population. It is a rapid re-establishment of harmony within a system. The species either overbred, overwhelming its environment, or the environment changed in a way that it could no longer support the previously viable population.[vii] Population explosions, oscillations, overshoots, collapses: these are part of nature’s dance. Specific dances for specific ecosystems.[viii] Many creatures undergo regular cycles of “irruption” and dieoff—algae, insects, and rodents, for instance. Their populations explode and then they crash. Their predators face these same cycles. More hare will feed more lynx. A dieback of hares leads to a dieback of the lynx.
The Wounded Deer: Frida Kahlo, 1946
Herbivores, such as the moose, elk, and deer, often experience dieback. Unaware of carrying capacity or of the changing seasons, they mindlessly munch on all the edible vegetation within reach. In 1944, twenty-nine reindeer were released on St. Mathew’s Island, the site of a remote Coast Guard outpost in the Bering Sea.[ix] There were no predators, and the reindeer feasted on the grasses and thick lichen mats. Their population exploded. By 1957 there were an estimated 1,350 reindeer. By 1963, there were four times more, perhaps six thousand, albeit smaller and less robust. This was several times greater than the estimated carrying capacity, and their diminished stature suggested that they were experiencing intense competition among themselves due to their overpopulation.[x] By 1966, they had stripped the island nearly bare of lichen. The dieoff was sudden and horrible. By the end of 1966 there were only forty-two reindeer remaining. With no viable males, the reindeer died out by the late 1980s.
The Dream: Henri Rousseau, 1910
Of the many other cases, both “natural” and human caused, here are a few rather arbitrary examples…
· In 1965 tens of thousands of cattle suddenly died in Uganda after decades of overgrazing the country’s dry grasslands.[xi]
· In 1983, the population of long-spined sea urchins collapsed off the Jamaican coast. Algae were then free to grow unchecked on the coral, and the coral reefs collapsed soon after.[xii]
· The Lesser Flamingo in Kenya’s rift valley has undergone numerous dieoffs in the past decades, with several tens of thousands of individuals at a time “dying mysteriously.”[xiii] The scene of pink carcasses on the shores of Lake Nakuru in 2006 was described as looking like a “flamingo death camp.”[xiv]
· Cod stocks off North America’s Atlantic coast have been fished to near extinction. The fisheries were closed in the early 1990s and have not been reopened.[xv]
· Indeed, in the last sixty years, some thirty percent of all fish species have been fished to collapse.[xvi]
· The lobsters in Long Island Sound nearly disappeared in 1999 when multiple environmental stresses weakened their immune response to the parasitic amoebae, Neoparamoeba pemaquidensis.[xvii]
· The salt marshes that rim the American Southeast and Gulf Coast states are among the biologically richest ecosystems in the world. In the first years of the 21st century, a prolonged drought altered the soil moisture, acidity, salinity, and the metal toxicity levels of these wetlands, severely stressing the plant life. Then, snails and a pathogenic fungus that they carried “acted synergistically” to cause a “a massive die-off” along a thousand miles of these important wetlands.[xviii] The “snails actively converted marshes to [nothing but] exposed mudflats”.[xix]
· Several sea star species experienced weird “melting” deaths, their bodies disarticulating and disintegrating in massive dieoffs along much of the U.S. and Canadian east coast in 2013 and 2014.[xx] Sea stars regularly undergo population explosions and collapses.
· Springtime melts carry nutrients from the partially decayed leaves of the previous autumn to mountain ponds, resulting in annual algal blooms. Then, after their food source runs out, the algae populations crash in mass dieoffs.[xxi] The world’s coastal dead zones are the result of a similar process—the nutrients, in this instance, coming from upstream farmland fertilizers.
· And then there are the wine-making yeast cells who die by the trillions each year in fermentation vats.[xxii] Gorging themselves on the sugars of the crushed grapes, they then suffocate in their own toxic wastes of carbon dioxide and alcohol.
On a larger scale, volcanic super-eruptions, asteroid impacts, novel and invasive life forms, and—more often—climate change have caused diebacks and extinctions and, sometimes, even mass extinctions. In the last two million years alone, astronomical and geological forces have colluded to substantially alter the surface of the earth. Continental ice sheets have waxed and waned numerous times across the northern continents, and deserts and jungles have replaced each other on the southern ones. Within these grand rhythms, and many others as well, species come and go.
Civilization and Destruction: Sewon Rai, ca. 2016
It does not take a vivid imagination to see the parallels to human civilization. The European invasion of the New World, with all its natural bounty, has been likened to yeasts introduced to the new crushed grapes.[xxiii] And the pollution of the environment has been likened to “the plight of the yeast cells in the wine vat…” after they have binged a while.[xxiv] The dieback of the Mayan civilization has been compared to the irruption and dieback cycles of the reindeer on Mathew Island.[xxv] The Indus and the Anasazi died back like the drying of the ancient Sahara forests, surely, gradually, mysteriously.[xxvi] And the causes of the Native American and Australian Aboriginal diebacks—a mixture of invasion, war, and invisible pathogens—were not unlike those that had extinguished the mega-fauna on those same continents thousands of years earlier and that have also laid low the American buffalo, the great whales, world fisheries, and coral reefs.[xxvii] Likely, the 21st century human dieback will be caused by a combination of all of these.
Gaia: Alex Grey, 1989
ENDNOTES
[i] Ward, P.D., and Brownlee, D. (2000) Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. Copernicus, New York.
[ii] Ward and Brownlee (2000)
[iii] Sahlins, M.D., and Service, E.R. (1960:97) Evolution and Culture. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
[iv] Ward and Brownlee (2000:166).
[v] Crosby, A.W. (2004:92) Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge.
[vi] That is, the rising cost of ever-scarcer fossil fuels and the low prices of ever present solar and renewable energy sources.
[vii] Catton, W.R. (1982) Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, Univ. Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.
[viii] Catton (1982). Boettiger, C., and Hastings, A. (2013) From Patterns to Predictions. Nature, v. 493, pp. 157-158.
[ix] Klein, D.R. 1968. The Introduction, Increase, and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island. Journal of Wildlife Management, v. 32, pp. 350-367.
Rozell, N. (2003, November 13) When Reindeer Paradise Turned to Purgatory, Article #1672. Alaska Science Forum. Available at http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF16/1672.html. Accessed October 21, 2013.
[x] Catton (1982), Harper (2004).
[xi] Harper, C.L. (2004:44) Environment and Society: Human Perspectives on Environmental Issues. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey.
[xii] Zolli, A., and Healy, A.M. (2012:33-35) Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. Simon and Schuster, New York.
[xiii] Koenig, R. (2006) The Pink Death: Die-Offs of the Lesser Flamingo Raise Concern. Science, v. 313, pp. 1724-1725.
[xiv] Koenig (2006).
[xv] Homer-Dixon, T. (2006) The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Island Press, Washington D.C.
Randers, J. (2008) Global Collapse—Fact or Fiction? Futures, v. 40, pp. 853-864.
[xvi] Zolli and Healy (2012:36).
[xvii] Pearce, J., and Balcom, N. (2005) The 1999 Long Island Sound Lobster Mortality Event: Findings of the Comprehensive Research Initiative. Journal of Shellfish Research, v. 24(3), pp. 691-697.
Wacker, T. (2008, July 20) In the Sound, Reports of Lobster Disease Rise, New York Times.
[xviii] Silliman, B.R., van de Koppel, J., Bertness, M.D., Stanton, L.E., Mendelssohn, I.A. (2005) Drought, Snails, and Large-Scale Die-Off of Southern U.S. Salt Marshes, Science, v. 310, pp. 1803-1806.
[xix] Silliman et al. (2005).
[xx] Arnold, C. (2013, September 9) Massive Starfish Die-Off Baffles Scientists. National Geographic News.
Science Daily (2013, July 23) Why are Sea Stars Dying from New Jersey to Maine? Divers asked to Report Large Groupings of Starfish.
[xxi] Catton (1982).
[xxii] Catton (1982).
[xxiii] Catton (1982:169).
[xxiv] Catton (1982:176).
[xxv] Harper (2004).
[xxvi] Owen, J. (2008, May 8) Once Lush Sahara Dried up Over Millennia, Study Says. National Geographic News.
[xxvii] The sad irony of this example is that it was the ancestors of the American and Australian Aboriginals who were responsible for the megafaunal dieoffs.
